Microsoft

Sea Of Thieves’ New Story Quests Are Just What The Game Needed

Sea of Thieves’ Anniversary Update is live. The pirate game’s ambitious expansion brings activities from competitive player-vs.-player battles to fishing and cooking. Largest of all are the “Tall Tales,” a lengthy chain of cutscene and exploration driven story missions that are designed to be completed in a group or by your lonesome. The first—hunting down…

Microsoft’s Official Examples Of “Acceptable Trash Talk” Are A Joy

Microsoft updated the company’s “Community Standards for Xbox” earlier this week, and while this is normally not news, the content is so damn wholesome that it’s worth a closer look. You can read the whole thing here, and I genuinely recommend you do: the company has gone way beyond simply listing rules you should follow,…

Cuphead: The Kotaku Review

Cuphead turns players into perfectionists. The long-awaited hand-drawn action game is full of cartoony boss battles that demand enough precision and focus that even a single hit of damage feels unacceptable. Playing Cuphead is like a stage performance; every mistake is embarrassing, but the curtain call of each defeated boss is like nothing else. This…

New Disc-Less Xbox One Coming In May, Will Cost $250

Microsoft officially announced a new, all-digital version of the Xbox One S during the latest episode of Inside Xbox today, confirming previous rumors. It will have a 1 TB hard drive and be priced at $250, with Microsoft saying it will receive price drops as necessary that will make it always cheaper than the standard…

Man Pleads Guilty To Hacking Both Microsoft And Nintendo

A 24 year-old man from England has pleaded guilty to charges of hacking into both Microsoft and Nintendo’s servers, causing an estimated $3-4 million damages. As The Verge report, Zammis Clark—a former security researcher at Malwarebytes—went before a court in London this week accused of accessing servers at both companies, stealing user information, accessing files…

Minecraft Update Removes Mentions Of Notch, The Game’s Creator

The latest Minecraft update makes a few changes to the decade-old phenomenon, none more notable than the fact the game’s splash screens have removed all mention of Minecraft’s creator Markus “Notch” Persson. Previously, the game’s splash screens—the yellow text you see when Minecraft boots up—would display random messages, and some of them referenced Persson with…

New Microsoft App Lets You Play PC Games On Xbox, Sometimes

After years of testing via the Xbox Insider program, Microsoft has finally officially released its free Wireless Display app, enabling PC streaming to Xbox One, complete with controller support. It’s neat when it works. In my experience thus far, it doesn’t work often. Harnessingindustry standard Miracast technology, the Wireless Display app from Microsoft is designed…

Halo: The Master Chief Collection Is Coming To PC, Adds Halo: Reach

Halo: The Master Chief Collection will soon include Halo: Reach and be available on the Windows store and Steam, Microsoft announced today during its Inside Xbox livestream. Rather than make every game in the collection available all at once on PC, Microsoft said the collection will roll out one game at a time, starting with…

Just Cause 4 Hits Xbox Game Pass Only Three Months After Release

Despite all of the explosions in Avalanche Studios’ open-world chaos simulator, Just Cause 4 did not set the world on fire when it launched last year on December 4. Now, less than 100 days later, it’s free for Game Pass subscribers to download and play on Xbox One. Microsoft announced the game would be the…

Microsoft’s Inside Xbox Show Isn’t Working

Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft aired its latest episode of Inside Xbox, a monthly livestream in which the company updates players on new stuff in the world of Xbox. Like most episodes of Inside Xbox, it was long, precisely staged, and light on interesting news. If new Nintendo Directs have become exciting, mini-E3 press conferences, new episodes…

500+ Games Are Backward Compatible On Xbox One And More Interesting Stats

ResetEra user MauroNL spent some time putting together a comprehensive list of stats and dataabout the Xbox One backwards compatibility program. Using Wikipedia, Xbox.com and other tools, MauroNL figured out how many games are backwards compatible on Xbox One and how many have yet to receive support. MauroNL also put together some interesting stats about…

Sea Of Thieves Has Unexpectedly Become One Of Twitch’s Biggest Games

After an intriguing but worryingly barebones launch in March 2018, Rare’s ambitious pirate opus Sea of Thieves found itself lost at sea. There just wasn’t enough for players to do, causing many to fear that the game would never live up to its potential. Late last year, that began to change. Now, Sea of Thieves…

A Catalogue Of Some Of The Rarest Consoles Ever Made

I’ve always had a weird thing for collections of video game hardware. Rare colourways, odd promotional designs, Japanese-only releases with crazy hardware features, I live for it. So I’ve just spent the last 24 hours clicking throughthis website, whose goal is to catalogue every console variant there is and ever has been, from fancy PS2s…

The Master Chief Collection Is What Happens When A Studio Doesn’t Give Up On A Game

It’s now taken as gospel that the future of a game isn’t written in stone when it first comes out. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege rebounded from a lackluster launch, hampered in large part by its grinding, fragmented progression system, into one of the most successful shooters on PC right now. No Man’s Sky released bereft…

Sea Of Thieves Update Will Cut Down On File Size

Sea of Thieves is a constantly evolving game with an expanding roster ofmonsters to battle and islands to explore. In a blog post yesterday, Rare announced that it’s nerfing a dangerous foe: file size. Executive Producer Joe Neate announced the changes in an official blog post. Following an update on February 6, Sea of Thieves’…

Microsoft Removes Carlton, Floss Dances From Forza Horizon 4

The Carlton and Floss dance emotes are no longer available in Forza Horizon 4 following changes made to the game as part of today’s big Series 5 update. Although publisher Microsoft won’t say why it removed the emotes, both dances are the subjects of lawsuits against publisher Epic Games for using them in the mega-popular…

Xbox Game Pass Quests Give You Money For Earning Achievements

Today, Microsoft announced a new slate of quests for Game Pass games in January. Earning certain achievements in particular games available through the monthly subscription service will net you rewards points. It’s a small but interesting new development in how the company has been trying to gamify how people play games on Xbox. Announced over…

Xbox Game Pass subscribers just got a nice surprise: in addition to the already-announced games being added to the service this month like Just Cause 3 and Life is Strange, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is also going to be made available.

Forza Horizon 4‘s First Expansion Is Dull, At Least Right Now

Though I appreciate the rocky cliffs and craggy hills of Forza Horizon 4‘s new Northern Isles-inspired Fortune Island, I worry that once I finish all the expansion’s treasure hunts I’ll lose my appetite for brown emptiness. Fortune Island is Forza’s newest DLC. Located somewhere to the north of the main game’s English countryside, it’s a…

Dumb Kids Will Try Anything To Get Out Of An Xbox Live Ban

Back in the earlier days of Xbox Live, while the Xbox 360 was still in its prime, the platform’s support forums used to allow users to complain about bans they’d received, and Microsoft staff would actually reply. Even if the users were being racist little shits. It seems a universe away from how platforms are…