STACK #153 Jul 2017

GAMES FEATURE

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MICROSOFT

Super Lucky'sTale

Ori

I’ve seen it described as a ‘shenanigan simulator’, and quite honestly that’s a really good way of putting it. You’re a pirate, and along with your pirate mates you must sail the seven seas in search of booty and other pirates to plunder. As it turns out, there’s a fair bit more

Sea of Thieves

and actually navigating a map with a compass. And that’s just the seafaring part of it. There’s fighting off sharks in the water, swordfights with skeletons on the beaches, deciphering of clues... and that’s without worrying about the other pirates on the loose. It's lot of fun, and the Xbox team I played with on the booth were an amicable bunch of lads, that also very quickly discovered it’s possible to get your avatar drunk and vomit all over everything. It’s the pirate life for me. With a new - and immensely powerful - console on the horizon, and a bunch of new (and improved) IP to back it up, Microsoft is looking to have a steady year ahead of it. A combination of triple-A and indie titles feature something for every gamer, coming soon to Xbox One.

I've seen Sea of Thieves described as a 'shenanigan simulator', and that's a really good way of putting it

Cuphead

on the booth), as well as Crackdown 3 and Forza Motorsport 7 . One of the biggest announcements to come out of the conference was what Spencer says the fans have been asking for most – original Xbox Backward Compatibility for the Xbox One. I, for one, can’t wait to get back into Blazing Angels and Top Spin , but there’s no word yet on when it’s launching. Aside from the conference, this year Xbox shook things up a little by holding an outside-E3 hands-on session on the Monday. Here, media could check out their most anticipated games before the show floor opened to the general public, leaving little chance to jump on anything. This allowed us to get hands-on with Forza Motorsport 7 (the GT-R looks bloody gorgeous), the playground platformer Super Lucky’s Tale , and even Hello Neighbour; if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a quirky first-person horror game about breaking into your creepy neighbour’s house. As far as the other new games were concerned, I didn’t get to spend time with Sea of Thieves until I hit the show floor at E3, and I would go so far as to say it’s my game of the show. Though it’s been around for a while, waiting in the wings, pondering its next move like a calculating chess player, it’s come out this year – quite literally – all guns blazing.

to the peg-legged life than climbing crows nests and yelling ‘land-ho!’ at the top of your lungs. Between you and your crew, you’ve got to coordinate steering the ship, raising/ lowering the sails, dealing with the anchor,

The Xbox One X Experience

An additional part of the three hour hands- on session (which included some of the best breakfast burritos I’ve ever eaten) was what Microsoft called the Xbox One X Experience. Groups of attendees were led up to a theatre, where we were privy to a few behind-closed- doors presentations from a few select Xbox devs showcasing the power of the XOX and its Dolby Atmos sound support. Much of this consisted of the 4K upscaling for many of the games receiving patches, like Ge4rs , Minecraft , and Forza Horizon 3 . It was a short presentation, but still pretty cool to check out the Dolby setup.

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JULY 2017

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