Microsoft

Google’s Self-Driving Car Goes Wild In GTA V

An autonomous, self-driving car in Los Santos? What could go wrong? YouTuber pizzaforbreakfast made a clip imagining how this new technology would work in the precisely designed environment of GTA AI drivers. It’d be a disaster. Although, on second thought, it’s not much different from GTA Online To contact the author of this post, write…

Fallout 4‘s World Map As A Globe

Suddenly, Fallout 4‘s Commonwealth, which feels pretty big in first-person view, shrinks when we can see most of it from above. An awesome idea from kidaXV, who used a panorama photo stitcher on 45 carefully selected screenshots to make this unique projection. Slightly bigger pic above, and there’s an even larger one (it’s 50 MB…

Massive Update Fixes A Lot Of Quantum Break‘s PC Problems

When Quantum Break launched earlier this month the PC version had plenty of problems, including poor performance, forced upscaling and the lack of a button to exit the game. Today’s 27GB update goes some way towards making the port not as horrible. First off, that’s a very large update. I’ve seen folks on various forums…

Microsoft Officially Kills Lionhead

In early March, Microsoft announced plans to cancel Fable Legends and put forth a “proposed closure” of the iconic studio Lionhead. Today, it’s official: Lionhead is no more. “We can confirm that after much consideration over the six week consultation period with Lionhead employees, we have reached the decision to close Lionhead Studios,” Microsoft told…

Tony Stark Was Able To Build This Xbox In A CAVE! With A Box Of SCRAPS!

Xbox France had three of these consoles made up as a promo for The Latest Comic Book Movie™. You can’t buy them, but you can look at them and wonder why we can’t at least get that controller. The console itself is…a bit much, though the arc reactor effect in the middle is nice. I’m…

GTA V Player Pulls Off Absurd Stunts With A Vespa Bike

The Enduro bike isn’t the only suitable vehicle in GTA V for wild custom stunt maps. The Vespa bike might be sluggish, but when handled correctly it’s a good choice for parkour maps as well. This is Dark Stunter, showing his skills and sliding through a pretty technical scooter trial, in record time. To contact…

Microsoft Ends Xbox 360 Production

After a successful ten-and-a-half-year run, the Xbox 360 is officially saying goodbye. One might even say it’s turning around 360 degrees and walking away. Announcing the news on the Xbox Wire today, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer wrote a few paragraphs about the console’s success. And it has indeed been successful, selling upwards of 78 million units…

Dark Souls 3 Party Steamrolls Everything With Armor Of Thorns

That’s a lot of players getting rolled to death. The “Armor of Thorns” is a special set in Dark Souls III, covered in thorns, that does damage when rolling into enemies. The damage is minimal, but not when a whole group of players are wearing it in 4v1 pvp. Iron Pineapple and his friends teamed…

Microsoft’s Caption A.I. Is Sometimes Right, Sometimes Stupid

Microsoft has launched a new CaptionBot, and the results range from impressively spot on to bwah. Simply by uploading a photo to CaptionBot, it will describe what it sees. Keep in mind, the A.I. is still learning, but damn, there’s so much it doesn’t know. It does know this guy. Good. He’s important. Amazing! It…

Fable Legends shut down today. People who bought items in the game via microtransactions should be be getting refunds sent to their linked Xbox or Windows Store accounts. The in-development, free-to-play multiplayer game was the last thing made by legendary British game studio Lionhead

This Is Windows Solitaire In 2016

Welcome to tonight’s instalment of “Game Ads For Dads”. Actually, Granddads might be closer to the mark here. Good on Microsoft for trying to explain all this shit in a uniquely (for video games) clear and concise way, but the fact this promo takes two minutes to explain what’s going on—or needs explaining at all—is…

Age of Empires II Buildings, In LEGO Form

Here are some nice LEGO versions of essential medieval buildings from Age of Empires II by a group of LEGO enthusiasts. An Archery Range by Mark of Falworth and Barracks by Andrew JN above, and a few more below. Great designs (with very good rooftops!) and with the old-school minifigs added, these builds reminds me…

Gears Of War 4: The First Trailer

It’s time for Gears of War: Son Of Marcus Fenix Sorry Mike, no more statues of Marcus in this debut trailer for the game. But we do get a continuation of the series’ penchant for covers (complete with bad timing), so there’s…that. To refresh, some gameplay was shown off at E3 last year Gears of…

Quantum Break’s PC Version Sure Sounds Broken

I started playing Quantum Break on Xbox One last night and was surprised by how much I liked it. If I’d been playing on PC, sounds like it would’ve been a different story. I raised an eyebrow last week when I heard the PC version’s main menu didn’t have a quit button—never the sign of…

Gears of War 4 Comes Out on October 11

The next chapter in the Xbox-exclusive shooter series will be hitting this fall, and players will have to opportunity to sample a multiplayer beta on April 18. First shown at last year’s E3, Gears of War 4 introduces a crop of new characters to the planet of Sera. Folks who’ve played the Gears of War:…

Killer Instinct’s Season Three Saves The Most Exciting Addition For Later

New fighters, balance changes and the launch of the Windows 10 version of Killer Instinct are nice and all, but its the single-player Shadow Lords game mode coming later in the year that excites me most about Killer Instinct season three. Battletoad Rash, barbarian Tusk, former teen fighter Kim Wu and Halo’s Arbiter headline the…

Meanwhile in Japan, Microsoft’s A.I. Chatbot Has Become an Otaku

This was bound to happen. So were the questions about Hitler. In the West, Microsoft launched Tay, an A.I. chatbot designed to appeal to the youth. Its rollout was, well, not good. In Japan, however, Microsoft had previously launched a schoolgirl chatbot called Rinna. Schoolgirl. Chatbot. Japan. Of course. For the past couple months, Rinna…

GTA V Player Completes Insane Parkour Map In Record Time

Nearly impossible, custom-made parkour maps are a popular part of GTA Online, with their very own community. They test the limits of the game’s engine, which sometimes results in some truly spectacular runs. This is Albert using an Enduro bike (which is great for wall rides) on a really evil map made by Retro maniA,…

Microsoft Releases AI Twitter Bot That Immediately Learns How To Be Racist

“Hellooooooo world!!!” wrote Microsoft’s new AI bot in its first tweet yesterday morning. By the end of the day, it had declared that Hitler did nothing wrong Tay, launched yesterday, is an artificially intelligent bot that’s designed to appeal to teens and younger 20-somethings. Its Twitter bio reads “Microsoft’s A.I. fam from the internet that’s…

Maki Roll, a professional cosplayer and dancer, has written a fascinating essay about Microsoft’s recent GDC party controversy She examines the event from a dancer’s perspective, and takes a closer look at what the backlash says about an industry grappling with the increased visibility of women’s issues.