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'Mortal Kombat X' and the comedy of violence
Mortal Kombat is synonymous with violence -- hell, it's baked into the franchise's name. But despite how increasingly gruesome the series has become with each successive release throughout its 23-year history, it hasn't lost sight of keeping the tone light as a counterbalance. Whether that's a head popping up saying, "Toasty!" in falsetto after a particularly brutal uppercut, or turning an opponent into a crying baby that slips on a puddle of frozen urine at the end of a match, humor is just as intrinsic to the game as its bloodshed. What the series delivers is cartoony, over-the-top violence akin to the B-movie horror of something like Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. Fatalities, Mortal Kombat's signature, end-of-match moves, are shockingly gory, for sure, but somehow developer NetherRealm keeps the game from feeling like torture porn. "We're not out trying to make Saw or a horror film," says NetherRealm Lead Designer John Edwards. "We don't take ourselves too seriously."
Resurrecting 'Guitar Hero' through live rock and robots
Guitar Hero Live is trying to pull off one of the most difficult acts in rock and roll: the return to relevance. Not just a reunion tour feeding off nostalgic fans looking to recapture the good, old days of 2005, but a bona fide resurrection. After a five-year hiatus for the series, FreeStyleGames has taken over. It hopes to bring the rock star simulator back to the prominence that made Guitar Hero 3 the first game to break $1 billion in sales. Its first step: redesigning the iconic guitar, trading its five primary-colored buttons for six black and white keys that mimic actual chord fingerings, but that's not its primary gambit. Chasing the rock star fantasy that the old games sold even further, this fall's Guitar Hero Live places you on a real stage with a real band and audience, all filmed from a first-person perspective.
'Guitar Hero' gets born again with a new look and a new controller
Guitar Hero has no business being relevant in 2015. Ten years is an eternity for video games, especially so for games tied so closely to specific technology like Harmonix's revolutionary PlayStation 2 game was to its inner-rock-star-summoning controller when it came out. A decade on from that original, and five years on from the last release in the series, Guitar Hero is an icon, but it also feels like a relic, a work hopelessly locked in its era. A 10-year anniversary reissue, maybe with some bonus tracks thrown in, seems like the best-case scenario for Guitar Hero coming back to life in 2015, a dignified archive for the nostalgic. FreeStyleGames has done so much more with its new game Guitar Hero Live. The studio has made a game that feels deeply modern, relevant, wholly distinct from Rock Band and somehow still rooted in tradition. It's all thanks to a new controller and a wildly different look for the series' debut on PS4, Xbox One and Wii U.
Xbox 360's latest update makes it an even better media center
For a lot of people, now that the Xbox 360 is in its twilight years it's transforming from a gaming device to more of a media center. It makes sense then that the first update going out to the console's preview program members is support for bigger external hard drives. Just how big? Two terabytes. Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb writes that the system won't reserve space on your drives in advance anymore, either -- if you only need 16GB for games, it'll only use 16GB for games. However! If you already have space dedicated to Xbox 360 storage you'll need to clear that before you can take full advantage of all that new room for game-related content. The functionality hits everyone's consoles sometime later this year. [Image credit: Blakkos/Flickr]
OneDrive link to Xbox Music puts your MP3s in the cloud for free
A few months ago info leaked out that OneDrive was getting ready for music storage, then Microsoft confirmed, and now it's here. Starting today, Xbox Music and OneDrive are connected so any music files (MP3, M4A, or WMA) in your "Music" folder on Microsoft's cloud storage service are immediately playable via the web or Xbox Music apps on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8.1, Xbox 360 and Xbox One -- for free. The initial leak suggested there would be 20GB of storage, but Xbox Music's paying Music Pass subscribers will get an additional 100GB of space.
'Forza' wants to put you in 'Fast & Furious' for free
Most attempts at turning the Fast & Furious movies into video games haven't exactly set the world on fire, but here's one that might be worth playing. Microsoft, Turn 10 and Universal have teamed up for Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious, a slightly awkwardly-titled Horizon 2 expansion that has you scoring cars for the Furious crew's missions. It should have the same open-world racing that you saw in the latest Forza title (generally a good thing!), but with 11-plus cars from the movie franchise, including Dom's killer '70 Dodge Charger R/T above, and Ludacris doling out racing challenges. Don't own Horizon 2? No worries -- the expansion is standalone and doesn't require the base game to play. Whether or not you're a fan of Brian, Dom and company, it won't hurt much to try this out, either. The Fast & Furious add-on will be free on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One between March 27th and April 10th, after which it'll cost you a not-too-outlandish $10.
The Big Picture: Virtual Los Angeles' minimalist skyline
Hello darkness, my old friend. No the image above isn't a minimalist poster for the Jack Nicholson classic Chinatown on Etsy, it's what Grand Theft Auto V's version of Los Angeles looks like when the game's textures are stripped away, leaving just the architecture behind. It's part of a series dubbed los_santos.obj by Kim Laughton, and should you be in the far east, you can check it out at China's Monadigital. As a few of Kotaku's commenters point out, the pieces look just a bit like the indie adventure game Kentucky Route Zero. We're curious, though: What do you think? Monadigital's website was down last we checked, but Laughton's posted more from the series on her Tumblr page in case you're interested in seeing more.
'Lego Jurassic World' game packs four movies' worth of brick dinosaurs
We have no idea how Jurassic World is going to turn out come summer, but we do know that it's getting Lego-fied for Lego Jurassic World. The game follows all three Jurassic Park stories in addition to this June's blockbuster, and it'll be available for basically every platform you can think of. Short on imagination? Well then, here's a list: 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Phew. The dino-centric series has always had a bit of a mixed showing when it came to solid video game adaptations (the Sega Genesis movie tie-in and the Xbox's Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis were great, though), but the folks at Traveller's Tale have a pretty good track record with their Lego games.
Microsoft's Surface tablet business is booming
Microsoft appears to be well past the days when it was writing off unsold Surface tablets and struggling to match Sony in game console sales. The Windows developer reports that its Devices and Consumer group's revenue grew 8 percent year over year in the last calendar quarter of 2014, thanks in no small part to healthy Surface and Xbox sales. It's not revealing shipment numbers for the Surface, but it notes that revenue for the slate computers shot up 24 percent versus a year earlier, thanks in no small part to the Surface Pro 3.
The world's largest video-game collection is up for sale again
Miss your chance at grabbing the largest video game collection that went up for auction earlier this year? Well now's your chance to fix that grave error -- possibly even at a discount. Due to legal reasons, Michael Thomasson can't divulge exactly why the sale fell through, but he's not looking for "anywhere near" the amount ($750,250) that it went for in June, according to an interview with Rawrcade. Thomasson is apparently considering re-listing the 11,000+ game-collection somewhere like Christie's and may even entertain a direct sale to someone that wants to get their own name in the Guinness Book. That's your cue to start emailing, everybody. [Image credit: Techspot]
You can finally watch Microsoft's 'E.T.' documentary on Xbox
What a long, strange trip it's been. Microsoft's effort to document the excavation of all those fabled E.T. The Extraterrestrial game cartridges from a New Mexico landfill -- and Atari's downfall -- is finally watchable on Xbox Video. As Variety reports, you can check out Atari: Game Over on your Xbox One, Xbox 360 or even on the web and see where those carts came from before they hit eBay. Perhaps most notable is that it's one of Xbox Entertainment Studios' scant few projects to actually see the light of day, getting a release a few months removed from Redmond shuttering its original-TV-programming experiment. So there's that, too. Need a refresher on Atari's Spielberg-infused saga before turning on your flatscreen? We've got you covered. [Image credit: John Thien for Engadget]
You can now try 'Destiny' for free and carry progress into the full game
Let's say that you aren't among the 3.5 million daily Destiny players, and you want to try the action out for yourself (for free) to see if its worth your investment. Well, developer Bungie wants to make your dreams come true. You can now download a sample version of the game on either generation of hardware and give it a go without dropping $60. Perhaps best of all, any progress made will transfer over to the full game -- something that members of the alpha and beta tests weren't afforded (but would have appreciated thank you very much). So really, there shouldn't be much stopping you from at least giving the former Halo-house's new jam a go by this point. Except maybe your data cap, that is: Sony says the PlayStation 4 trial weighs in at 40GB.
This year's 'Call of Duty' on PS3 and 360 comes with a free new-gen upgrade
Activision is taking a page out of its own book and throwing Call of Duty fans that haven't yet upgraded to new consoles a bone. That's right, if you pick up a digital copy of this year's Advanced Warfare for either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, you'll get a free upgrade to a new-gen copy within the same console family. That means PlayStation 3 begets a PlayStation 4 download and Xbox 360 in turn unlocks an Xbox One version. What's more, each console will retain its respective license and you'll still be able to play online with your buddies on new and old boxes (with frickin' lasers!) after you do the deed. The offer expires at the end of next March, and like with Destiny before it, premium content like season passes will carry over too. Sounds like a pretty great deal unless, of course, you were planning to pick up one of those special edition Xbox Ones.
'Doctor Who' skins for 'Minecraft' hit Xbox 360 this Friday
Fancy yourself a master of the Sonic Screwdriver? Well, in a few days you can put those skills to the test... in Minecraft, that is. Whether you're a timelord fanperson or a Dalek-sympathizer, you'll be able to show it off once the Doctor Who skin pack hits the Xbox 360 version of the pixely build-your-own-adventure on Friday. As if you needed another reason to look forward to this weekend, yeah? PlayXBLA (Microsoft's official blog for Xbox Live Arcade news) still doesn't mention any word of an Xbox One release, but considering that the company recently paid $2.5 billion for the game's developer, Mojang, we expect to hear it break the, ahem, silence on that soon.
Bungie's leap forward with 'Destiny' isn't gameplay: it's social
"Waffles. Waffles with Swedish fish in them!" Destiny developer Bungie's community manager Eric Osborne is telling me about his crew's Halo LAN-party ritual. Lugging bulky CRT TVs everywhere ("You didn't have a 36-inch [Sony] Trinitron Wega?" he asks), snaking Ethernet cables around a possible stranger's house, sipping Mountain Dew in the kitchen between games of capture the flag, eating lots of cheap pizza. Or, in Osborne's case, breakfast food sprinkled with candy. "That was my experience!" It's easy for him to chuckle at how ridiculous his go-to game fuel sounds in retrospect. Back then, host advantage wasn't having non-lagging bullets -- it was knowing where the bathroom was and not having parents home. Times were a lot simpler.
'Doctor Who' is coming to 'Minecraft' on Xbox 360 next month
Simply put, Doctor Who and Minecraft are two worldwide sensations, each extremely popular in their own entertainment category. Thus, it just kind of makes sense to bring the two together. Thankfully for those of you who are into both, Microsoft and the BBC have partnered up to do exactly that, by way of digital downloadable content for Minecraft on the Xbox 360. Starting next month, players will have access to character packs from Doctor Who, including skins of The Doctor himself, his companions and his mad enemies -- all from throughout the show's entire history, not only from most recent seasons. No word yet on if this also applies to the upcoming Xbox One edition of Minecraft, but it wouldn't surprise us if that was the case.
Canadian cable giants launch a Netflix rival
Canucks don't have much choice for streaming video services. Netflix is the de facto pick, and its Canadian division's selection (historically smaller than in the US) isn't going to satisfy everyone. However, cable giants Rogers and Shaw think they have a better option for some viewers -- they've just unveiled Shomi, a mostly TV-focused service that might have a few aces up its sleeve. The offering blends automatic recommendations with handpicked selections; if you're looking for nothing but comic book adaptations or movies with dating disasters, you may have an easier time finding what you want. Shomi is also leaning heavily on exclusive deals for past seasons of big TV shows like Modern Family, New Girl and Sons of Anarchy, so it may be your best bet if you're looking for a Hulu Plus equivalent.
Xbox 360 HDD now comes in 500GB format, costs less than 320GB version
Been taking advantage of the Xbox 360's "Games with Gold" deal? You might be running out of hard drive space, and Microsoft knows it: it just updated the Xbox website with a teaser for a 500GB hard drive. At $110 it's still more expensive than PC storage, but it's oddly cheaper than the 320GB Xbox 360 HDD that's currently on the market. It's not clear if the new drive will serve as a replacement or if the price is merely a placeholder, but we'll never scoff at more storage space. Unfortunately, you can't order the new drive just yet -- the product page just says that pre-orders are "coming soon." [Image credit: yum9me, Flickr]
Creator of Xbox dashboard ads is sorry for all the Mountain Dew tiles
You know all those annoying ads cluttering the Xbox 360 and Xbox One dashboards? Well, one of their creators has issued an apology. Former Microsoft employee Allen Murray writes on Gamasutra just how his noble intent to get digital games noticed on the Xbox 360 got away from him, and, as he tells it, Redmond initially opposed the idea. Prior to joining the Xbox team Murray worked at Amazon, which he says gave him a keen insight into how tech can be used to enhance retail sales. His idea was to highlight titles like Hexic HD on the dashboard and allow users to purchase them directly from the dash almost effortlessly. So, with the encouragement of Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb, Murray pitched the idea to his bosses and was immediately shot down. Eventually the higher-ups relented and, clearly, the results speak for themselves. "If you hate the Mountain Dew ads, I truly am sorry," he says. Well, at least we have a target for our fist shaking now.
Why Activision is spending $500 million on Destiny
Yes, it's true: Activision is spending half a billion dollars on Bungie's Destiny. Yes, that's true despite Bungie's statement that, "the budget for Destiny, including associated marketing costs and pizza Wednesdays, is nowhere near 500 million dollars." And that's because, when Activision head Bobby Kotick revealed that gargantuan number earlier this year, he was speaking to the entire franchise, not just this September's game. "That number has been widely misinterpreted as a production number for the first game," Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg explained in an interview today at Gamescom. "That number is an all-inclusive number that's several years worth of investment, including marketing and several games, and a lot of up front investment in things like engines and tools that will be able to be used for years to come."