Microsoft

Fable Card Game That Survived Death Of Lionhead Coming Out In July

Last year, to the surprise of many, Microsoft closed down renowned British studio Lionhead. Fable Legends, a multiplayer entry in the fantasy RPG series, went down with the ship. Fable is not, however, entirely done. Fable Fortune, a card game spin-off developed by ex-Lionhead employees, is coming out next month. Fable Fortune is coming to…

Microsoft’s Twitch competitor Beam just got some new bells and whistles. Now rebranded as “Mixer,” the platform now offers co-streaming, which lets up to 4 streamers combine their streams into one broadcast, and a mobile streaming app, currently in beta.

Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft’s $10 monthly gaming subscription program, will go live on June 1, the company said today. Unlike Sony’s streaming service, PlayStation Now, Xbox Game Pass will let you download its games. It’ll be fascinating to see whether Microsoft can amass a library big enough to create gaming’s version of Netflix.

Phantom Dust Is Still A Great Time (And Totally Free)

Phantom Dust is a 2004 action game that mixes Magic the Gathering deck building and frantic arena brawling. A free remaster was released yesterday for Windows 10 and Xbox One. Heather and Chris collect magic spells and slash their way to a few victories in this archived stream. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, Phantom Dust…

Phantom Dust’s Remaster Out Tomorrow, Will Be Free

Phantom Dust, which we very recently named one of the best Xbox games, is re-releasing tomorrow on Xbox One and Windows 10. And it’ll be free. The property has had a tortured time at Microsoft of late, with a planned new game killed off and its studio closed A remaster of the original game was…

Halo Fan Turns Microsoft’s Cortana Into Actual Hologram

Usually, Cortana the personal assistant is just a disembodied voice. One Halo fan decided to take his Cortana to the next level by building a rad hologram appliance that responds to your queries. The whole thing is still a work in progress, creator Jarem “untitled network” Archer says, but it’s still pretty cool to watch…

Forza Horizon 3’s Hot Wheels Expansion Is Pure Joy

Miles of bright orange track winding through the sky, speed boost pads flanked by gigantic toy engines, loop-de-loops and dinosaurs—I can’t stop smiling when I’m speeding through Forza Horizon 3‘s Hot Wheels expansion. Released yesterday alongside a substantial PC performance update for Forza Horizon 3, the Hot Wheels expansion is everything I wanted and more.…

The Best Xbox Games

It’s hard to believe given its place in history, but the original Xbox was only really around for four years. That’s not long in console terms, but as we all found, when it came to Microsoft’s first console the focus was on quality, not quantity. Leveraging the console’s horsepower, hard drive and online capabilities, the…

Microsoft Tests Steam-Style Refunds For Xbox One

Microsoft is testing out a digital refund service on Xbox One, although it’s currently only available to alpha testers and might not make it to the public. If this service does go wide, Xbox One players will be able to return games that are less than two weeks old and that they’ve played for less…

Microsoft Officially Bans Emulators From Windows Store

Microsoft has revised Windows Store policy to remove emulators. The new rules bar any applications that emulate preexisting game systems, resulting in the removal of a popular program that supported games from Nintendo and Sega consoles. The new policies explicitly disallow emulators on “any device family.” It’s a wide reaching change that stymies emulation efforts…

Microsoft Reveals Xbox Scorpio’s Impressive Specs

Microsoft has promised that their next console, Scorpio, will be “the most powerful console ever,” and today the company delivered on that promise, revealing a set of beefy specs that, in terms of raw power, surpass any video game console on the market today. In a PR reveal with Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, Microsoft unveiled that…

Microsoft Is Making A New Xbox Controller Inspired By The Military

Xbox just announced a new controller: the special edition Recon Tech wireless controller, to be released next month. With a stylized utilitarian look Xbox says was inspired by “military technology,” combat armor and sci-fi mechanical gear,” the controller has etched textures on the front and back, apparently for grip. Like other Xbox wireless controllers, it’s…

All Hail The Brief, Glorious Return Of The PC Demo

Demos have been gone so long there will be younger readers who never really got comfy with them in the first place, but a some news from big PC publishers this week shows that the oldest (and maybe best) way of selling a video game is making a comeback. OK, so demos never entirely disappeared—and…

No Conan Dicks For You, Xbox One

Make that, no dongs at all. Conan Exile’s Xbox One release will be sausage free, it seems. The game’s early access Windows release has a penis slider, so players can make sure their character has the weenie they want. Or he wants. Whatever.  Mods have been make even bigger dicks possible. Of course!   But…

DayZ’s Dean Hall debuted a game called Ion during Microsoft’s E3 press conference in 2015. Like a lot of other things announcedat a MicrosoftE3 press conference in recent years, it now no longer exists

Microsoft Unveils $10 Monthly Gaming Subscription Service For Xbox One [Update]

Coming this spring to the Xbox One, the Xbox Game Pass will give console owners access to over 100 Xbox One and backwards compatible games for $9.99 a month. The Xbox Game Pass is not a streaming service, like PlayStation Now, but a game download subscription along the lines of EA Access. Subscribers who pay…

Halo Wars 2: The Kotaku Review

The nice thing about Halo Wars 2 is that it works. Which is nicer than it sounds, because the biggest fear about real-time strategy games on a console, and the thing that generally keeps those games off the platforms in the first place, is that a control pad does not rank highly on the preferred…

Microsoft just announcedthat the Xbox’s E3 briefing will air Sunday, June 11th at 2PM PST, and not on Monday morning, when it usually is.

Final Fantasy XIV‘s Interface Made Futuristic Thanks To HoloLens

We’ve already seen what Microsoft’s HoloLenscan do to Portal. Now, let’s picture what it can do to Final Fantasy XIV Japanese Twitter user Tanufuku created this mock-up to see how it could handle the MMORPG’s interface.  Tanufuku thinks this actually might make the game even more immersive as well as make it possible to play…

Playing Portal In The Real World

Why play Portal on a 2D screen when you can play it all around you in the real world? This Portal demo for Microsoft’s Hololens—an “augmented reality” headset that displays digital content on glasses overlaid on your outside vision—looks incredible. It was made by developer Kenny Wang, who did something similar last year with Pokemon…