Xbox One Tour is under way
For those of you who just can’t wait until November 22 to experience the Xbox One, Microsoft has the hype train headed to a city near you. Yesterday, the Xbox One Tour kicked off and will be traveling all across North America and Europe. At the event, you can be among the first members of the public to try launch games like Forza 5, Ryse: Son of Rome, and hotly anticipated XBLA games Crimson Dragon, Lococycle and Max: Curse of the Brotherhood.
Lucky tour route cities include Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, Paris, Vienna, London and many more. Each city will feature two events: Area One and Test Drive; the former being a much bigger, convention-like event. Participants must be 18 or older to enter Area One, but no restrictions apply for the more commonly available Test Drive. While admission is free, you might want to bust out the tents a day or two early to secure your spot. To find out which events are near you, you can consult Microsoft’s official tour map.
For those of you gunning for Area One, you’ll find the schedule after the jump.
12 years ago
Max: Curse of the Brotherhood preview: Imagining a world without miniguns
Max is your typical late-80s/early-90s video game or cartoon hero. He’s an adventurous young boy, colorfully drawn to life with a an oversized golden mane and a t-shirt that bearing a prominent reminder of the letter his first name begins with. He lives in a picturesque home in a neighborhood that is presumably full of residents who don’t know the meaning of the words “overcast” and “precipitation.” At the start of his adventure, a monster arm that’s more adorable than scary reaches out of his closet and nabs the little brother whom Max had just been fighting with. This event signals the beginning of an adventure that will see Max running through bright and varied environments and jumping over obstacles in his path.
But this isn’t the late ’80s. Nor is it the early ’90s. This is 2013. And in 2013, game and cartoon characters have guns. Usually big guns. Take, for example, one of XBLA’s most recent releases, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Ubisoft’s ’80s love letter sealed with the blood of the titular dragons went so far as to give the player a minigun. Max: The Curse of the Brotherhood, however, does nothing of the sort.
“One of the things that is very appealing about this game is that Max isn’t armed with a minigun or a samurai sword, but he has this ability to control different kinds of materials that are in themselves not very dangerous,” says Mikkel Thorsted, studio director of Press Play, the developer behind Curse of the Brotherhood. “Basically he is armed with his imagination and wit, so basically when you encounter danger you have to outsmart the villainous henchmen. You have to outsmart them and lure them away, and stuff like that.”