"No-one can really put their finger on what it is people love.".
The year is 2314. The last android butler has now expired after a protracted proxy war with the Saucer People, who have been chased back to their capital planet in the Horsehead Nebula. Human skin is now stored in freezers overnight to slow the ageing process. Kitchen cupboards contain wormholes that allow you to take foodstuffs directly from the hands of sentient raccoon slaves, toiling in the granola mines of Mercury. And DICE still hasn't made a third Battlefield: Bad Company game, though it continues to broach the topic at intervals just to annoy people.
Includes super-cheap PayDay 2, Anarchy Reigns, Virtua Fighter and The Cave.
All dosed up on caffeine? Raring to go? Quick, let me distract you with some delectable Xbox Live Marketplace reductions before you vanish into the folds of (hawk, spit) "gainful employment". This week's haul includes a large number of SEGA titles, presumably in celebration of Sonic the Hedgehog's 23rd birthday. Microsoft has also put together some Gold-exclusive deals of the Fabulous variety.
"We want this to be part of a greater saga".
Wolfenstein: The New Order took quite a lot of people by surprise when it turned out to be not just a quick money-grab on an old and outdated franchise, but a damn good action adventure title in its own right. Speaking with Giant Bomb, MachineGames' creative director Jens Matthies says he's hoping that'll put the series in good stead for a sequel.
You'll have to upgrade to Sky Go Extra. Hurrah!.
Your days of using Sky Go for free on Xbox 360 are over, maggot. From 29th July, existing users will have to upgrade to Sky Go Extra, which means committing to a monthly fee.
Xbox 360 version is effectively a "different game" with fewer features.
In perhaps the most shocking turn of events imaginable, Playground Games has confirmed that Forza Horizon 2 won't be quite as sophisticated a game on Xbox 360 - a console that's composed largely of leftovers from the construction of Stonehenge - as on Xbox One - a console that is, in fact, a hologram projected hundreds of years back through time by the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
"Everything you're going to see in this game will be available to all some day.".
Bungie community manager David Dague has put up a spirited defence of Destiny's timed PS-exclusive DLC, assuring viewers of the Angry Joe Show that all the content in question will appear on Xbox One and Xbox 360 at some point, with exact timing to be revealed.
A portion of the game map also revealed, is ridiculously huge.
That's a bad internet. A very, very bad internet! Some unscrupulous individuals have apparently hacked into the Google Drive of a developer on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and uncovered a huge amount of information on the game, including its endings, concept art, maps, and Xbox One exclusive features.
So says leaked Microsoft Store listing.
File this under 'whoops!'. An online US Microsoft Store listing has put a date on the release of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Knight, and it'll be 24 February next year. This is probably news to Warner Bros., as all official documentation so far has only stated that it 'will be available' on Xbox One and other various platforms without mentioning any specifics.
Watch the trailer anyway. It's really good.
Imagine if Minecraft was Star Trek: Voyager. Actually, imagine if Elite was Fern Gully. No wait, how about if X-Wing Alliance was a bag of Skittles? Hmm. Perhaps you should stop picturing ungainly pop culture hybrids and watch the E3 2014 trailer for No Man's Sky, a procedurally generated space exploration game from the creators of Joe Danger, which may - fingers crossed - end up on Xbox One.
"We made choices on the game early on that we're going for the shared experience.".
Assassin's Creed multiplayer has always been something of an oddity. It's one of the few truly decent online stealth games for Xbox, and the only such endeavour - save possibly for Splinter Cell's venerated Spies vs Mercs mode - to have attracted anything approaching a "blockbuster" following. That's quite the feather in Ubisoft's cap. So why has the publisher decided to drop head-to-head multiplayer with Assassin's Creed: Unity, out for Xbox One this year?
Also: other cool things.
In its continuing quest to help us forget how mortally worrisome Battlefield 4's multiplayer component has been, DICE has revealed the full details of its upcoming Dragon's Teeth DLC - all of which correspond with last month's leaked feature list.
343 breaks down the Xbox One's biggest retro compilation ever.
Feel like there's a massive, space doughnut-shaped hole in your life this morning? I know the feeling. Don't worry, 343 is here to help - the developer has put together a big Q&A about Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which hits Xbox One on 11th November.
New IP "incubation team" is hatching something new.
We've known Lionhead has something new and definitely non-Fable related up its sleeve for some time. It turns out there's more than one something to think about. Speaking to Eurogamer, studio head John Needham has revealed that the team is working on a number of prototypes, including ideas for games that are tucked away inside the forthcoming Fable Legends.
Dynasty Warriors, Raiden and assorted schmups make the leap to the big black slab.
Microsoft has announced a number of new Xbox One games from Japanese developers at an event in Tokyo, including a new instalment of Dynasty Warriors - the loudly dressed, high-bodycount period action franchise that Joe, as it turns out, absolutely adores. This should help with his hangover.
Multiplayer still absent, however.
Ubisoft's side-scrolling, 2.5D platform racer, Trials Fusion, has received its first update that introduces tournaments and also highlights the ten best user-created tracks. You'll find those in Track Central.
Also: here's why it doesn't run at 60 frames a second.
The grander and more chaotic the game, the harder it is to cook up that most coveted of cakes, an engine that purrs along at 60 frames per second. Purring cake-engines? What is this madness? Let's move ahead without further horseplay to senior environmental artist Jason Sussman's discussion of the technical challenges posed by Destiny, a massively multiplayer (well, sort of - they're not keen on the term "massively multiplayer") sci-fi shooter, in which Peter Dinklage becomes a floating metal ball of gravitas.
Weather vain.
Tread lightly, Xbox tankers, lest we awaken the PC hordes. There was a light furore in the more dedicated corners of the web when World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition received weather and night map variants before the original edition, and it looks as though that trend could continue.
Got a minute?.
If you've been looking for a game to burn time with while you wait for, say, a spoonful of food to complete its voyage from the plate to your mouth, consider Sixty Second Shooter, which is indeed a shooter with levels that last for 60 seconds. The idea is to amass as many points as possible within that time by chaining kills.
Remember that January info blow-out? Right. And here's a little more from Frank O'Connor.
As the dust settles on E3 2014, I continue to be curious about the identity of NeoGAF user "ntkrnl", the architect of a spectacular series of rumours about the Xbox conference showing. To the best of my knowledge, he or she has yet to be proven wrong on any count. Furthermore, Kotaku claims that a contact has told it that ntkrnl works (or at least, has worked) for Microsoft.
Costs #163;15.99 / US$19.99 / AU$26.95.
Like a creature rising from the depths of your own psychological hell, indie survival horror title Outlast has appeared out of nowhere and is now available to buy on the Xbox Store.
