Category: Microsoft

I Bought An Xbox One And I Like It

That’s right, an Xbox One! I’m as surprised as you are. At the end of the last console generation, I was pretty sure I’d be a PC-only gamer for a good long while. I definitely have enough games in my Steam library to keep me busy until the heat death of the universe.

When I sold it for about $50, I hadn’t powered on my Xbox 360 for at least a year. My PS3 had transitioned to being a box for Netflix and blu-rays. I’d resolved to hold out for as long as possible before maybe picking up a PS4. After all, I’m obsessed with the Souls games and I knew Bloodborne would be irresistible. Sure enough, when Anthony had an extra PS4 thanks to a prize giveaway, I decided to buy it, thinking that would be it for me and the current generation.

So, what changed? What made me decide to drop several hundred dollars on an Xbox One less than a year later? The short answer is that I’m a sucker for a deal and I’m ready to cut the cable cord (again).

Continue reading I Bought An Xbox One And I Like It

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 93: Not Afraid of Butt Stuff

gamersushi show e3 2014

Well here we are friends, at the end of our journey together for this season of the podcast. Over the last twenty episodes (and two Extra Bytes), we’ve laughed, we’ve cried and learned way too much about Eddy’s personal life.

In case you’ve missed out repeated warnings, this is the last episode of Season Three of the GamerSushi Show and we’ll be taking a break for the next few months to enjoy the summer and also not have to talk to each other on a weekly basis.

This is our E3 2014 wrap-up where we grade the conferences and talk about the third-party games, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole shebang so chime in below!

Listen, rate and we’ll see you in September for season 4!

0:00 – 6:00 Intro
6:01 – 37:07 Microsoft presser and third party games
37:07 – 58:59 Sony presser
59:00 – 1:10:45 Nintendo presser
1:10:46 – 1:13:07 Outro

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The Eternal War: A Look at the Repeating Console Cycle

Sega Logo

I’ve been reading Console Wars, a new book by Blake J. Harris that chronicles the rise of Sega during the 90’s. It’s a delightful book, full of endlessly fascinating details, such as how Target’s lenient return policy allowed customers to return years-old NES’s in order to get credit towards a SNES. Needless to say, this didn’t sit well with Nintendo and it led to Target pulling Nintendo products from the stores for a time. I lived through this era and reading the behind the scenes drama that went on has been very enjoyable. My nostalgia bones are all tingling right now. Continue reading The Eternal War: A Look at the Repeating Console Cycle

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 91: You Sunk My Battleship!

gamersushi show ep 91

Hey. We’re back.

It’s a regular-ass regular show with all of the GamerSushi dudes in attendance. This is the first time in a number of podcasts that Eddy has joined us, but he’s been a busy dude so we should all forgive him.

Anthony also regales us with tales of his honeymoon and then we discuss what happens to the hair on your head when you get older. It goes south. The hair, not the conversation.

For actual video game news, we talk about Microsoft dropping a $399 Kinect-less Xbox One on us, then we try to remember if you go to the Citadel in Mass Effect 2, and we wrap it all up with E3 predictions.

Listen, rate and hopefully we’ll be back next week. See ya!

0:00 – 8:49 Intro
8:50 – 29:59 Microsoft shipping a Kinect-less Xbox One
30:00 – 51:54 E3 Predictions
51:55 – 54:36 Outro

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Halo 5: Guardians Announced, Hitting Fall 2015

halo 5 reveal

In what is probably the least exciting Halo game announcement of all time, Bonnie Ross, General Manager of 343 Industries, took over the Xbox Wire to reveal Halo 5: Guardians which will be coming to the Xbox One in the Fall of 2015.

Continuing the story of Master Chief from where we left him in Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians is being built with a completely new engine and will deliver a 60 frame-per-second performance, a first for the series. A Halo TV series is also teased to be released in a similar time-frame to Halo 5: Guardians.

The Spartan on the top of the box art will apparently be a new character according to series Executive Producer Josh Holmes on Twitter.

Microsoft is certainly getting a lot out of the way for E3. Typically a Halo reveal is a big to-do and Bonnie Ross promises that more will be revealed at E3 this year, but I can’t help but feel a little deflated that a game series that once commanded attention is now relegated to blog post unveilings.

Source – Xbox Wire

Microsoft Shipping a $399 Xbox One Without Kinect in June

Xbox One 399 no Kinect

Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s new head of all things Xbox, posted an update on the Xbox Wire about changes coming to the Xbox One in June, including a new $399 price point without a Kinect in the box and access to popular video apps like Netflix without requiring an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

This is another case of Microsoft backtracking on the Xbox One, which started out with a mandatory Kinect, an always-online Internet connection and aggressive DRM. With this most recent update, just about a year after its announcement, the Xbox One no longer requires any of these things. It’s a win for consumers, certainly, but not for Microsoft’s previous vision for the console.

The most curious aspect of this for me is that this makes the Xbox One cheaper in Canada than the PlayStation 4, which saw a $50 price bump earlier this year. The $399 Xbox One without Kinect will be available on June 9.

What do you guys think about this news? Does this new $399 Xbox One without a Kinect make the console more appealing to you?

Source – Xbox Wire

Microsoft’s Answer to Siri is Named Cortana

cortana

Microsoft just announced their virtual assistant software for Windows Phones, and the connection to Halo isn’t just her name:

Cortana is named after a virtual character in Halo, Microsoft’s science-fiction video game series, that uses her encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game’s protagonist, Master Chief. The actress, Jen Taylor, who does the voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone assistant’s voice.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/meet-microsofts-cortana-a-more-personal-siri/

Xbox One Rumor Dump Contains Halo News, Titanfall Bundle

neogaf xbox one rumors

On the whole I really don’t know what to make of NeoGAF, but whenever there’s a juicy rumor these days it seems to originate from there. Recently, a whole bunch of Xbox One rumors got posted to the message board including a Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 5 being delayed to next year, Black Tusk’s (the new Gears of War studio) canceled Shangheist game and a Titanfall Xbox One bundle.

You can go read the whole thing yourself, but if some of these turned out to be true it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve had the feeling that a Halo 2 Anniversary was pretty much a given and Halo 5 being delayed to 2015 makes sense. Crackdown 3 doesn’t necessarily make me excited, given that 2 was kind of a flop, but with more development time Ruffian might be able make the next one a must-have for One owners.

Check out the rumor list for yourself. What seems legit to you?

Source – NeoGAF

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 81: This Isn’t Even My Final Form

gamersushi show ep 81

What ho, podcast faithful! We’re two casts into this new year and 2014 has been kind to us with many topics to converse about. It’s a three-man cast this week as Anthony and myself were off doing secret best-friend stuff (Askarnian handshakes) so Eddy, Jeff and Nick shared the load. Well, Jeff and Nick tried to, but Eddy was dishing out some USDA-choice trolling. Seriously, it’s kind of ridiculous.

There were also some interruptions which I tried to cut around, but you can probably tell at a couple points that “real life” was calling on our intrepid heroes. Anyways, you know what to do, listen, rate and be merry. See you next time!

0:00 – 3:12 Intro
3:13 – 10:54 The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
10:55 – 18:04 Don’t Starve
18:05 – 47:07 Nintendo in trouble and the Wii U’s development
47:08 – 51:24 Joe Staten leaves Bungie
51:25 – 56:10 SimCity’s Offline mode
56:11 – 1:12:19 DayZ and Early Access
1:12:20 – 1:15:13 Outro

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The Xbox One Community Gives Microsoft Some Feedback

xbox feedback

If there’s one way to mercilessly QA-test your new product, it’s by releasing it into the wild. Rest assured that, no matter how many man-hours your company put into testing a device, giving it to a million people will mean that any bugs, issues or glaring oversights will pop up in short order.

Since the Xbox One released on November 22, the gaming community has had plenty of time to fool around with it and figure out what it’s missing. A website called Xbox Feedback has sprung up where suggestions for future updates to Microsoft’s new console can be found.

Personally, I find the lack of some of what I would consider no-brainers (such as being able to check the battery charge on the home screen or the difficulties with party chat) pretty mind-boggling. Even though the Xbox 360 got bogged down with a UI that it was never really built to support, it still had a lot of user friendly tools and tricks. I personally appreciated the ability to set the controls to every game for inverted as a system-level option because I am a weirdo.

What do you guys think about Xbox Feedback? Any suggestions you would add to their current list? Do you think this website will actually gain any traction?

Source – Xbox Feedback

GamerSushi Asks: What Are You Playing?

super mario 3d worlds

Now that the Xbox One is finally out in the wild, I thought I would ask what all of you GamerSushi peeps will be up to this weekend.

Are you playing a shiny new Xbox One, or are you perhaps gaming with a PlayStation 4? Personally I’ll be checking out Super Mario 3D Worlds and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds this weekend, both of which have been getting sterling reviews.

I also tucked into some Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag last night and I’m already enjoying it much more than AC3. While I can kind of tell that Edward will end up being a character that is ultimately fairly forgettable, the world and the sheer amount of piratey things to do really speaks to me.

So, what are you playing? Go!

Digital Foundry Tests Dead Rising 3, Finds it Lacking

dead rising 3 digital foundry

Launch titles for a new generation of consoles have a lot to live up to. They have to be discernibly different from the previous generation, look better, carry all sorts of bells and whistles and run smoothly.

Given that this is the first hardware refresh in eight long years, perhaps the expectations leading into this gen are too high. Some people might have been expecting 60 frames per second and 1080p on every game, but recently it came to light that the early games of this console cycle will rarely be hitting that mark.

In fact, Dead Rising 3 falls far below it, as Digital Foundry found out on behalf of Eurogamer. The Xbox One launch title runs at 720p and is supposed to be a consistent 30 fps, but sometimes it dips down to the lower twenties and high teens. The dip is especially noticeable in the large outdoor areas now that Dead Rising 3 is a contiguous open-world and boasts a larger variety of zombies than the previous titles.

Dead Rising 3 does have a crazy amount of effects like per-object motion blur (which the original game had as well, believe it or not) and seems to be a vast improvement over the performance the game displayed at E3, which was apparently choppy and tearing frames all over the place. It seems that Dead Rising 3 definitely puts the Xbox One through its paces.

What do you guys think? Did Dead Rising 3 promise what it can’t deliver? Did we expect too much going into this next generation of consoles? Is 1080p at 60 fps still another cycle off?

Source – Eurogamer

NeoGaf Thread Shows Halo 4’s One-Year Decline

halo 4 one year later

Halo 4 came out one year ago today, marking the first time in the series’ history than an FPS title was developed by a studio other than Bungie (who had, at that time, moved on to making Destiny).

343 Industries, the studio that Microsoft created to keep the Halo train rolling, brought forth an admirable effort (we liked the game a lot), but one year after launch, how is Halo 4’s multiplayer user base doing?

According to this NeoGaf thread by user FyreWulff, not very well. Halo 4 had a peak population of just over 400,000 gamers shortly after launch and that number has dropped down to about 50,000. In this thread he lists 343i and Mircosoft’s various missteps with Halo 4, including the early map pack debacle and the weapon tuning and balance changes that occurred six months after launch (Black Ops 2 also sucks up half of Halo 4’s players, but we won’t count that against 343i or Microsoft).

The number tell the tale of Halo 4, it seems. Despite the game impressing critics, it failed to retain the long legs that made Halo 3 and Reach such contenders throughout swaths of Call of Duty releases. What do you guys think of Halo 4’s one year decline? Does this mean bad news for the future of the series?

Source – NeoGaf

#RyseFacts Tweet About Crunches Backfires

rysefacts crunch

Ryse: Son of Rome is an upcoming Xbox One third-person action title being worked on by Crytek, makers of Crysis, Far Cry and hopefully at some point in the future a Y: The Last Man video game because that fits with their motif.

Since the game has been in development for several years and changed direction a few times, it stands to reason that the team would have been through a crunch or two. According to the Ryse Twitter account, the team has been served some 11,500 crunch-time dinners during the game’s development.

Besides being a rather large number, it’s also an odd thing for a game’s Twitter account to bring up. Sure, crunch happens, but I don’t think it’s a stat the public needs to know about. People who are much better at math than me totaled that up to about 58 days of crunch during the game’s development time (assuming the Crytek team is about 200 people). Continue reading #RyseFacts Tweet About Crunches Backfires

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 73: Rinkydink Curdlesnoot

the gamersushi show ep 73

Aaaand…we’re back. After our traditional Summer break we return to the mics to bring you the latest installment of the GamerSushi Show where we talked about how much we missed eachother. Not really, it’s mostly dick jokes, video games and the Benedict Cumberbatch name-generator, which is where I got the title for this episode.

When we recorded the cast last Wednesday, I had just come back from PAX, so I give an in-depth breakdown of what I saw and played. Well, more accurately I have to be gentle lead through the discussion, but we all know I’m bad at just talking about stuff.

Seeing as how we’re back, you should definitely listen to the cast, rate the cast, and enjoy the cast. We’re back on the regular schedule, more or less, so we’ll see you next week!

0:00 – 11:44 Intro
11:45 – 20:39 Dark Souls
20:40 – 42:59 PAX Prime
43:00 – 54:18 Microsoft and the Xbox One
54:19 – 1:13:24 Nintendo’s Missteps
1:13:25 – 1:30:06 Saint’s Row IV
1:30:07 – 1:31:46 Outro
1:31:47 SEKRIT PODCAST STUFF

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Xbox One Does a 180 on DRM, Online Requirements

Xbox 180

Giving the Internet an ego boost it did not need, Microsoft reversed their controversial polices regarding DRM and always-online as it pertains to the Xbox One, their next-gen console scheduled for release in November of this year.

Giant Bomb reported that multiple sources were suggesting that Microsoft was poised to do the mother of all walkbacks and fundamentally change their approach to used games, DRM and online requirements for the Xbox One. Shortly after that, Microsoft did in fact reveal the changes, which are highlighted below:

  • The Xbox One does not need to be online at all with the exception of a one-time initialization during set-up.
  • The Xbox One will not be required to check-in online every 24 hours.
  • Disc based games will be played from the discs, the same as with the Xbox 360. Installing the game is no longer required.
  • All downloaded games will function the same when online or offline
  • No additional restrictions on trading games or lending discs
  • Xbox One will be region-free.

Continue reading Xbox One Does a 180 on DRM, Online Requirements

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 72: E3 2013

gamersushi show e3 2013

It’s the Season Finale of The GamerSushi Show! At the end of this season of the podcast, we talk about E3 2013: the press conferences, the games, and how we felt about the whole thing!

All five of us assembled like some sort of giant robot or mighty super-hero team, so it’s a pretty great cast. Unfortunately I had to duck out early thanks to work things coming up, but the guys brought it home in grand style.

So, you know the deal. Listen, rate, and eagerly await our return in September (or August, if Saint’s Row 4 has anything to say about it).

0:00 – 5:02 Intro
5:03 – 30:59 Microsoft’s press conference
31:00 – 54:21 Sony’s press conference
54:22 – 1:04:05 Nintendo’s….presence at E3
1:04:06 – 1:12:53 E3 wrap up thoughts
1:12:54 – 1:17:20 Outro

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Pixel Count: Which System Will You Be Playing in 2014?

E3 has come and the Big 3 have shown us what they have in store for us over the coming months. There has been so much news, updates, retractions, clarifications and denials that it is kind of hard to keep track of everything. Still, this has been an eventful E3, one where the details of two new consoles were revealed, where fanboys waged war and where Nintendo did whatever it is they do. Microsoft brought the games, Sony brought the Internet to its feet and Nintendo brought its beloved franchises.

So now that we have a clearer picture of what Microsoft and Sony are going to do with their next gen systems, it only makes sense to take a poll of our loyal readers and find out where your current desires lie. A lot can change between now and release but it seems reasonable to assume that some of you have made up your minds. So tell us in the poll below which system you plan on doing your gaming in the near future. Please leave the reasons for your vote in the comments!

Pixel Count: Which System Will You Be Playing in 2014?

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Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference Highlights

XBox One

Well gents and ladies, E3 is here, which of course means one thing: time for press conferences! The big gaming show is about the only time of the year that I get excited to listen to executives throw a bunch of scripted marketing speak at me, since it (sometimes) means I’ll get to look at some new games — and, if it’s a really good year, maybe some new tech and a few new IPs as well.

So how did Microsoft deliver after all the hubbub they’ve caused in recent weeks with the reveal of the XBox One? Let’s find out. Continue reading Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference Highlights