xbla crazyness

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 experiences, which we will be highlighting soon in our yearly Game of the Year pieces. However the diversity between games has caused us to reexamine our review system in an effort to best serve our readers. Our focus has always been providing quality content for our readers even at the expense of exclusion on sites like Metacritic (they hate that we only give a buy, try or skip for scores). In the future, we are going to be trying a few new things.

Telltale has produced some excellent games on the Xbox One and really brought episodic gaming new life. Instead of trying to score each episode individually, we are going to treat them more like a TV miniseries. Each episode will receive its own mini-review (without a score). These mini-reviews will remain spoiler-free but will delve into the episode. At the end of the season’s run, the author will compile a final review encompassing all of the episodes and scoring the game. We will be starting this with Tales from the Borderlands and Game of Thrones. We encourage you to play along with us and share your thoughts on each episode.

We are also facing a new dilemma as Xbox 360 games are released on Xbox One. There really doesn’t seem to be a need to review a direct port of a game that we have already covered. Instead, we will be giving quick impressions focusing on if the game holds up and how the small graphical changes affect our original opinion of the game. An example of this was our Limbo Xbox One Impressions. We will still continue to review HD remakes as we have in the past.

Microsoft’s assertion that a game is a game is obviously not entirely true, as Threes is classified as an app on the Xbox One — and a well-known app at that. Using the snap app feature, Threes brings a wonderful mobile game to the Xbox One. It’s elegant and simple. We will be adopting quick impressions instead of reviews for future well-known games ported as apps. You can take a look at our Threes Xbox One impressions for an example.

We hope to continue to be your source for XBLA, ID@Xbox, Indie Xbox Games and whatever else ends up falling into our category over time. We will continue to evolve as needed.