About Nick Santangelo

The Lifeline DLC pack for State of Decay will release for XBLA on Friday, May 30 for $6.99, Undead Labs announced in a Memorial Day blog post. The DLC …
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Xbox One launch title Powerstar Golf is now a free-to-play game, reports Eurogamer. Users first noticed a free version of Zoë Mode’s cartoonish golf title on the Xbox Games …
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Continuing with its stated goal of giving gamers what they’ve been asking for, Microsoft announced today that the Xbox One’s June system update will add functionality for external storage support and real names for friend identification.

Once the update arrives, Xbox One consoles will support up to two external USB 3.0 hard drives, provided the drives are at least 256 GB in size. This move will allow users to increase their storage space from the standard 500 GB available on the console’s internal drive. After plugging in a compatible drive, players will be asked if they wish to format it and given the option to make it the default device.

In addition to storing more Xbox One content simultaneously, external drive support will give gamers the ability to drop full games, downloadable content and apps onto external drives and take said drives on the go for usage on a friend’s console. Content can either be saved directly to external drives or copied over to them from the internal one. Digital content stored on external HDDs can be accessed on other consoles once the user has signed into Xbox Live. For retail games, the disc will have to be inserted in order to verify ownership.

Speaking of friends, real name support is aimed at making it easier for users to immediately identify who is who on their friends lists as those lists continue to grow up to 1,000 names in length. Microsoft is cognizant of the privacy concerns this move could potentially raise. The console holder will give each gamer the ability to choose whether all friends, some friends or no friends see their real name. Settings can be changed at any time and real names will not appear in-game.

Microsoft originally planned to support real name usage on launch day but ended up delaying the feature. Competitor Sony has supported actual names since launch on its PlayStation 4 console.

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Even when they’re right in front of your face, you can’t see words written in invisible ink without “decoding” them. It’s appropriate then that you can’t see what’s right in front of your face in Klei Entertainment’s Invisible Inc. without first performing what amounts to in-game decoding work.

The game’s PAX East demo places the player in a room of some evil corporation or another’s building. In the room is a pair of controllable secret agents who are equipped with skills and equipment to furtively navigate their way past guards and turrets and to the top of the building. We don’t get to see what’s at the top, but Klei explains that at the top of buildings will be the culmination of “multifaceted” objectives. Several floors must be accessed and information and/or keycards obtained along the way before ultimately cracking a computer core or something of the sort.

“The main objective of each floor is to get to the next floor,” says Klei’s Matthew Marteinsson, “but there will be some objectives that you can complete along the way. And there’s different things you can find, like documentation for your player. We give a bonus for exploring the whole floor. You get more credits the more you explore, you get credits for not having killed anybody. So those sort of things that you can…do if you want to do.”

Klei wants players to explore the buildings they enter as much as possible. To do that, we’ll have to get out of that room we started in. Invisible Inc. is turn-based, and each room’s floor consists of tile grids. Moving agents across tiles costs movement points, of which naturally come in limited supply per turn. Once I’ve moved the agents as far as I can towards the room’s exit door the unseen enemy takes its turn, scurrying about performing unseen actions in the surrounding blacked-out rooms. Well, not entirely unseen. The game shows dotted lines and arrows indicating where the bad guys are moving in the darkness.

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Microsoft’s Xbox One will achieve price parity with Sony’s competing PlayStation 4 on June 9. It’s on that date that a new One SKU sans Kinect sensor will become available for a $399 MSRP, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer announced today on Xbox Wire. This cheaper Kinect-free take on on the Xbox One will be sold in all markets in which the console is currently available.

Spencer noted the importance of fan feedback to the console holder, alluding to changes such as the elimination of the once-planned always-online feature of the Xbox One due to massive gamer backlash. “Today, we’re excited to share more ways your feedback is impacting the products we build,” he added.

The Head of Xbox also took the opportunity to point out that Microsoft isn’t forgetting about the millions of gamers who already have a Kinect sensor. “To be clear, as we introduce this new Xbox One console option, Kinect remains an important part of our vision,” Spencer wrote. “Many of you are using Kinect for Xbox One every day. In fact, more than 80 percent of you are actively using Kinect, with an average of 120 voice commands per month on each console.”

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The whispers that Microsoft is interested in selling or spinning off its Xbox division have been swirling for some time. Perhaps the most concrete evidence of that move being a real possibility emerged from a February Washington Post report claiming a pair of “influential Microsoft shareholders” were putting the pressure the software giant to move on from what they believed to be a non-essential product line.

Now Bill Gates himself has weighed in on that prospect. When questioned by Fox Business Network if he would support Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella if he chose to go in that direction, Gates responded, “Absolutely.”

That does not, however, mean that the company’s founder thinks unloading the Xbox division is the right move. In fact, he noted that doing so was not an “obvious” choice and emphasized that Microsoft has future plans for Xbox and gaming at large.

“Well, we’re taking PC gaming — Windows gaming — and Xbox gaming and bringing those a lot closer together,” Gates told Fox. “The power of the PC graphics chips means you can do great games there. So I’m sure Satya and the team will look at that, and, you know, it’s up to them. But we’re going to have an overall gaming strategy, so it’s not as obvious as you might think.”

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You’ll want to steer, but you won’t be able to. Charles Cox doesn’t want you to. Endless space-based video games have taught gamers to manipulate analog sticks, a d-pad or a keyboard and mouse to steer all manner of spacecraft to precisely where they want them to go. Habitat: A Thousand Generations in Orbit doesn’t work that way. Physics have the wheel in 4gency’s strategy game, and they’ll be doing all of the steering. Cox hopes the approach will work.

He showed up at PAX East last month with a playable demo of his ID@Xbox title. Actually, it was more a proof of concept than a proper demo — 4gency put together a playable outer space sandbox and filled it with junk, lots and lots of junk. There was no objective or end point to the demo. Instead, players were free to take the orbiting hunk of junk they started with (the titular habitat), weld whatever debris they pleased onto it and propel the thing through the space. Doing so is easier said than done.

Your habitat is an unwieldy thing, as you might expect a floating mass of rock, rockets and pieces of famous landmarks to be. Movement is based on physics, so, again, there’s no steering controls for your rubble-craft. What you do have control over is the placement of rockets, the rockets you want to fire up at any given time and how much thrust you want from those rockets. A mistake at any of these three levels of propulsion oversight will lead to your habitat either careening off of other objects and being smashed to pieces or performing the spacecraft equivalent of doing donuts in a car parking lot. On top of that, players also have to manage electricity and oxygen levels, as some of one or the other is necessary for rocket power.

Taking control of a habitat, I immediately screw the entire thing up by unintentionally playing bumper cars with surrounding space debris. Crucial parts of the habitat are torn asunder and most of its inhabitants are killed. Cox restarts the demo and advises me on what to do. Even with his over-the-shoulder guidance, it’s next to impossible to not make a mistake. I continually place rockets in ill-advised locations, place one rocket where there should be a pair and apply improper amounts of thrust. There’s no shortage of space junk in the demo, and I crash into most of it during my play session.

Cox says that there’s “an art to this.” If so, Leonardo Da Vinci I am not. A successful go at things seems unfeasible, but then again, there are no conditions for success in the demo, so perhaps things will be different in the final game.

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Capybara Games’ long-in-development Super Time Force will release simultaneously for Xbox 360 and Xbox One on May 14, Capy President Nathan Vella announced yesterday on Twitter.

A launch trailer …
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Child of Light was developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released April 30, 2014, on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for $14.99. An Xbox One copy was provided for review purposes.

Child of Light is a game that isn’t afraid to take what it likes. Ubisoft Montreal’s pastiche borrows liberally from the JRPGs of yesteryear in paying homage to them. Its roughly 12-hour adventure is filled with bits from its source material: Final Fantasy VII‘s sword gigantism, Final Fantasy X‘s in-battle character swapping and a sidekick that acts like a more palatable version of Ocarina of Time‘s Navi and looks like a Dragon Quest Slime, to name a few.

The story also feels like it was cut from the same cloth of many seminal RPGs. It revolves around a group led by the titular Child of Light (Aurora) on a quest to save the fairy tale world of Lemuria from the Black Queen, who has pilfered the land’s sun, moon and stars and appropriated its throne for herself. Child of Light‘s pitting of good-natured youngsters against an evil covering the world in darkness is nothing new, and its world, while beautiful, can be less than exciting to traverse. You might not then expect a game aspiring to be an indie love letter to the JRPG composed by the blockbuster shooter production crew at Ubisoft Montreal to keep you happily adventuring along. Thanks to a sublimely addictive combat system, pretty artwork and a delightful cast of characters, however, you’ll continue to gravitate towards this quest until you reach its conclusion.

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Microsoft has announced that a number of its popular video game franchises could potentially get their own TV shows, reports Joystiq. Vice President of Xbox Entertainment Studios Jordan Levin …
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