New Xbox One Launched

BOOM! That was the sound of Xbox throwing down the gauntlet with the newly announced Xbox One (that’s the official name). The launch of the new Xbox was today and it’s looking pretty good, if you want to view the website to have a look just click the link here.

If you’ll remember yesterday we sent up a post about Sony sneaking a preview of what the new console is going to look like for this years E3. Maybe they did this to try and throw Xbox off their game and get some publicity. No! said Xbox and in their launch that kicked off at 6 o’clock in the UK- they showed not only their new console, controller and Kinect, but also all their new features and a ton of the big games announced for the new Xbox One. It was a metaphorical “What else you got?” to Sony.

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The first of the announcements was that the Xbox is named the Xbox One, not Orbis or 720 or something like that. I imagine that they were going for a ‘We’re number one!’ slogan as a clever marketing ploy and it sort of works; I mean PS4, bitch please.

The main theme that Xbox announced was that they were going to completely change the living room into one seamless entity. The announcer stepped in front of the camera and gave a cool sounding ‘Xbox on’ line and the Xbox immediately recognised him and started his personal profile.

With the use of the Kinect Camera you can control your TV, Xbox, Skype, Internet and ESPN with gesture, voice or controller. Xbox announced a range of fancy internet and TV features. But it was the speed at which the announcer could switch from right in the middle of a film to right in the middle of a game that was impressive.

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This is done by the three operating systems in one that make up the Xbox ONE: Xbox OS, Kernal of Windows and a layering system that allows instant switching between the two. The Xbox is said to have 8 gig of RAM and a Blu Ray drive and claims to run almost silently, with Xbox proclaiming that it’s also futureproof.

This step into interactive TV is set to make the TV inseparable from the Xbox and with big names like Sky already invested in Xbox you can expect big things from these developers. The Kinect was also announced to come with the Xbox ‘free’ so this might have an impact on how expensive the console is.

The one announcement that was missing was the always online rumour that was circulating. The amount that Xbox intends to connect leads me to assume that the always online rumours are true. Although the way they put it was ‘bigger matches, more players, living in persistent worlds all because the Xbox is supported by the cloud.’

Games Announced

1. Announced by EA: Fifa 14, NBA, Madden NFL and UFC. These are all big titles and they look good, but sports games aren’t renowned for being the peak of gaming technology or gamers games’ which also made me think that Xbox are leaning to more multiplayer tournament style games, rather than individual player experience but we will see.

2. Forza 5, looked pretty good, but has always been used as a showcase game.

3. This weird game called Quantum Break announced by Microsoft Studios. It had a weird live action trailer with this creepy girl in it.

4. The guy at Microsoft studios announced 15 new titles in Xbox One’s first year. Eight of which are brand new franchises.

5. One of the bigger announcements was a live action television series of Halo. It’s going to be directed by Steven Spielberg, so it’ll either be awesome or tank.

6. The Final Big Release was Call of Duty Ghost, a game that spent 10 minutes showing us ‘new’ game innovations that other games have been doing for years – leaning around corners is not new, neither is sliding: Call of Duty you embarrass yourself.

7. Xbox One will be released later this year.

So that’s the announcements, the console looks pretty impressive, the always online mode and the games they announced were a bit of a let down, but overall thumbs up. Sony will just have to swallow their pride and announce their console at E3- where the games are sure to continue.