SuperKMx

Can't wait to fire up my Xbox Series X and never ever use the Facebook Gaming tab on the dash. A tab that will only exist because some smartarse decided that splashing $40m on Ninja and a couple of dozen million on signing other streamers to temporary deals was a better idea than creating new talent or investing in improving discoverability.

Absolutely can't wait.

Mixer featured tech that was years ahead of Twitch, but practically every step that was taken after they were purchased by Microsoft has been the wrong one, sadly.

Meanwhile, the best FIFA player in the world has to use an interview during an official EA eSports event to raise issues regarding FIFA 20, because it's the only way he can get anyone from EA to listen to him.

They'll listen to what the moneymen say and this year, the amount of positive PR they'll get from announcing Skate 4 outweighs the amount of money they'll lose making it.

Gamers and series fans are barely even a factor.

Owned a PSVR and a Rift and despite playing a lot of different titles, only one or two genuinely benefitted from being in VR.

Until the cost, cables, and amount of hassle it takes to set up each time proves to be worth it via a batch of absolutely top-notch must-have titles, I'm not all that bothered.

FIFA Street 2 and NFL 2k5 should lose this in an absolute landslide, given that SSX Tricky is one of the top games of that generation.

How do I feel? Looking forward to playing several of the games that Sony showed off. Microsoft will show several games that I want to play in July (probably) and no doubt I'll be looking forward to them, too.

As usual, both consoles will be sat in my entertainment stack on day one, because console wars are pointless and brand loyalty is hilarious to me.

#bleedgames

Absolutely none. I can't say that I've ever seen the point in game-specific ones. About the only special edition consoles I've had any interest in were the green and clear OG Xbox ones.

Aside from that...it's just a decal or paint process you're being charged a bunch of extra money for. Get the plain one and spend the difference on games, I say.

Burnout 3: Takedown without even the slightest hint of doubt.

No driving game has come close in terms of thrills, spills, and balls-out speed since. As much fun as it was, I include Burnout Paradise in that, too.

Put Takedown and Revenge in a remastered single package and I'd be happy for the rest of my natural born life.

I'd be embarrassed if I got anything less than a perfect 10, given how long I've been covering Xbox stuff.

As it turns out, I'm not embarrassed.

Can confirm. I had a PDP Wired Legacy Adapter and listed it on eBay in January after my e-kit gave up the ghost. From a starting price of a tenner, it sold for just over £300.

I ain't complaining

I almost had a heart attack from not surprise.

Why they took this long, I'll never know. They even went as far as to restate their intention to hold the event no more than a couple of weeks back. Was absolutely never going to happen.

TimeSplitters 2 - absolutely no contest.

Almost all new consoles are sold as loss leaders. I'm not sure why Bloomberg or any analysts are even remotely surprised.

Midnight launch. RalliSport Challenge, followed by Project Gotham Racing. Grand times

The Blades for me. Not for any reason other than it was the last one that wasn't constantly interrupted by loading spinners and blank screens.

Skater XL works for me.

Yes, I did.

Tried it again about a year later and they hadn't fixed even 10% of the problems, so it got uninstalled. A real shame.

I feel sorry for those affected, but I'm genuinely surprised most of the monthly publications that are still going have survived this long.

@Tasuki @gamer83 @KelticDevil - Thanks all. Good to be back here

@gingataisen And I must speak mine. It isn't a great look to suggest everybody sticks together right after throwing a couple of hard left hooks in my general direction.

No contempt was shown for the readers of this site when I - and I alone - decided to call time on it. We worked for YEARS with very limited resources to continue to provide content to those who enjoyed the site, while the vast majority of readers looked on in apathy, seemingly unable to share an article, post in the forum, vote in a poll, or leave a comment. I'm hoping things are different this time around. To suggest we "jumped ship at the first sign of trouble" is utterly ludicrous.

And I apologise for the one time I wrote "Xbox One Series X." It doesn't mean I'm disconnected from anything. It just means I made one minor mistake in an 1,800 word article. Nobody's perfect.

@FraserG I was The One once and won a copy of Worms on XBLA.

Which they never sent me.

Oh, hello there.

Just in case anyone is reading this in 2018 - happy new year to you!

Also, I'll be running a series of pX-style GameBlast 18 charity marathon streams over at my Twitch channel on Feb 23/24 and March 2/3: http://twitch.tv/superkmx - Join in, win some cool stuff, help me raise money for SpecialEffect, which is a great charity!

@Tasuki Yup...a whole year! Time flies.

I'm writing at a number of places (reviews list at https://superkmx.com) and just launched a new podcast with @tylertreese - https://gamingthecomments.com

Self-promotion ends.

@Red620Ti No problem man. You absolutely did do everything you said you'd do (and more), and that was always really appreciated!

If anyone else is reading, I've finally got my stream setup sorted, so I'll be getting back on that particular horse from next week. Also running an Xbox One game giveaway or two while I'm at it. In fact...there's one running on my site (https://superkmx.com) right now.... self-promotion ends

Hey folks! Long time, no speak. Hope you all had a good Christmas and have a happy new year!

(I’ll say right here that pX isn’t coming back as far as I’m aware, just so folks don’t get the wrong idea about me posting after so long and then end up annoyed! The site’s still here as the domain is registered and it still gets some pageviews as there’s a few thousand pages. Every little helps, I guess!)

I was browsing through pX as I reflected back on the year and spied some of the comments made on this article, so I thought I’d take some time to respond to some of the questions raised and points made.

@Stylon – I get why you’d be disappointed about the way I handled the site closure publicly. However, I will say that pretty much every day since we switched to be a “full” Xbox site (as opposed to a Kinect-only joint) was a fight. Not with management – they were super-supportive – but with the conditions of running a site day-to-day. I also feel that you might have over-estimated how big the community was here. Sure, there are 180+ comments on this post, but if you take out “comment to enter” contests, less than 30 posts out of the nearly 6,000 here ever garnered more than 25 comments. Of those, most of the posts were back-and-forths between two people. Most articles only picked up 2 or 3 comments at most and the forums were absolutely dead, no matter what we tried. We had 4k+ Twitter followers and 15k+ Facebook fans, but trying to get a retweet or a share of a story was like pulling teeth.

A high percentage of articles were posted that got no shares, no likes, no favourites, no retweets, and no comments. I get that not every story is going to set social media on fire or get everybody talking, but it was tremendously hard to stare pure apathy in the face every day and battle against it.
It was this reason that I didn’t try to set up a Patreon or something like that to try to crowdfund a bit of cash to pay writers. It simply wouldn’t have worked. If we’d have got £50 of contributions a month, I’d have been surprised!

(I will say that I'm not blaming anyone specifically. It was just apathy in general. If you're reading this, then chances are that you probably did a heck of a lot more for this site than most!)

To an extent, @Tasuki is correct with regards to my issues with running the site. I was writing the majority of the content myself on a day-to-day basis and I was feeling the pressure. I’m a freelance web developer and was working 12 hour days to pay the bills, then realising that I had a 1,000 word review to write, a couple of hours of a game to play to be able to write the one after that, 40-odd emails to sort through from various PR teams from the last 24 hours, and five news stories to write up (plus any that came out of those 40-odd emails!) I don’t need as much sleep as most (thanks to coffee!) but after a while, it gets to the point where you just think ”Why am I bothering?”

Especially when you’re writing articles and getting told by your “fans” on Facebook that you’re writing “clickbait” for not putting all the info in the headline and therefore “forcing” them visit the site to find stuff out. I couldn’t say “Assassin’s Creed Syndicate Release Date Confirmed.” I had to say “Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is Coming Out on December 8th” because hell…why should we get the pageview or the resulting ad money?

On a daily basis, we’d get complaints from people who basically didn’t want to read. Or from people who thought that we were Microsoft. Or from people who thought that we were Activision. Or, in one case, from somebody who thought we were Sony. No, I’m not kidding.

Then there are the “aggregation” sites that ripped the entirety of our text and images, and posted it on their own site as if they wrote it (This isn’t the best example, since it’s an advert, but it happens to Nintendo Life, too... https://gameup24.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/reminder-watch-the-ea-play-press-conference-with-push-square-or-pure-xbox/ ripped from http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/06/reminder_watch_the_ea_play_press_conference_with_push_square_or_pure_xbox). When you're seeing people retweet THOSE articles rather than your own...it kinda takes its toll.

I’ve seen entire reviews from this site ripped and posted on ahem popular gaming forums ahem without so much as a link. Big sites do it, too. The number of professional outlets that took a Watch Dogs 2 release date leak that Anthony found and didn’t credit us, was unbelievable. We should have had a few hundred thousand views for that piece of work by Anthony, but instead we got less than 10k. Professional, paid writers, taking images from pX and cutting off the watermark so that they didn’t have to credit us. It beggar's belief.

I wrote a piece of software that grabbed the Deals With Gold items and prices direct from Microsoft the very second they went live. I’d sit here at 2am, formatting and writing up the list WAY before Major Nelson posted it on Twitter, only to find somebody would copy/paste my list and post it on Reddit every single week without giving us a link. My work would be voted up to be on the top of the Xbox subreddit for a day and we wouldn't get a single visit. They didn’t even have a site or a means of making money from it. They just wanted to look knowledgable. In fact, try finding any of our articles on Reddit. You probably won’t find any. People would copy/paste our news and claim it to be theirs, but if it was from IGN…oh boy…they’d go out of their way to only post an excerpt, along with a link. I'm not bitter...honest!

With regards to content, great people like Dave, Anthony, Red, Josie, Tyler, Lucie, and others would write when they could, but barring them, we’d get tons of people asking to write for the site. They’d send over an example news post and if the English was up to scratch, I’d take them on. I’d spend an hour or two getting to know them, training them on using the site content management system, setting up their email account, adding them to the staff chat area, and introducing them to the team. They’d be awesome people that I really thought would fit in well, but then I’d watch as either one of two things happened. Either they’d say “Right, I’d like to review <insert name of biggest AAA title here> first” and expect me to just magically make a game code appear before telling me that they can only do reviews, not news, or they would disappear entirely from staff chat, never post anything, and never be seen again.

It’s no joke to say that happened at least once every two weeks, for four years.

One guy went through the training and introductions, making out that he’d be writing content a few times a week, and then said “I can only write every other Tuesday as I’m quite busy.” I don’t think me saying “OK then…I’ll just make sure the games industry holds all of its news for a Tuesday then, eh?” really helped matters, but hey…

I don’t know the point of this comment, other than to clear some things up and get things off my chest for 2017, I guess.

If you’re interested, I have launched http://superkmx.com which will house links to all of my reviews for other sites, as well as some articles (when I get a chance to write some!) and I’ll be doing some streaming soon as well.

And if anybody wants to add me on XBL, I’m SuperKMx (of course)

Some folks have asked us to provide info on where we'll be writing in the future, so I thought I'd drop in and say that I'll be reviewing (multi-format) for http://wegotthiscovered.com with my first review going live this week or early next.

There were plans for a multi-format news outlet, but I haven't the time to get a new site off the ground just now. Maybe in the future.

Thank you everyone, for the very kind words. It means a lot.

I'll see y'all around the bend.

@korsaat84 Many apologies - this has now been corrected!

@SMW It's not required on PC, no. On Xbox One it will be, as it is now.

@ReigningSemtex Absolutely agree! I really enjoyed this game, but I was massively surprised at this news myself. Figured the game was dead and buried!

@VanillaLake Haha, no idea.

Still, I think you'll like the Horizon 2 demo better than Most Wanted on Wii U.

@VanillaLake Fortunately, there's a Forza Horizon 2 demo out for Xbox One.

@VanillaLake It's the Xbox 360 version.

@MadAdam81 This one is a bit different to the one that lets the Hofner Bass work. I've got one of the ones you're talking about as well after thinking it would let the ION Drum Rocker work, but it doesn't.

Fortunately this new one will sort that problem.

@flameboy84 I'd imagine you can pretty much just jump in.

And the winner of this contest is Twitter user @shadowhive. Congratulations to you!

@Marce2240 I'm not arguing that point at all. People WILL usually take the better spec machine if they get a chance.

However, you said that smaller devs will have to survive making games for the low-tier hardware, but that won't matter. Games for the low-tier hardware (XO) will work on the high-tier hardware (Scorpio) so if people are upgrading, whether they trade their old machine in or keep it in a cupboard, they'll still be able to play the game.

The potential userbase for their game, if it's developed with the lowest-tier console in mind, will be XO sales + XOS sales + Scorpio sales. The number of potential users won't go down, because if someone trades in their old machine and buys a Scorpio, it's -1 Xbox One and +1 Scorpio, so the userbase for that game stays the same.

Ok, our winners are as follows:-

1st Place - Thomas McGaffney, Finland
2nd Place - Oliver Bothe, Germany
3rd Place - Steven Lyon, England
4th Place - Alan Murilo, Brazil
5th Place - Nick Harrington-Lewis, England

Congratulations to those five - we'll email out your prize shortly!

@Vincent294 I'd imagine so, closer to launch...

@N4LIFE It's a good question that I don't think anyone will be able to answer just yet.

From my knowledge of things though, I can't see why it wouldn't at least be easily possible. Just depends on if Microsoft takes it into account.

@Utena-mobile Yep, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is free right now.

@JaredJ No, it's only available as displayed, unfortunately.

@Marce2240 "If Scorpio becomes the new standard, those devs that can't afford to make a version of the game up to the specs of the new system will have to survive by developing games for the low-tier hardware (XBO). Last time I checked, lifetime sales of the XBO had surpassed 20 million units. They can only plummet from here, and you have to subtract to that figure the number of people that will upgrade to Scorpio."

I don't think that's right. You wouldn't need to subtract the number of people that will upgrade to Scorpio, because the Xbox One game would still work on their system.

@VanillaLake Apparently so, yes. Microsoft have now confirmed that.

@lucieisawesome Arr, me hearty! I'm sure we'll have a pX crew assembled at some point so we can all shiver our timbers. Arrrr!

@crazycrazydave The latter.

If you buy a game on Xbox One, you get the Windows 10 version to download. If you buy it on Windows 10, you get the Xbox One version to download.

This is the messiest console announcement ever.

We're still waiting for an official press release all up in here, three hours after the show.

@VanillaLake Nice, thanks

Winners will be announced here.

Ryno, you just need to click on them. It'll pop up a Twitter box so you can verify the Twitter things.

@Souldin These are all digital copies. And yep, you can click the Subscribe option. If you aren't subbed, it'll ask you to. If you are subbed, it'll verify it.