Xbox

Ryse: Son of Rome: The Kotaku Review

Ryse: Son of Rome is what I want from a next-gen game. It’s something different. And it’s something impressive. Ryse is also a game I expected to not like very much, so let’s give it one more label: a pleasant surprise on day one for Xbox One. Seven years in the making by a collection…

Jimmy Fallon’s Xbox One Segment Tries Hard to Make Kinect Look Fun

What do you do if you’re trying to hawk the Xbox One on late-night talk shows? You can’t show the gory, crotch-laser killfest of Dead Rising 3 or the slice-an-arm-off combat of Ryse: Son of Rome, both of which seem to be the better games for the new console. No, no, you have to go…

The Japanese voice track and lip sync animations will be available as DLC for the English version of Lightning Returns The pack, per the latest announcement from Squeenix, will be free to download for two weeks after release, after which time it becomes paid DLC. Above is the newly-released “special effects” trailer.

Unboxing A White Xbox One Makes Me Very Jealous

Unless you paidover $12,000 for one via auction, the only way to get hold of a white Xbox One console is to have been responsible for actually building the console. So this unboxing is one hell of a tease. The “I MADE THIS” is only going to get sillier the longer time goes on, regardless…

Borderlands 2 Serves Up a Thanksgiving-Themed Episode Next Week

As only it could do, Borderlands 2 is desecrating a sacred family tradition for millions with its next wildass set of missions, “The Horrible Hunger of the Ravenous Wattle Gobbler.” available on Tuesday for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. It sounds nuts. The pretext for all of its Thanksgiving imagery is a “hunger-themed competition,” being…

​When You Start Up The Xbox One, It Plays A Pretty Song

One of the first things I noticed when I turned on my Xbox One was that it played me a little song. It’s just three notes, which I’ve always thought of as the bare minimum number of notes required to make a melody. Two notes could be the start of a melody, but a mere…

How To Get Your Cable TV Surround Sound Working On Xbox One

There’s been some confusion about whether the Xbox One can play cable TV in surround sound. It can. There’s a catch—a presumably temporary one. As I wrote in the New York Times last week and as we mentioned in our review of the console, the Xbox One will downgrade any surround sound audio that comes…

The Guy Who Got His Xbox One Early is Unbanned

Good news, says Andre Weingarten: “I’m unbanned!” Sometime in the early afternoon while the college freshman was in class, his Xbox One—the thing Target mistakenly delivered early two weeks ago—went legit. What’s the first thing he’s going to do? “Well, I’ll be streaming,” he said. You can watch here as he plays Call of Duty:…

An Xbox One Plugged Into Itself Looks Like Art

We’ve seen an Xbox One playing through another Xbox One And an Xbox 360 through an Xbox One through an Xbox One. Also a Wii U through an Xbox One and, sure, a PS4throughan Xbox One. But what if you plug one Xbox One into itself? Because it’s certainly possible. And the results are kind…

NBA Live 14: The Kotaku Review

It’s hard to remember, but NBA Live was once a challenger to the formidable NBA 2K. If you care about aggregated ratings, NBA Live 10 and NBA 2K10 finished in a dead heat. Live had stolen away one of 2K’s top designers. It was fargin’ war. Then EA Sports burned down everything. We haven’t seen…

You Can Play PS4 Through Xbox One, But You Probably Wouldn’t Want To.

What happens when you plug a PlayStation 4’s HDMI cable into the back of an Xbox One? The same thing that happens to everything else. The fine folks at DigitalFoundry plugged their PlayStation 4 into the Xbox One’s HDMI input and — contrary to my fevered speculation — a singularity was not formed. Instead, they…

​The Xbox One: The Kotaku Review

The Xbox One is a testament to Microsoft’s towering ambition. It represents their desire not only to occupy a place in your home entertainment center, but to lumber straight into the center of it. It is a black plastic tank, a hard-edged chunk of corners meant to conquer everything in its path. But for all…

11 Minutes of Lightning Returns: FFXII For Your Viewing Pleasure

The fine folks over at Japanese news site 4Gamer.netmanaged to get their hands on the shortly-releasing Japanese version of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. So, of course, they immediately went and captured some footage for the rest of us. So without any further ado, above’s eleven minutes of gameplay from the next Final Fantasy. 4Gamer…

You Can Play An Xbox 360 Through An Xbox One Through An Xbox One

Ever since we heard about the Xbox One’s HDMI input feature—which is intended to route HDMI devices like a cable box through it and “snap” to that program—I’ve been excited to put it to the test. Could we play another Xbox One through an Xbox One? What about an Xbox 360 hooked into an Xbox…

If Only Microsoft Made Xbox One Controllers This Nice

When you pick up an Xbox One this week (or anytime in the near future), I hope you like black, because that’s the only colour you’ll be able to get it in. Those wanting their controllers to be a little more adventurous, though, at least have a third-party option to spice things up. Just like…

Still looking to snag an Xbox One for launch day? Amazon. Tomorrow. Several awesome readers have forwarded us emails from Amazon.com, indicating a limited amount will go on sale there at 8AM Eastern time tomorrow. That should give you enough time to read Kirk’s full review, coming up at midnight.

Lococycle: The Kotaku Review

Lococycle is a guilty pleasure. It’s a friend you hang out with, in private. You’re not comfortable introducing it to your parents and it sure as hell isn’t winning any “games as art” arguments and the like. In all aspects, Lococycle is an incredibly stupid game. In Lococycle you play as two-wheeler I.R.I.S., manufactured as…

Kirk Hamilton is writing his Xbox One review right now. You can read it here at midnight ET. You can read other outlets’ reviews then, too. We won’t be offended. We know you love us best.

​The Guys Who Designed the First Xbox Critique the PS4

It’s one thing to think about the PS4 as a black box that delivers games and services to your TV. It’s entirely another to look at it as a piece of design itself. The studio who crafted the imposing look of the first Xbox did exactly that. And hey, they think the DualShock 4 rocks,…

Heist Nabs 58 Xbox Ones More Than a Week Before Launch

The PlayStation 4 had two day-one robberies in the same city, but the clear winner in next-generation crime has to be the Xbox One. Fifty-eight of the consoles were stolen—and stolen a week ago—in Memphis, Tenn., where one unlucky customer has just been arrested. WMCT-TV reports that a 31-year-old Memphis man is facing charges of…