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Independentie

News [1]
Opinion [2]
Business [3]
Sport [4]
Life [5]
Style [7]
Entertainment [8]
Travel [9]

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Xbox

December 2019

Project xCloud runs so far only on Android devices

XO19: Project xCloud puts an Xbox in your pocket

You’re sitting on a bus trundling through the burbs and playing Gears 5 on your Xbox. This is not a fevered dream, this is reality. This is game streaming, coming soon to Ireland but already a viable proposition in test markets such as the UK.

November 2019

Minecraft Earth: Take your creation outside and several players can interact with it

XO19: We want to rebuild the world one block at a time, says Minecraft Earth chief

SAXS PERSSON had just endured the downside of augmented reality. The creative director of Minecraft spent the morning outside in freezing London weather demonstrating what he hopes will be the next big thing to succeed Pokémon Go.

The show floor at X019 in the Copper Box Arena in London was packed with playable games

XO19: We’ve bought all these studios, now it’s time to deliver, says Xbox

A year and a half ago, Xbox was on the back foot, trailing so far behind PlayStation it was no contest. Despite having the “most powerful console in the world” in the Xbox One X, a glaring gap remained because Microsoft’s pipeline of exclusive games paled beside that of Sony.

September 2019

Gears 5 review: The war hasn't gone away

What, no more war? As if. The Gears of War series has ditched its suffix for the fifth (er, sixth actually) helping of space marines shooting terrifying narky aliens. Don't be fooled, though - Gears 5 slots its cogs quickly back into a comfortable routine, with barely a shift in tone.

August 2019

Supermarket Shriek review: Off their trolleys

A game about a screaming man and a wailing goat in a shopping trolley which you control by shouting into a microphone? What are they smoking up in Belfast, whence this amusing kart racer comes?

June 2019

The Outer Wilds features some strange characters who inhabit the planets

The Outer Wilds review: The end of the world has never looked more appealing

Like a strange interactive planetarium, The Outer Wilds strands the player in a pint-sized solar system to unravel its arcane mysteries. The exploration of these beautiful but treacherous worlds gains urgent impetus from the supernova that explodes at the system's core every 20 minutes.

April 2019

Sea of Thieves: Fishing for food and fun will also be an option in the new update

Sea of Thieves sets sail on a different course

One of the great joys in Sea of Thieves, Microsoft’s raucous pirate sim, comes from dropping the anchor while sailing at full speed. Rather unrealistically but totally amusingly, your ship performs a handbrake turn, perfect for docking quickly or dodging enemy cannonballs.

March 2019

Crackdown 3 review: Superhero fun is less than sum of its parts

You wait ages for one Crackdown 3 and then two come along at once. This much-delayed superhero fantasy props up Microsoft's spring schedule but neither of its components stand out after protracted development.

January 2019

Below review: No mercy in hell

A game less in need of an age rating than a patience rating, Below emerges from five-year development hell with a warning. Don't buy this unless you've a deep well of bloody-mindedness.

October 2018

Forza Horizon 4: The cover star is the McLaren Senna supercar

Forza Horizon 4 review: Four seasons in one game

"Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!" Forza Horizon takes its inspiration from myriad sources but perhaps none more so than Doc Brown's line in Back to the Future.

September 2018

Forza Horizon 4 is released on October 2

Forza Horizon 4 preview: A butter-smooth beast of a machine

IN a little clearing in the woods, we enter a glass room and spy a perspex lift shaft disappearing into the earth. Pressing a button brings the elevator silently to the surface and we descend into the bowels of the building, to be greeted by white corridors stretching off into the distance as far as the eye can see.

July 2018

E3 2018: Calming troubled waters - how Rare is knocking the rough edges off Sea of Thieves

WHY can’t we all get along? In the quarrelsome world of videogames, it’s no wonder players’ instincts bend inexorably towards shooting first and asking questions later.

June 2018

Mike Ybarra, corporate vice-president of gaming at Microsoft, at E3 2018 in LA. Photo: Ronan Price

E3 2018: Microsoft gets back in the game by listening to the players

THE consensus is that Xbox ‘won’ this year’s E3 game show in LA with a strong showing that delivered a broad slate of upcoming games, as well as the addition of five studios to its development team.

May 2018

State of Decay 2 review: Zombie sequel is in no fit state

The jokes write themselves. Shambling zombies in shambles. Brain-dead survivors fight undead. Civilisation in disarray portrayed by chaotic game.

April 2018

Sea of Thieves review: Pirate adventure sails its own course

It's easy to get lost in Sea of Thieves, in every sense of the words. This unpredictable pirate adventure revels in its physicality, eschewing many common game protocols to force players to think and act as if it's a real world.

March 2018

Subnautica review: Deep exploration of sea monsters

So beautiful, and yet so dangerous. Subnautica's gorgeous underwater world resembles something out of David Attenborough's Planet Earth, but with added monsters.

February 2018

Sea of Thieves preview: Ship-shape and Raring to go

IN A boardroom in the countryside outside Birmingham sits a weary Gregg Mayles, creative director at renowned studio Rare. With just a few weeks to go to the launch of arguably Rare’s most important ever game, Sea of Thieves, Mayles hunches over his laptop writing dialogue, fielding emails and greeting media visiting the offices set amid the rolling fields near Twycross.

The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter for Xbox One

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter review: Enjoy the confusion

It would be easy to overlook this belated port of a 2014 PS4/PC chiller, but fans of intense mysteries should give it a whirl. It belongs to a genre unfairly dubbed "walking simulators" but there's much more to the Vanishing than ambling from place to place, drinking in the atmosphere.

January 2018

PUBG review: The battle is only half-won on Xbox

It's the silence that gets you in Battlegrounds. In rival shooters, the air crackles and fizzes with the din of furious gunfire. But much of your time in PUBG (as aficionados dub it) is spent fearfully creeping around abandoned buildings scavenging weaponry while listening intently for a sound, any sound.

November 2017

The Xbox One X is a fine example of engineering - quiet and yet powerful

Xbox One X review: One to the power of X equals a magic number

A MATE of mine religiously spends at least €600 a year upgrading the graphics card on his PC. Every second year, he shells out even more to replace his processor, motherboard, memory … the list goes on. The wallet pain just about keeps him abreast of PC requirements for the latest games.

October 2017

Cuphead review: An iron fist hides behind silly face

Cuphead ships with two difficulty levels: "impossible" and "harder than impossible". Or so it seems when you dive into this delightful side-scrolling 2D shooter.

May the Forza be with you

You would think the scenery in a driving game to be no more than background, a placeholder in a world where you're focused relentlessly on that narrow strip of tarmac in front of you. But lap after lap in Forza 7 something new always caught my eye.

September 2017

The Xbox One X (left) alongside its little brother the Xbox One S

Xbox One X: The futuristic console with an eye on the past

ALBERT PENELLO doesn’t want to sell you a console. He wants to sell you a philosophy.

August 2017

Piecing together the path of past lives

A game that's all story and no action - that's a movie, right? But Tacoma shucks off the narrative constraints of a linear film script to provide an experience only the gaming medium can deliver.

June 2017

Mike Nichols, Xbox chief marketing officer with the new Xbox One X at E3

E3: Xbox touts a torrent of games

EXCLUSIVE, exclusive, exclusive! The booming word rang out dramatically around the Galen Center in downtown Los Angeles 22 times last Sunday as Microsoft unleashed its slate of forthcoming Xbox games at its E3 press conference.

Retro stories of an accidental killer

You are an accidental assassin. No surprises there. Many games make a killer of you - too many, if we're being honest. But Tokyo 42 manages to be different with its decidedly retro aesthetic pinned to a nostalgic fusion of genres.

March 2017

Games: Say Halo to a new bird's-eye view of war

Eight years after the original's modest success, Microsoft expands the Halo universe again with another slice of real-time strategy, a genre almost unknown on consoles. Developed by RTS specialist Creative Assembly (of Total War fame), HW2 introduces Atriox, a charismatic but chilling new villain intent on a reign of terror in the humans-vs-aliens saga.

December 2016

Games: Comedy horror rises from grave

George A Romero's zombie apocalypse flick Dawn of the Dead supplied the original Dead Rising with its arch commentary on consumerism. Now, 10 years on, DR4 embraces the full silliness of hordes of undead roaming a shopping mall and brings back series favourite Frank West to investigate the outbreak.

October 2016

Games: Different engine, same Gears

A decade almost to the day has elapsed since the original Gears of War exploded like a grenade on Xbox 360. Three sequels later and it's as if the intervening 10 years almost never happened.

Forza Horizon 3: The Lamborghini on the beach is typical of the game's combination of flash motors and great locations

Games: A Forza to be reckoned with

A racer needs great locations as much as it demands fantastic cars. FH3 hosts both, a deliriously happy confection of motorsport with a series of events on Australia's sunny east coast.

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