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In the eight months immediately following the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One launches in November of 2013, Sony, riding high on major public relations victories over Microsoft, led next-gen console sales by a supposed margin of nearly two to one. Despite selling at a pace much quicker than the last-gen-market-leading Xbox 360 did during the same point in its life cycle, the Xbox One was lagging far behind the PlayStation 4 in market share.

So Microsoft made some changes.

Executives Don Mattrick and Marc Whitten left the company. Phil Spencer took over as the head of the Xbox team. Kinect was unbundled from the console. Larger multimedia initiatives were cut entirely or made ancillary in favor of a focus on gaming first and foremost. Finally, the Xbox One’s price was temporarily (for the holidays) dropped to $350 with a $60 retail game bundled in.

Those maneuvers seem to be paying off, as data reporting firm InfoScout found that the Xbox One enjoyed a Black Friday sales lead of 22 percent over the PlayStation 4, according to data compiled from more than 180,000 sales receipts. InfoScout followed up by conducting a survey of 350 consumers who purchased a console on Black Friday, and found that 71 percent of Xbox One buyers cited cost as a major influence on their purchase. Comparatively, just 48 percent of PlayStation 4 buyers surveyed indicated that price played a major role in their purchase decision.

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World Series of Poker: Full House Pro for Xbox Live Arcade will be shut down on March 4, 2015, developer Pipeworks software has announced.

Following is a timeline of events leading up its closure:

• World Series of Poker: Full House Pro for the Xbox 360 was originally released to the public on September 3, 2013.
• World Series of Poker: Full House Pro for Windows 8 was released on April 9, 2014 that featured cross-platform play.
• New weekly events stopped occurring after the week of May 29, 2014.
• An announcement on June 3, 2014 from the developer’s website stated the development phase had ended and new content would be not created anymore for World Series of Poker: Full House Pro.
• An announcement on September 4, 2014 from the developer’s website stated that World Series of Poker: Full House Pro will close on March 4, 2015.

What does this mean to the players? Click ahead to find out for yourself.

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Game of Thrones: Iron from Ice was developed and published on Xbox One and Xbox 360 by Telltale Games. It was released December 3, 2014 for $4.99. A copy was provided by Telltale for review purposes.

Having recently played through the first episode of Telltale Games’ Game of Thrones, I’m pretty thankful for XBLA Fans’ new approach to reviewing episodic games. No doubt you’re wondering why, and the answer is simple – because whilst this episode shows a lot of promise for the rest of the season, it is generally uneventful in isolation and scoring it as a standalone game would be quite a challenge.

The season begins during the Red Wedding and introduces us to a new family in the form of House Forrester. These loyal followers of House Stark are immediately thrown into a difficult position both at home and away because of their allegiance. This first episode does a decent job as the introduction that it aims to be by placing us in the shoes of Lord Ethan, his sister Mira and the house squire Gared. Thankfully, Telltale has created a generally likable cast of heroes in this trio. Lord Ethan is suitably believable as our main character, stepping into his father’s shoes following the outcome of the Red Wedding. His sister Mira occupies an interesting and entirely different position as the handmaid of Queen-in-waiting Margaery Tyrell, whilst the final character is the house squire, Gerad.

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Warface was publicly released for the Xbox 360 on April 22, 2014. Less then one year has passed, but Crytek has already announced that Warface for the Xbox 360 will no longer be available after February 1, 2015.

A Warface moderator on the xbox.com forums had this to say: “It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce you the upcoming closure of Warface: Xbox 360 Edition. We considered every option before making the difficult decision to end the product that brought us together.”

The moderator then goes into further detail saying, “We’re always evaluating our portfolio to ensure that the experiences available on Xbox suit the needs of our community. Player demand and creative direction sometimes mandate that we shift our focus onto other games and opportunities.”

How will this affect the players? Jump inside to find out.

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Have you ever tried chocolate and bacon together? You know how combining those two great things sounds gross, but turns out to be amazing? That’s the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands. It’s chocolate-covered bacon.

Zero Sum proves Telltale’s patented formula has flexibility and that making decisions can be fun instead of torture. The episode is essentially a heist story, told from the perspective of two very different characters. Playing as Rhys and Fiona, you make the decisions as they tell their side of the story. Despite not being gun-wielding tanks, they’re still true Borderlands anti-heroes: likeable scumbags trying to get paid. Getting to tell their stories is a blast; you get dialogue trees full of wit and sarcasm, and some major choices just turn out to be jokes in disguise. Going through the events that brought them together, you get a more intimate look at Pandora; one that is a little more calm with humor more refined. It’s still a Telltale game; you’ll build relationships with the game’s great supporting cast and do some terrible things, but you’ll be smiling all the way through.

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While Microsoft’s stance on games may be that “a game is a game“, there is a huge breadth of experiences on the Xbox One. The console boasts some fantastic …
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December 5 is the official release date of Playdead’s Limbo ($9.99) and Sirvo’s Threes! ($6.99) on the Xbox One Store.

Microsoft brings to Xbox One gamers an instant classic in Limbo, which was originally released on XBLA in July of 2010. With the Xbox One release, Limbo has been updated to 1080P and 60FPS. Limbo is a 2D side-scrolling game done only in black and white tones where players control a nameless character in search of his missing sister. Along the way players will come across numerous puzzles requiring some serious trial and error. Don’t fret though, this was one of the intents of the developer and will try your patience more then once.

That said, if you haven’t played Limbo before,where have you been the last four years? Since its initial release, Limbo has been ported to almost every platform. Its unique style and tricky puzzles are something every gamer should experience at least once. A lucky group of day one purchasers of the Xbox One (North America) were gifted codes for Limbo as a thank you.

Unfortunately if you have played Limbo on one of those other platforms, I see no reason to recommend you make another purchase just to experience it in 1080p and 60fps. I went back and played Limbo on the Xbox 360 before playing the Xbox One version and saw no noticeable difference in the graphics. All the controls and puzzles are the exact same on both consoles, which made solving the puzzles very easy removing the best part of originally playing Limbo.

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The historical origins of Giana Sisters date back to 1987 with the release of The Great Giana Sisters on the Commodore 64. Fast forward to March 20, 2013, Xbox Live Arcade saw the release of Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams for $15.00 USD. For fans of the XBLA game and curious newcomers alike, Black Forest Games is introducing Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams — Director’s Cut to Xbox One users on December 12, 2014 for 14,99 € and undisclosed USD price.

What is the difference between the Xbox 360 version and Xbox One version?

More everything.

This release encompasses the original Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams as well as the add-on Rise of the Owlverlord. On top of that, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams — Director’s Cut will also contain The Christmas Levels and The Halloween Levels, which will total for 38 action filled levels in 1080p HD graphics at 60 frames per second.

Included after the jump is an early announcement trailer of the festivities coming soon.

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On Monday, December 1, 2014, services on Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 were temporarily unavailable for several hours as users were unable to connect online. Xbox One users were unaffected by the disruption of the service. The hacker group Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and had this to say:

Xbox.com’s Support page did not issue any service alerts on the first outage.

On December 5, 2014, services on Xbox Live were once again halted for the Xbox 360 as users were unable to connect online. This time around users have been sporadically able to connect but have not been able to keep up a connection for a significant time. Lizard Squad has once again taken credit for causing problems to the Xbox Live services, saying this recent attack came at the behest of a follower.

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Thomas Was Alone was developed by Mike Bithell and published on Xbox One by Curve Studios. It was released on November 21, 2014 for $10.99. A copy was provided by Curve for review purposes.

Thomas Was Alone is a game that released at precisely the right time in history. Originally debuting on PC in 2012 before finding its way to Xbox One, Thomas Was Alone perfectly captures today’s zeitgeist. Using nothing more than colored squares and rectangles that are seen and heard about but rarely heard from, developer Mike Bithell has assembled one of gaming’s most interesting and diverse casts of playable characters.

In Thomas Was Alone you play as artificial intelligences that have, as the result of a glitch in an experimental lab, become self-aware. Yes, this is a setup similar to ones we’ve seen countless times in popular media, but Bithell has breathed new life into it. AI Thomas, represented on screen by a red rectangle, is companionless and confused upon achieving self-awareness. He starts moving “up and to the right,” as the game’s delightful narrator makes a point of frequently noting, in a desperate bid to find friends and answers. It’s not long before Thomas begins encountering both, and he and his new friends endeavor to reach the awe-inspiring “fountain of wisdom” (internet connection). The staggering amount of information Thomas sees there convinces him that the AIs must work in sync towards the goal of escaping the system and entering the greater world beyond. Each AI is different in appearance and ability, and the way they learn to accept this diversity and use it to their advantage is nothing short of inspiring.

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