Jenkinss

Very pumped for Speed Freeks!

All I need is the Halo 3 cutscenes remade by Blur Studios. Anything else is gravy.

Laughing my ass off at Bluesky. These news worthy tweets or whatever they are called with 2 likes. Peoples comments on Purexbox get more views.

@Sindayl Oh that's good to know, I still have the disc. I wonder what goes on in the decision making to delist a game that has seemingly no licensed content like cars, music, or the IP itself.

My wishlist has seemingly dodged almost all the deals this week.

and unfortunately, the two people who forced that decision on Sharma'sv predecessor are very much still there. That year of Phil doing interviews hyping up exclusives while Satya was doing interviews saying he doesn't like exclusives was really something else.

The Last Remnant
Enchanted Arms

Really need to find time to try Against the Storm

I played it after the patch as I played Expedition 33 first. I played it long enough to get all the achievements, again. I had 1 crash and 1 major quest bug. The big was from the original game and 20 year old forum posts got me through it. Performance was excellent, as always if there were minor frame drops the series X vrr erases them.

Overall it's one of my favorite remasters.

I don't know of HOMM will be a return to form of the 3D0 days or another dud like all the Ubisoft games, but I will definitely be playing it either way for the Paul Romero score.

This was the one game that MS canned that I really wanted to see.

Hire decent writers. Bring the Spirit of Fire into the main series.

@BustedUpBiker for Xbox, it is dudebros.

I'm a big fan of eurojank games and we've taken some big hits lately between Spiders and Pirranha Bytes. Even though they announced Two Worlds 3 I'm pretty sure Reality Pump is gone too.

I may be boorish but I'm consistent: the idea that anyone is positive that MS is even making another console right now is laughable to me. Obviously we have to wait and see but everything I've seen leads me to believe that Helix is a PC and Xbox is indeed dead as anything but an emulator.

And I've said repeatedly I'm not really interested in the clown argument that "DirectX Box really means video game publisher and not a console." When there's no more console, Xbox is dead. If they keep selling Xbox gear, console are gone but you can still buy an Xbox lunch box, you guys can pretend Xbox is still alive.

Reducing how much gamepass has been hiked since 2023 from 100% down to just over 50% is good-ish, but I don't see it as a direction shift as much as they were bleeding customers so fast they had no choice but to do something or shutter the thing.

I'll say it over and over, there's 1 thing that shows they have interest in continuing (or at this point - reviving?) Xbox, and that's exclusives. Everything else just looks like milking the few people like me still hanging on for some reason.

The sole reason they spent 70 billion was mobile. Full stop. Candy Crush, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal, etc. If you're hung up on CoD then consider this: CoD on Xbox has less users than it does on playstation. CoD on Xbox + Playstation combined are less than CoD on PC. CoD users on Xbox, Playstation, and PC combined are less than CoD users on mobile. There are over 6 times more CoD mobile users than CoD Xbox users. MS was quick to promise in court they wouldn't make CoD exclusive, or even have exclusive content, because they didn't give a sh*t about Xbox. It was all about mobile and their plans to open a mobile store competing with Google and Apple.

Only my most beloved games get a replay, remaster or not. Certainly not Ubislop, lol.

If they are going the exclusive route again and their mobile dreams are scrapped, the Xbox division needs to separate from all studios that are multiplatform like ABK Mojang and Bethesda assuming they are unwilling to divest them completely. "Some of our games are exclusive" is not a strategy that will work.

Last gen I really wanted to see Xbox buy Sega. I thought they could launch the Series consoles in Japan with Sega branding and it would have had a puncher's chance at finding a market.

Forza Horizon 6

@Master_Cthulhu70 it's coming, it was at this show. It's just not announced to be on game pass. Let's hope that changes. And totally agree it's the best party game, just gotta make you turn on collisions - or as we call it, ball touching 😂

Oh and the confirmed crossplay, Hallelujah!

@SmokeEmAll what is detrimental to you personally is not detrimental to gaming. Having a strong competitor for Sony far outweighs smokeemall not getting every single game he wants on one platform.

Same with all the other stories. This does nothing. Xbox had the best hardware at the best price this gen. It fell behind due to a lack of exclusives. It fell off a cliff when it abandoned exclusives.

One thing matters. Exclusives. That's it.

Pay the price, bring back exclusives and go hard, or don't bother. And that needs to include a lot more than Halo Gears and Forza.

@Gabrie one way or the other, this will likely be the last time.

@Coletrain For many years in MMORPGs going back to the 90s we used rogerwilco, teamspeak, mumble, etc for voice comms. Then separately there would be something like a forum for communicating raid times, events, posting memes, etc.

Discord replaced all that. Voice coms + text channels. It's pretty great. For a few years now it also fully integrates with Xbox, you can join a Discord voice channel on your Xbox the same way you'd join an Xbox party. If you play video games with friends via crossplay, it's nothing less than a godsend.

Just a reminder that Game Pass is still 53% more expensive from what it was only a few years ago in June 2023. I don't see this framed properly enough. A trillion dollar corporation doubling the price from $15 to $30, wait a few minutes, then reduce it to $23 - so much of the narrative is that the cost is "down." I don't know if that's organic or astroturfed. Game Pass is still massively more expensive, just less so. 53% more expensive instead of 100% more expensive.

Bless Asha for... hiking the price... less.

@Questionable_Duck I don't think it backfired for Nintendo, families are their market and they've stayed the course. Their only hiccup was releasing one badly conceived piece of hardware which they quickly buried and moved on. Xbox is the only one who abandoned their entire core fanbase and seemingly will never recover from it.

@Questionable_Duck To me marketing wise they picked up the ball that Sega dropped and they did it perfectly. Peter Moore's tenure continued the trend. Mattrick's Xbox became the corporate follower targeting families, he wanted to be Nintendo. Spencer pivoted to targeting diversity (groan).

Xbox abandoned its identity and core customers and got absolutely nothing in return. This isn't just captain hindsight talking, it's personal for me as I am (was) their core customer, a dudebro. I never saw Nintendo or Sony encroach on their edgy marketing space so I disagree that everyone was doing it. Xbox had their space (carved out by Sega) and they blew it, like they blew everything else in the Mattrick era.

Let me disagree with some media
I will never agree that this was a good idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9l4z0rgvRQ

Because "everyone else was doing this:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELPRVu0GxYo

Like... no. You'll never convince me that's the reality of what happened. They just became corporate clowns

@FraserG I just think of them as the console startup animations. I am assuming this new one will be Helix and that green one was during the One era. Fwiw that green one was by far my least favorite.

Aww man, no Golf With Your Friends 2

On your side by side, isn't the green one from last gen, and the current one is the white logo on black background?

@FatGuyInLilCoat Phil did not think Sony or Nintendo were going to put their games on Xbox. The very idea of that is beyond hilarious.

Not seeing a bullet point about firing the incompetent Aaron Greenberg and bringing back edgy marketing from the peak of the brand.

@FatGuyInLilCoat disagree completely and you can find comments from me years ago saying what happened to Phil would happen. Before the 4 games announcement he was a lame duck. He was kept on board as the fall guy while all the bad news kept coming. Literally said it would happen, and it's exactly what happened. Satya and Amy's dogsh** decisions like buying Activision and going multi platform laid on his shoulders and people would just go with it. Years later here we are.

GOLF WITH YOUR FRIENDS 2 YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

@Evilinsane is this satire, lmao.

I'm paid up until July and then have another year from Phil himself so I admittedly haven't looked closely at prices in a while. But for some reason I thought when Ultimate went to $30, premium was introduced at $20. It's kinda welcome "news" to me that I was misremembering and that premium is only $15. I think that's an ok price - the original price of ultimate.

@GeminiX53

It's the exact thing you asked for. I quoted it. Move goalposts wherever you want, I'll be right here where we started still having a laugh my man.

It's the exact thing you asked for.

Now make up some new argument.

Almost none. ABK was bought for its mobile stable, and MS attempting to open their own mobile storefront to compete with Google and Apple. All momentum on this has seemingly stalled after their lawsuits and from what I can tell no one seems to be talking about it. More people play CoD on mobile than on PC, PS, and Xbox combined. Candy Crush, Hearthstone, Diablo Immortal, etc. CoD on game pass is an afterthought in that $69B purchase. Xbox in general is an afterthought. We know from the FTC trial Phil did not target ABK, Amy Hood did to redirect the gaming division to mobile which she sees as valuable and a growth space vs consoles which she does not.

This is genius! Remove the day one AAA titles... reduce the price... maybe even give it its own tier name - something like "Xbox Game Pass Premium?" I think you're really on to something here! Microsoft, hire this man!

I know you've been arguing about "first party," but I think the more interesting conversation is about the word console. If this thing runs multiple storefronts and/or has OEMs making them, it's a PC imo.

I didn't expect this but it's extremely welcome. I haven't played a Call of Duty game since the first one on Xbox 360 - even after they became available for free to me as part of game pass.

Mt Rushmore of game devs no matter what internet commenters spew

This should be packaged in a fanny pack.

Sorry UK people I know that means something else there.

The only ex playstation exec I would want to hear from is Kevin Butler.

Everything exclusive is the only path where Xbox survives. Anyhing else and Microsoft just becomes a publisher and possibly keeps the Xbox name around as a cruel joke.

I don't understand how anything she implies she is tackling here isn't already solved for next gen, where it was planned years before her arrival to scrap Xbox and just have Helix pay PC games.

An I misreading this?

@Balaam_ whatever controller you are using has cheap toy battery life compared to my Xbox controller with Eneloop Pros.

Never got around to Revenge of the Savage Planet. I enjoyed the first one, wish I had the time to play the sequel, would have been fun co-op with my wife.

I got one of these years ago but haven't seen one since.