Everyone wanted a piece of the gaming pie today! Nintendo announced Mario Kart for iOS & Android, PlayStation held their “Stay of Play” event and gave us a release date for The Last of Us Part 2 and then Xbox screamed “we’re still here” and showed off a bunch of stuff during their Inside Xbox stream.
First off there’s Project xCloud. Microsoft’s big bet on the streaming war to come.
Starting in October Xbox are running a public preview of Project xCloud that is open to anyone living in either the UK, US or Korea. Why Korea? Well they have the best internet in the world so it makes sense that to get some good runs on the board Microsoft would take their yet-to-be-proven tech there.
For those wanting to participate in the trial you can sign up on Xbox’s website. Sorry Australia, don’t expect this anytime soon.
Xbox Game Pass is getting a bunch of new games, the highlight for me being Cities: Skylines and Dirt 2.0 both coming to PC. Console subscribers are getting Jump Force and Lego Worlds as well as an adorable comedy-puzzle game about death, which opened the stream, called Felix the Reaper and the highly rated rogue-like Children of Morta.
A lot of time in the stream was dedicated to a pirate MMO called Atlas, which has been available on Steam for a while now. The game comes from Ark: Survival Evolved creators Grapeshot Games and puts you in a persistent world that is crossplay between PC & Xbox. Think of it as the adult version of Sea of Thieves.
Stand out of the show was developer Night School Studio’s follow up to Oxenfree called Afterparty. The game was shown off at both Xbox’s & Sony’s events today so that should tell you how much hype there is for it!
You take control of two recently deceased best friends, Milo & Lola, whom in a battle to escape from hell discover the only way to do so is in beating the devil in a drinking game. It uses the same highly conversation driven mechanic as Oxenfree before it but takes the player on a much more light-hearted journey into a wild night in Hell.