Games:

Alan Wake: Collector’s Edition

BIT.Trip Runner (S)

Bioshock

Dota 2 (S)

Grid

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Vouchers:

25% off Dungeon Hearts (S)

75% off Total War Shogun 2 (S)

Beta Access:

Steam Community Beta Access (S) – (I don’t really know what this is)

Steam Trading Card Beta Access (S)

(Disclaimer: Some of the stuff is only transferable by Steam, signaled by (S) after the item, so if I don’t have you on there please don’t apply for that stuff)

I think that’s everything. Remember to follow and tweet me @matt_porter44 for a chance to win.

Good luck.

Thanks for reading.

Xbox One.

It’s not a bad name, certainly better than “Infinity” anyway. After the name reveal, we had a short montage revealing what the hardware looks like, including the controller and the new Kinect camera. It’s a large looking box, but from the sounds of things they want it taking up most of your living room anyway. The controller also looks on the chunky side, but it’s hard to gauge all this stuff without seeing some comparison shots.

Next came some cool demos showing you what the new Kinect can do. Saying “Xbox, on” will now turn on your console, and it will go to a home page showing you what you were last doing, whether that be playing a game, watching a movie, or listening to music. This was the start of a big focus on television for the presentation. You will now be able to watch live TV without having to switch inputs on your box. A new feature called “live switching” swiftly changes between applications on your console. A quick demo showed how voice commands can be used to seamlessly transition between watching tv, films, playing games or listening to music. It looked very impressive.

The Kinect also seems to have been improved, with what looked like better finger tracking. This was used to grab and drag things around the screen. For example you can hold your hands up and pinch to grab a movie and shove it onto the home page until you’re ready to watch it again. This is also linked to “snap mode”, which allows multiple applications to be running on screen at one time, much like on smartphones and tablets. We saw footage from a football game, popping up with real time Fantasy Team stats.

Specs were the next order of business. Eight cores, 8GB Ram, 500GB hard drive, so on and so forth. The specs looked very much as expected – no surprises here. An odd announcement was the inclusion of three operating systems. One that had access to the base level hardware, for use by developers and such, one acting as a Windows kernel, and another to link efficiently between the two. The Kinect is 1080i, and we saw some nice looking models showing off the new pivot points it’ll feature. It also seems as though it will be able to recognise individual controllers as you pick them up, which could have some cool implications.

Sports sports sports. We had Andrew Wilson from EA come out and announce its new partnership with Microsoft. Then came a trailer to announce the new game engine – Ignite – featuring huge names from the world of sport like Robert Griffin III and Lionel Messi. From the sounds of things, Ultimate Team in FIFA 14 will be exclusive to Xbox One. It will be odd to see Sony left out in the cold on such a big deal though, so I’m interested in further developments on that front.

Phil Spencer came out next, and showed us a trailer for Forza Motorsport 5, which will be a launch game. You can make cars look really good on new hardware, so this trailer was a no brainer. Next came a game no one was anticipating: Quantum Break from Remedy. It had a partly live action trailer, and a huge ship crashing through a bridge. It seemed like it had some Bioshock Infinite-y tear type stuff going on there, but the trailer was vague at best. Spencer told us that there would be at least fifteen Xbox One exclusives within the first year of release, with eight brand new franchises.

Next, an interesting partnership involving a live action Halo tv series with Steven Spielberg at the helm. Then, a partnership with the NFL was announced, further tying in with the tv and sport stuff announced earlier. After all that, we had a short recap of what we had seen so far, but of course everyone knew there was one more thing to come, and everyone already knew that it was Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is more exciting than other games in the franchise that have been released in recent years because Oscar winning writer Stephen Gaghan is penning the story. They’re making a big deal about it, which is promising given the flak the series gets for not having any semblance of interesting plot. Regardless, there are still lots of explosions, plenty of dudes get shot, and you now have a dog companion, which I hope can’t die or I’m not buying the game.

Then we were treated to a big countdown timer telling us how long it was until Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which I expect will be far more focused on games than this one.

In terms of reveal events, the PS4 one was certainly more interesting, but with E3 so close, you can’t blame Microsoft for saving most of the game reveals for that huge show. It’s an exciting time to be involved with games.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.

Well, other than my daily dose of League of Legends, I have been playing various NES and SNES games using the online emulator over at VirtualSuperNES.com. Looking back through gaming history has been a pretty cool experience, especially as I’ve never actually played a lot of these games before, having never owned the consoles. (The first console I ever owned was a PlayStation, prior to that I was all about PC gaming.)

I’ve been playing some Super Mario World, Mega Man and Tecmo Bowl among others, and it got me thinking about the late 80s and early 90s in gaming. I was born on Wednesday, February 13th 1991. The next day, DMA Design would release a puzzle platformer for the Amiga called Lemmings. Sadly I couldn’t find anything released on my actual birthday, but having such a well received game coming out the day after you’re born is pretty cool, right? I decided to check out what other games were released in 1991, and I was surprised. It turns out the year I was born could be one of the most critical in gaming’s history. Not only was the SNES released, but some fantastic games were too. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

Do you like turn based strategy games? If so you’ve probably played one of Sid Meier’s Civilization games. In late 1991, the first ever Civilization was released, and would shape the genre for years to come. What if you’re more of a fantasy multiplayer kind of person? Have you ever played an MMORPG? The first ever graphical mmo was Neverwinter Nights, it was released in 1991 and ran for six years.

Maybe you like single player role playing games though. Can I assume you’ve heard of a series called Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy IV was released on July 19th 1991, to great praise. It pioneered many ways in which the RPG on the console is known today, as well as having a plot considered to be above and beyond what was expected of games at the time. Perhaps you like Nintendo RPGs a bit more though. How about a bit of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, released on 21st November 1991? Widely considered as one of the greatest games of all time, it has sold millions of copies worldwide, and paved the way for the franchise to become massive.

Fighting game fan? Street Fighter II came out in arcades in March 1991. This game is credited for the start of the huge boom in fighting games throughout the 90s, and as such is one of the most important games of the genre. Sports fans weren’t disappointed this year either, as Tecmo Super Bowl was released in December. It was the first game to feature real life players and their attributes, and was praised for its gameplay. It is still regarded as one of the best games in the genre.

If you’re looking for era defining characters though, look no further than Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. The first installment in the Sonic franchise was released on June 23rd 1991, and its success has led to the development of countless subsequent titles. But how can we leave 1991 behind without mentioning Super Mario World? This is a game that perhaps needs nothing more said about it, but I will do so anyway. Released on November 21st (yes, the same day as Zelda), it has appeared on pretty much every “Best Game of All Time” list, and achieved an average score of 95.62% on GameRankings. If you haven’t played it, you probably should.

Plenty of other great games came out in 1991. If you’re interested, you should go back and see what games were released when you were born, you might be as surprised as me. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.

Mark Hamill 

Hamill is most well known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy, but since then he hasn’t been taking it easy. His IMDB page is unbelievable, but it’s the games we’re focusing on. As early as 1994 he had a role in Wing Commander III, but the highlight of his game voice acting career has to be his wonderful portrayal as The Joker across multiple Batman games. 

Troy Baker 

This guy is quickly becoming one of the most sought after voice actors in the business. He’s been acting for games for about ten years now, but most recently you will have heard him voicing Booker DeWitt in Bioshock Infinite. He has also featured in games like Prototype and Resistance 2, as well as providing additional voices for the Halo and Call of Duty series, and he took the leading role in Red Faction Guerrilla as Alec Mason. Baker voiced Tim Drake, Robin and Harvey Dent in Batman: Arkham City, and he is also one of the player voices in Saints Row The Third. 

Jennifer Hale

Hale has been a part of a scary number of video games since the mid 90s, so it is likely that you will have heard her voice somewhere before. Major sci fi roles seem to be her forte, as you’ll find her as Bastila Shan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Repulic, Trinity in The Matrix: Path of Neo, Samus in multiple Metroid Prime games, and of course, female Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect trilogy. Recently she voiced Rosalind Lutece in Bioshock Infinite, one half of my two favorite characters in the game. She has also been a part of over one hundred other games over the years, and is continuing strong. 

Nolan North 

Widely regarded as the king of video game voice acting, Nolan North has voiced some of the most recognizable characters in games since the turn of the century. If you’ve ever heard a group of people talking in the background in a game, chances are one of them (if not all of them) are Nolan North. He is Desmond in Assassin’s Creed, Nathan Drake in Uncharted, a whole host of characters in Dragon Age, Batman and Dota 2, the cores in Portal and the list goes ever on. 

Claudia Black

Black found fame playing Aeryn in the TV series Farscape, but her voice is quite well known across video games. She was Artemis in God of War, had small roles in Conan and Crysis, played Chloe in Uncharted, and had several acting credits in the Mass Effect franchise. Most people will recognize her as Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origins however. Her distinctive Australian accent is heard across a few other games too.

John DiMaggio

Everyone knows John DiMaggio as Bender from Futurama, but he has also been acting for video games since the early 2000s. He has had minor roles in plenty of games, but most notably he is Marcus Fenix in the fan favorite Gears of War franchise. He has been in a whole bunch of cartoon and super hero tie-ins, and he will be voicing Wolverine in the upcoming Deadpool game.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.

This week three new character trailers for Grand Theft Auto V were released. It seems like at the start of every year there’s a general sense of “oh man, there’s nothing good coming out this year”. But then every year a huge amount of AAA titles impress, and that’s not to mention the seemingly never ending stream of superb indie games that have been coming out over the past few years. Sometimes publishers and developers save their games for the next generation, leaving the year leading up to new hardware releases a bit stale. Not this year however. This year we’ve already had a pleasantly surprising Devil May Cry rework, a pleasantly surprising Tomb Raider rework, and Bioshock Infinite was fantastic. GTA V is coming out in September, there’s also a new Saints Row game, and Watch Dogs is coming out on current generation hardware, as well as the new stuff. Beyond: Two Souls is dropping in October, and The Last of Us will be out as soon as June. I’m gonna have to power up my PlayStation for the first time in a few months… There’s a bunch of other stuff I haven’t talked about too.

As for the indie guys, it just gets better and better. I played Cart Life a few months ago and loved it, and was ecstatic to see that it won the Grand Prize at the Independent Game Festival this year. You choose from a couple of characters, and it is your aim to set up a sales cart, for coffee, or newspapers, or fruit, or whatever. However you must also keep yourself fed, and make sure that you sleep at reasonable times, and take care of problems that crop up throughout the game. The “life” is a lot more relevant than the “cart” in the title. I also really liked the first act of Kentucky Route Zero, which won the Excellence in Visual Arts award at IGF, and am very much looking forward to the second act which will be released later this month. It’s a gorgeous story driven adventure game that I urge you to take a look at. A couple of weeks ago I played through the beta of Papers, Please, and am now clamoring for more. You are a border crossing officer, checking the credentials of people who want to enter your fictional eastern European country at the height of a terrorism threat. Moral decisions crop up during the game, and the actual mechanics of checking the IDs of people are a lot more fun than it sounds. Previous IGF award winner Monaco was released last week, and I’ll be writing up a review of that over the next few days.

On the eSports front, things are better than ever also. StarCraft is on the rise once again thanks to the release of Heart of the Swarm, and of course the titanic MOBAs, Dota 2 and League of Legends, remain ever popular. Coverage of LoL is becoming more and more professional, and the pro circuit is super easy to follow now, with regularly scheduled matches. The League of Legends Championship series features matches from the best teams in Europe and North America on four days out of every week, and last week saw Team Solomid win the NA spring split, and Fnatic win the European equivalent. This weekend the promotion series is happening, allowing amateur teams to get their big break and potentially compete in the summer split later this year. Later this month its the all-star weekend, where teams from NA, EU and Asia made up of players voted for by the fans will duke it out to see which region is the strongest.

It’s been a great year already, and it’s only May. This time next year we’ll have new console hardware, and most of the games that people have been looking forward to will be out. From there we’ll be looking forward to the ways in which developers can get the most out of the new tools they have been given, and the whole cycle will begin again. Isn’t this industry wonderful?