oopsiezz

$30 gamepass will be back in no time at this rate with the $23-$25 tier sporting ads and $30 gets you ad free gamepass.

I love watching ads in order to play games I bought & already own. What a fantastic idea. /S

Halo on Playstation, never thought I would see the day. Absolutely mind boggling business strategy to take your flagship series and port it to a competing console platform, and then have nothing in return.

Absolutely unacceptable. Do better Halo Studios and Microsoft. I used to be comfortable buying the upgrade paths offered through gamepass but after Outer Worlds 2, I'm done giving Microsoft money for any type of early access it's just problem after problem and they even had the gull to attempt to charge you $80 for Forza Horizon 6's premium upgrade. No thank you, I can wait a few days.

Unfortunately Xbox only has a 1gbps ethernet port so it will never take advantage of my 3GB download speeds.

Absolutely hideous skins. 343 / Halo Studio have no idea what they are doing, probably using AI to make these honestly. The premium edition skins are digitized vomit.

I'll be very curious to see if Xbox can keep this momentum going after the price hike goes into effect in August.

Hell yeah! Can't wait to hop on shift at midnight tonight with a couple friends. Looks like a lot of fun trying to identify the doppelganger shoppers while trying to keep your store running.

Been waiting for Shift at Midnight. Me and a couple friends were ready for it's release last month before it was delayed last minute. I was tempted by the sale on Hell is Us as well but never pulled the trigger, glad I waited as now I can play it while waiting for Halo.

Just more proof that Sony is just following the buying trends of consumers.

I seen a report the other day that only 7 PS5 games games have managed to sell over 100k physical copies in 2026.

The vocal minority don't want to hear or see this though, they've got their fingers in their ears and their eyes closed. Sooner or later the reality wil set in that they really don't matter.

@Mr-Cage Call of Duty has campaigns that can be played offline also, doesn't mean it's not a live service game.

There seems to be an up tick in the occurrence of these "hacks" it seems. I have never had an account on any service or website get hacked. Makes me wonder what these people are doing to fall victim to it. I used to get a ton of suspicious unsuccessful sign-in attempts on my Microsoft account until I changed the email associated with it to one I created solely for my Microsoft account and it stopped fully.

The day gamepass is discontinued, or day one games are no longer available, is the day I unsubscribe after being a subscriber since day one and very likely means the end of owning an Xbox altogether for me.

Finishing up Final Fantasy VII Rebirth then moving on to Kvark. Seen it in the store on sale for like $5 and thought it looked fun. Supposed to be reminiscent of Half Life, or at least a Half Life like game.

The bigger question is; will they release day one on gamepass? I'm not so sure anymore.

Absolute steal of a deal for two of the best Final Fantasy games in the entire series. Final Fantasy 7 was a big part of my childhood, I played the original so much that I discovered the in-game timer stopped at 99:59:59. Discovered all there was to discover and killed every optional boss except that damned Ruby Weapon.

Safe to say FFVII on ps1 was my favorite game and was my favorite Final Fantasy until the Remake dropped. They did such an excellent job on Remake, I was hooked once again into the gripping story, the characters recieved new life being fully voiced and the environments from the original brought to life as well and fully realized and are a real treat to explore for fans of the original. I would still highly recommend these games to people who haven't played the original as well.

Rebirth takes everything good about Remake and takes it up a couple notchs in basically every way. The characters are fantastic and rememberable & fun. The voice actors really shine in Rebirth. Without spoiling too much, Rebirth does at times give the back-story to these characters. Where they came from, what they were doing before any of the events that transpire that led them to where they are now etc stuff like that. The gameplay itself is a big step up from Remake, it feels great and is expanded upon over Remake. There's a ton of optional content to do, or you can just go A to B for the story if you want but if you choose to do the side stuff there's so much of it and so many mini games to discover it's a blast to play. Rather than being a linear game like Remake, Rebirth features a gigantic world divided into different regions and you are free to either fast travel back, or you can walk all the way back to the area you start the game in, they are all connected and with no loading screens between giving the game a grand scale feel of being open world, but not so daunting or overwhelming because it's broken up into several large regions. I am nearing the end of Rebirth now, currently in chapter 12/14 after well over 120 hours while Remake took me around 35-40 hours to beat doing all the side stuff I could.

@HelloCraigo No worries there. My friends and me bought that John Carpenter's toxic commando game and enjoyed it despite being pretty rough. We got a pretty high tolerance for jank, if it's fun.

I have a feeling the only reason Xbox responded or even bothered was due to the massive attention he brought to the situation being in the position he is with a sizable following that could spread the word. That, or the recent Brazil ruling has Microsoft rethinking how they handle these situations and don't want a repeat of it.

This game was flying completely under my radar, never heard of it before. Been looking for a new co-op game to play with friends and this looks like it could be good fun.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 is no longer coming to gamepass next week. Hoping we will get a replacement game, otherwise there truly isn't anything on gamepass that I overly want to play until Halo this month.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 is no longer coming to gamepass. The article has been updated.

Another baffling decision. What was even the point of buying Activision if Xbox wasn't going to put the games on gamepass? Three years later and we get like 1 or 2 Activision games from the backlog a year if we are lucky.

Some nice cars in the pack but I'm gonna wait for 50% off on the premium upgrade before I buy anything.

Anyone else get VIP and random DLC cars for free? I have had VIP for almost 2 weeks now and I never paid for it. 😅 as well as have a couple cars from the car pass that randomly appeared in my garage.

I voted for this. It's absolutely ridiculous how many people have been let go from Microsoft since the Activision Blizzard aquisition. There is basically no other company in this industry that has had this many layoffs (16,000 and counting.) Not even their biggest competition in Sony, who have only laid off around 1,200 employees in the same time frame. Enough is enough it's time for the leadership to take the blow, pay cuts and no bonuses until the ship is upright again.

It's not hard to predict that the PS6 will outsell Helix. Every Playstation has outsold Xbox, even the PS3 outsold the 360.

This has got to be bitter sweet for the developers. On one hand they made a DLC that's recieving a ton of praise, and on the other they were rewarded for all their hard work by being laid off. This industry is ridiculous sometimes.

I'm still excited to play it on the 28th but I gotta admit the recent reporting by Rebs Gaming about Pierre Hintze, the head of Halo Studios, has me concerned. Reports of abuse, harrasment, mismanagement, and just being a downright cruel & unlikable individual creating a hostile work environment. It's time for Microsoft to step in and begin an investigation, and if these claims are true, it's time for Pierre and those that supported him and allowed this to go on to get the boot.

Mixtape is an abomination of a "game" and doesn't deserve to be on this list.

"No disc, No buy"

That sure didn't last long. Haha

Now you can have nice looking skins while the theater mode cheaters fly around the map killing you while they have god mode. Thanks Microsoft, we definitely needed skins and not the removal of mod menus from infected clips in theater mode.

Man, Xbox really didn't want to do the right thing here, did they? Made him file a lawsuit to get back what was already his. This sets a precedent in Brazil and I hope more players affected by similar situations file their own lawsuits to get what they are owed back.

Might give Quarantine Zone a try but it doesn't look like there is much depth there, probably the type of game you play in short bursts or you'll get bored of it quick.

The rest of this week's lineup doesn't look terribly interesting to me.

Gotta love how all the third party controllers actually address the issue of stick drift while the official Xbox controllers are plagued by stick drift. I have gone through three or four official Xbox controllers since the launch of the Series X due to stick drift until finally getting a gamesir controller with hall effect thumbsticks. Two years later, not a single issue with it.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. This game has taken me much longer to beat than part 1 did.

@NeoRatt Time will tell I guess. I just simply can't look at people who have been there for many years, made several great games, and worked their way up to the positions they were in as redundancies.

Hoping there is something announced in the first lineup in August that looks more interesting than what we see here. Nothing really stands out to me as something I need or want to play. I'll be finished Halo in like a day or two after it releases so will be ready for a new game to play.

@NeoRatt The issue i have with them saying the team is about the same size as it was in 2016, is all the senior positions and veteran developers that were let go to reach that number. I truly don't / can't believe this team is truly on the same level without these people involved that were let go. Like yeah, you have the same head count, but do you have to same minds and talent?

I would love to be proven wrong though and ID comes out swinging with a badass Quake game or maybe even Rage 3 (I know 2 wasn't great but there's always a chance of redeeming the franchise).

@Jenkinss You're not alone. I mean PureXbox just held a poll recently about this and it showed most people own 360 discs, and not many Xbox One or later.

Pretty funny seeing some people looking at this sale of DIGITAL games and going "hmm yeah that's very tempting" after lambasting the digital future. Lol

There's a few games on sale that I have had my eye on but gonna wait for the full sale to hit the store before buying anything.

It's not just the layoffs that concern me, it's that the games ID tried to pitch to Xbox before they got laid off were rejected also. Perfect Dark, Ironwood, Fury and several DOOM related projects. Without a project to work on, the only logical scenario is they will be supporting another studio until they can get something greenlit.

I have heard WuWa is 115GB but shows 250GB is reserved on your console after you first boot it up? What the hell?

If they haven't gotten it to work with xb360 discs this isn't going to be as useful of a feature as it could be. No half measures Microsoft, go the whole way with this.

@Fiendish-Beaver Looking back at all of the layoffs since Microsoft acquired Activision is rough. Over 6000 employees from their gaming division have been laid off with an additional 1600 to come bringing the total up to at minimum, 7600 positions gone.

Lina Kahn's concerns were valid afterall.

Well deserved and with the PS5 port just around the corner the revenue isn't going to slow down.

Xbox should have fuly committed to these and made a proper remaster so that there would also be a proper Xbox port of them. It's asinine that Playstation gets a much better, hacker free, multiplayer experience in these games than players that own the damn console of the company that OWNS this series.

Get rid of theater mode infections on Xbox Microsoft. Damn near every game has little timmy in it using a mod menu to fly around the map, shoot infinite rockets and ending games within minutes to seconds to spoil the fun.

So both can be true.

ID was gutted, but "dozens" of employees remain. ID had 270 employees including programmers, artists, designers, audio staff, QA and support—not just software developers. That leaves 135 employees after layoffs spread accross all of these positions leaving a couple dozen actual developers.

Lets not forget all of ID's pitched ideas were rejected as well. Fury, Perfect Dark, Ironwood and DOOM related projects including a co-op game. Without a project, ID has been reduced to a support studio.

@Noone2025 And some people are trying to act like nothing is changed. One is full of hackers and cheaters, the other isn't. Expect better from the company that OWNS this series.

Xbox couldn't even bother to give us an update to these games, let alone a port, to disable theater mode to reduce the amount of cheaters. Nope let's just let theater mode infections run rampant while Playstation gets a better multiplayer experience.

@FraserG Not surprising. The biggest selling point of these is no more hackers. With the removal of theater mode, and seperate matchmaking from PS3, nobody will have god mode or any of the other cheats / hacks.

It's pretty funny to see some people trying to downplay the significance of removing theater mode from the PS4/PS5 versions. I booted up the backwards compatible Black Ops 1 today after getting the urge seeing these ports shadow drop and match after match there was multiple players walking / running through walls, ending the match less than a minute in and firing rockets off without needing to reload. Just an absolute mess and this is what Microsoft deems acceptable for us Xbox players.

@SMJ three words: theater mode infections.

You don't need a modded console to get a mod menu in multiplayer in these games it's as simple as watching an infected clip in theater and now you can toggle on god mode, unlimited ammo, no clip etc etc. These new ports have theater mode removed. No more mod menus, no more hacks.

@Dampsponge I get that, but these games pre-date a lot of what people don't like about modern Call of Duty games. Black ops 2 introduced "personalization packs" that did feature weapon camos, calling cards and sight reticle but no character skins so no Nicki Minaj's running around or Snoop Dogg etc. These packs are included in this new bundle.

@Dampsponge Oh silly me for thinking you were talking about the main reason these games are so popular. My bad.