Gaming

Do you want to make your holiday gaming a little zestier? The GATE and Doritos want to help spice up your holidays with a special Xbox-themed prize pack loaded with goodies, all in the name of an even bigger giveaway.

Gaming and snacks go together like popcorn and movies, so I have to admit that I had a big smile on my face last night after I got a special delivery from Doritos and Mountain Dew. Waiting for me after I got back from trick-or-treating was a new Xbox One controller with a gift box filled with Mountain Dew and Doritos, all in the name of the Xbox One X.

Welcome back, Frank West! This week Dead Rising 4 arrived on Xbox One for ardent zombie fans to revisit the city of Willamette, and once again they take control of the wonderfully pessimistic photographer Frank as he’s pulled back into another bloody adventure.

Microsoft took the press and public alike through the opportunity to go hands-on last week with their fall Xbox One lineup at the X16 Media Showcase event in Toronto. They had a full complement of first- and third-party titles set for release between now and December, with a handful of already available games to try out. I was able to play a number of the games on display, read on for my impressions.

The Oculus Rift recently saw its big retail release at Best Buy, Amazon, and Microsoft Store shelves. A virtual reality headset that began as a Kickstarter campaign, the company was ultimately acquired by Facebook to the tune of 2 billion dollars, leading up to it’s impending limited-retail release. There are still many people who preordered the device back in January with an expected release back in March, who are still awaiting their headsets, with their estimated ship dates having slipped to as late as August. This puts a big question mark over the viability of VR.

The last time I wrote here, I spoke of how detached I felt playing the sequel to one of the few sports games I’ve put any time into in the last decade. EA Sports UFC 2 did many of the things its predecessor did, but removed much of the smaller personality touches that kept me invested.

I don’t play sports games very often. I played a lot of NHL 94 on the Genesis, and NFL 2K on the Dreamcast. The last sports game I had spent any real time on was 3 on 3 NHL Arcade for the Xbox 360, and that came out more than 7 years ago. These games captured the feeling of participating in their real-life counterparts, and they were exciting to compete against friends. But I hadn’t found anything like them in a good long stretch.

Games are an excellent medium to instill many emotions. You feel powerful, as you conquer hordes of enemies, or terror when that monster leaps at your throat. Triumph in clearing that last level; frustration because you can’t quite clear the next one. What Oxenfree, the downloadable, narrative-driven game from Night School Studio, filled me with, was dread.

Do you remember that show from about a decade ago, with a bunch of ordinary folks gaining superpowers, and somehow all the disparate threads become interconnected? Did you know that Heroes was revived last year, as Heroes Reborn, and was to be a revival of a show that had a strong premise, and a lack of direction leading to a faltering, mostly-ignored end. Heroes Reborn did not set the world on fire, but it did lead to a surprisingly fun tie-in game, in Gemini: Heroes Reborn.

Dontnod Entertainment’s episodic Life Is Strange was released as a complete collector’s edition in January. Given the timing of the re-release, I thought it would be a good excuse for my first article here at The GATE to be my thoughts on one of the best games of 2015.