One Xbox. Many questions.
Earlier this week, Microsoft finally took the wraps off Xbox One, the company’s next-generation successor to the eight-year-old Xbox 360 game console. Now that the initial fanfare is over – at least until the E3 Expo gets under way in a little over two weeks – I’ve had a day or two to mull over what I heard, saw and touched this week. Here are my early impressions of Xbox One.
I’m just going to jettison all pretense of cynical aloofness here and say it: It’s been a long, long time since I’ve wanted to play a game as badly as I want to play Watch Dogs.
Pizza Hut app on Xbox Live. (SCREENSHOT)
Now you can get pizza delivered to your house with an app on your Xbox 360. That is, if you are, for some reason, reading this in U.S. As the app is not available in Canada.
QMI Agency’s Steve Tilley hosted a live chat on the latest in video game news on April 23. Read the recap here.
William Shatner fights the Gorn in this video screenshot.
In an exclusive ad on Yahoo for Star Trek: The Video Game, William Shatner, the one and true Captain James Tiberius Kirk, once again battles his nemesis the Gorn – a reptilian humanoid alien he fought in the original Star Trek episode Arena.
Hollywood’s appetite for reboots is so insatiable that you can almost count the minutes between a franchise running out of steam and the announcement that it’s being revived. Spider-Man 3 sucked? Reboot the series! That Superman reboot didn’t work out? Just reboot it a second time! Christopher Nolan’s all done with Batman? Maybe he is, but we aren’t! Reboot!
Video game reboots used to be a relative rarity, but with Halo 4 marking the return of Master Chief and DMC: Devil May Cry giving the demon-slayer Dante new moves and a new haircut, it makes sense that video gamedom’s most famous heroine is being reinvented for a new decade.
Yo-ho, yo-ho, an assassin’s life for meeeee.
The first time I played the seafaring segments of Assassin’s Creed III, I thought, “Wow, this looks really cool. But why would Ubisoft go to so much trouble to design all this naval warfare stuff? It seems like a lot of work for such a minor part of the game.”
I think we now have the answer.
But officer, I have an alibli… an alibia… I was someplace else!
Rockstar Games’ period crime thriller L.A. Noire wasn’t a perfect game, but it tried something interesting by requiring players to study the faces of in-game characters and determine if they were being honest or lying. This hinged on a new form of face-capture technology in which actors’ faces were filmed from various angles and recreated in stunningly realistic detail in the game.
But what happened when the actors muffed their lines?
While Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey brought home some serious gold at the box office this weekend, I’ve been entrenched in a completely different, more interactive adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved lore with Lego Lord of the Rings.
Sure, this game is closer to Jackson’s work than Tolkien’s but as developer Traveller’s Tales Lego video game series was built on the blocks of successful film and pop culture franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter, Jackson’s Academy-Award winning adaptation of Tolkien’s books is definitely deserving of the Lego treatment.
Thankfully, Lego LOTR isn’t a pile of broken blocks. This Balrog-sized adventure continues to honour the series’ clever-but-never-complicated platforming and puzzles with a new wealth of collectibles worth seeking out in every corner of Middle Earth.
XBox 360 has annexed an entire country all in the name of Master Chief.
The PR stunt by Halo 4 folks, who appropriately chose Halloween as the day of its takeover, redecorated the European nation of Liechtenstein in United Nations Space Command paraphernalia.
Master Chief saunters through the streets of Liechtenstein in search of Covenant.
Gutenburg Castle, as well as Balzers Quarry which was transformed into adventure zone for guests, complete with Master Chief driving a Warthog, fell victim to the invasion.
This isn’t the first a video game franchise has taken over a large space to entertain gamers. Activision used Howard Hughes’ old airplane hangar in Los Angeles for Call of Duty XP.
