Microsoft

Microsoft has announced they hired TV and radio host Jonathan Ross to work as an executive producer with developers in the UK, including Lionhead and Rare. “We wanted to bring in new talent that would challenge the way we build games and the way we think about what an audience is and what is entertainment.”…

Rumored Xbox One Launch Issues Lead To Lots Of Questions

As we inch closer and closer to the release of next-gen consoles, we’re starting to learn more and more about their features—and some of what we’re hearing might not be great news for anyone who expected a totally stable experience at launch. Over the past few days, the Internet has exploded with drama surrounding the…

See What An Xbox One Dashboard (Might) Look Like In Action

This video could have been great. It shows the kind of thing a prospective buyer of a brand new console wants to see: menus, commands, switching between programs. The nuts and bolts of your every day experience. It’s a shame, then, that Microsoft decided to take such a “real” premise and make a staged advertisement…

Today’s New Batman Games Tease A Very Cool Possible Sequel

We don’t want to ruin any of the surprises in the new Batman: Arkham Origins and Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate games today—not if you don’t want to be spoiled. But if you do want to know about the very exciting future of the franchise that both games are teasing, keep reading. That was a spoiler…

The Xbox One’s TV Commercial Is Full Of TV and Games

Hype season has begun. We are less than a month away from the debut Xbox One and the spot above is one part of how Microsoft will be trying to sell their next-gen console to TV-watching folks around the world. The fusion of television watching and high-end gaming sits at the center of the “Xbox…

You’re Not Ready for MGSV. You Need Ground Zeroes to Prepare

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain will be divided into 2 parts: The prologue, Ground Zeroes, which takes place in 1975, and the main game, which takes place in 1984. Sound confusing? It’s actually done that way to make it less so. In a one-on-one interview with Weekly Famitsu, Kojima talked about the reasons…

In Kingdom Hearts III, Keyblades Can Transform Into So Many Things

Check out them guns on Sora. The D23 Expo Japan 2013 was an event last week at the Tokyo Disney Resort that celebrated both the 90th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company and the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Disney Resort itself. Nomura was there with Japanese cast members to show the latest Kingdom Hearts…

Something Else Cool About The Xbox One’s New Achievements

Remember, the Xbox One’s new achievement display does more than just look fresher. It also lets multiple people earn separate achievements from within the same game, even logged onto the same console, and display that as its own colour-coded pop-up. Here’s an example, taken from around the 11:15 mark in this video You’ll notice at…

Hey, Remember The Xbox 360’s HD-DVD Drive? It Was A Thing.

Oh Microsoft. What were you thinking? When people point to Microsoft’s biggest folly of the last hardware generation, they’ll normally suggest either the Red Ring Of Death pandemic or an unhealthy obsession with Kinect. Both of those have been problems for Microsoft, sure, and I’m sure we’ll get to covering both of them in our…

This Generation’s Best Final Fantasys Weren’t Named “Final Fantasy”

This console generation saw only a few Final Fantasy games during its time in the sun but luckily two of them were amazing. Of course, I am not talking about Final Fantasy XIV—decent as it is after its relaunch—or any of the Final Fantasy XIIIs. No, I’m talking about Lost Odyssey and The Last Story…

Xbox Live Survey: Three Percent of Users Don’t Approve of Free Games?

When it was announced back at E3, the free-games-for-paid-subscribers deal called Games With Gold was supposed to last only until the Xbox One’s launch. Well, now it is officially continued as an “ongoing benefit.” That’s not what caught my eye about the announcement, however. “According to recent surveys, 97 percent of participating members have given…

What An Xbox One Achievement Looks Like

We knew that the way achievements work has changed…but did you know that they’ve also changed in terms of how they look? Here’s what getting an achievement on the Xbox One looks like in motion; GIF courtesy of Gearnuke. Microsoft has confirmed to Kotaku that these are in fact the new achievements. Here’s some slightly-obscured…

Battlefield 4‘s Beta Ends, Glitchy GIFs Emerge

The Battlefield 4 beta is officially over, and DICE says the game is ready to launch on October 29. This limited period of time was more than enough for those who participated to capture hilarious moments and glitches and share them with us. Let’s take a look. 64 people can do a lot more than…

Xbox One: Everything We Know

The Xbox One is out on November 22, and we know almost everything there is to know about Microsoft’s new console. For your convenience, we’re rounding up all of that information and putting it right here. As we continue to learn more about the Xbox 360’s successor, we’ll keep updating this post, so check back…

Tetsuya Nomura Explains the Look of Kingdom Hearts III

It’s going to be a while before Kingdom Hearts III is completed, and a new video gave us a sneak peek. KHIII designer Tetsuya Nomura also recently provided more details about the game’s visual flair, expressing his desire for the game to look oh so Disney. As previously stated, Kingdom Hearts 3 will have a…

How Japanese Gamers Felt After Touching the PS4 and Xbox One

The PS4 and Xbox One won’t be out in Japan until next year, but many attendees to last month’s Tokyo Game Show got to try out the upcoming consoles and voice their opinions. Here’s what they thought. This week, Weekly Famitsu published the results from its TGS 2013 poll. One of the questions were on…

GOOOAAAAAL! Looks like Microsoft’s efforts to get into the original series business are ramping up. Deadline Hollywood reports that a soccer reality show called Every Street United is the first unscripted show greenlit by the Xbox Entertainment Division. The series will travel the world looking for the best amateur footballers in various countries. (That’s a…

Even Microsoft Thinks Cross-Platform Multiplayer “Makes Sense”

One of the biggest failures of Microsoft’s involvement in the PC space has been its treatment of gaming relative to the Xbox brand. Halo came late then stopped coming. Gears of War and Forza have never gone PC. [Correction: Gears of War 1 did.] So you’d be forgiven for assuming that Microsoft has given up…

Stare Longingly At This Xbox One Educational Video

This video is great. Not for the content, the parts where heads are talking. But the parts where heads are not talking. What should be a video where we all learn about the fantastic new things Microsoft is doing with Xbox Live for the Xbox One instead becomes a video that should have been called…

Thanks, Xbox 360, For Remembering That I Invert My Thumbstick

It’s human nature to want to break things down into easy-to-understand binaries: Introvert or extrovert. Gay or straight. Republican or Democrat. Autobot or Decepticon. And in video gaming, one of the greatest binaries of all is defined by how a player likes his or her right thumbstick: Regular or inverted? For those of us who…