The XBOX One

Uh, oops.

It might be awesome tech, but it damn near killed the XB1 in its infancy. “I know people are tired of the first-gen Kinects gathering dust out there and nobody has managed to create compelling gameplay with it, but hear me out – what if we made it MANDATORY?”

From adding $100 to the price tag, to requiring a dedicated fraction of the system’s already-weaker processing resources, all the way to being a 24/7 living room monitoring device right at the time the public was not feeling happy about being surveilled. Corporate euthanasia was the only real option for something the gaming public rejected that hard.

thx mr. mattrick

I’m one of the maybe few who really enjoys his Kinect on the One and will be sad to see support disappear.

It logs us in when we enter the room, lets us drive the Xbox and apps mostly through voice commands and we’ve used it on occasion for Skype. That and my youngest has had a lot of fun with Kinect games (and so have my wife and I with the Harmonix dance games for that matter).

But yeah, games have mostly disappeared. It’s mostly the user recognition and voice driven interface I’ll miss.

My echo dot recognizes my voice and accepts voice commands. You don’t need a $100+ device to do that, just a little microphone. Microsoft’s Cortana is the same deal.

Obviously you lose motion controls, but gosh, I guess it turns out those were a gimmick! Nobody coulda guessed!

Yes, pushing a $150 peripheral that was most useful for a feature that could be accomplished with a $4 room mic (not to mention the included headset) was absolute folly. When they originally unbundled the Kinect they should have kept packing in a mic for voice commands.

Played Sid Meier’s Pirates! last night, forgot how much fun that is. Totally ahead of its time too, the way it’s got the larger game that’s really just a bundle of lots of mini games - probably would make a great phone game, if it isn’t already. I also totally forgot how to play this game, sailed around getting in fights and dancing mostly.

And hey, looks like we’ve got our Games with Gold for November!

On Xbox One, we have Trackmania Turbo for the entire month, and Tales from the Borderlands from Nov 16 to Dec 15. On 360 and back compat, we’ll have Nights into dreams for the first half of November and Deadfall Adventures for the back half.

One more thing: some folks are reporting on reddit that OG Xbox multiplayer is possible through Xlink Kai. No idea about this myself.

That spoofs a LAN doesn’t it? Makes sense, given that MS say LAN multiplayer works.

Hey nice. I always wanted to try a Trackmania game.

I thought we already had Tales from the Borderlands? Maybe it was on PS+. I get confused between the two all the time now.

I haven’t heard of the other two, which is pretty rare for 360 games.

I don’t believe Tales from the Borderlands is a repeat because I bought it a little while back (great game too). Can’t speak for PS Plus.

Nights Into Dreams is actually an HD port of the Sega Saturn platformer (is it a platformer? I think you fly as opposed to jump everywhere).

Borderlands was PS+ around 6 months ago. The first episode is free on Xbox though, so it might already be in your library.

Looking forward to Trackmania Turbo. The older games were sometimes ridiculous fun. Deadfall Adventures might be interesting. I didn’t like the first half hour I played in a free trial, but it seemed like it would’ve gotten better.

I had no idea how to play Nights when I tried it on PS Now. That game is weird.

Another free weekend, XCOM 2.

Download is only 21gb.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Halo Wars Definitive Edition
Resident Evil HD
Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty
Van Helsing: Deathtrap
Mega Man 9
Sky Force Anniversary

Metal Gear will only be available until the end of January. Early press mentioned some games will be removed in November, anyone know which are going poof?

Looks like game gifting is available today to insiders. As best I can tell, this is only available at point of sale, not gifting games you already own.

Got to add one more feature coming, maybe nobody cares but me but they’re adding the ability to drop zero achievement games from your list and feed. That one’s been on my wishlist a while since it had been in the 360. I can stop bugging @Editer and @LMN8R now!

https://mobile.twitter.com/XboxQwik/status/832400201524539393

Hah! I was just coming here to PM you about that!

You know what’s on my wishlist? A wishlist.