THIS IS THE GNEWS

I recently won some hounds in a game of chance (I’m from Berkshire). They are now my gaming news (GNEEEEWS) hounds. To train them in the way of news, first I sat/chained them down in front of BBC News 24 for six weeks. I fed them only newspapers and the weekly trimmings from Jeremy Paxman’s beard. Once they were suitably well-versed in the way of news, I switched them to a typical gamer’s diet: beef jerky and cups of tea that have gone cold specifically because of a distractingly interminable Metal Gear Solid cutscene. I jammed their little furry dog heads into Oculus Rift headsets and left them in a darkened room with the explicit and strongly-worded instruction that they were not to leave until they had successfully formed the greatest Animal Crossing clan the world has ever seen.

It turns out that I don’t truly know what Animal Crossing is. No matter – whatever they did in that room while I was gone worked; the pack emerged as reliable, smirking, hungry GNEWShounds. They eagerly bound across the Internet every week (or so), bringing every tidbit of gaming news straight to my diamond-encrusted pimp-ass GNEWS door. I’ve assembled some of those tidbits into something less coherent below, so you don’t have to.

Millions dead (upset) as Microsoft remorsefully punts Kinect into a ditch

You can read Microsoft’s searing diatribe against their own textbook marketing failure here.

To recap, the PS4 is demonstrably (a little bit) more powerful than the Xbox One, costs less and thus has comfortably outsold it to date.

In response, come June 9th, Microsoft will be selling Kinect-less Xbox One bundles for £349. It’s an understandable u-turn, that apparently may lead to happy knock-on performance benefits for those running Xbox Ones without Kinect (see Polygon’s interview with Microsoft’s Junior Vice President of Silver Linings Yusuf Mehdi). However, all of the current Xbox One owners that the GNEWS Desk has talked to on this matter (just Tony really) are irritated that they’ve forked out top dollar for a chirpy little motion-capture device that Microsoft have now cheerily implied may in fact be of less point/relevance/use than they had previously indicated.

Still, anyone with a Kinect can always trade it in for a fair price to get something they really want, like a picture of Milo endlessly sitting by a pond waiting for someone to draw him a fish.

PlayStation Plus Instant Game Collection and Xbox Live Games With Gold change a little bit

Sticking with the theme of Microsoft and Sony figuratively conducting a corporate lightsaber duel atop a frothily flame-spewing volcano of gaming market expectation, both firms have slightly tweaked the way that they make games available to PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold subscribers. The changes are far too tedious and inconsequential to be itemised in a dynamic and progressive news blog.

Itemised Changes – Games With Gold

• Games With Gold will soon be available on Xbox One, starting with Max: The Curse of Brotherhood and Halo: THIS! IS! SPARTA!-n Assault available from date TBC in June.
• Access to Xbox One Games With Gold will be subscription-based, i.e. you will need to maintain your Gold subscription to keep playing them.
• Going forward, each month there will be two Xbox One games and two Xbox 360 games newly available through Games With Gold.
• The two Xbox 360 games available in June will be Dark Souls and Charlie Murder.
• An extra Xbox 360 game will be available in June, as a special one-off thing. That game is Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition.
• No one seems totally sure, but it looks like you’ll still be able to play the Xbox 360 offerings even if your Gold subscription lapses.

Itemised Changes – PlayStation Plus

• From now on, there will be two new games added to the Instant Game Collection every month for each of PS Vita, PS3 and PS4.
• Every new title in the Instant Game Collection will be available the first Wednesday of the month, and will be free for that month, until the first Wednesday of the following month.
• That’s it.
• Oh, the PlayStation Plus games for June are: Trine 2: The Complete Story and PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate (both PS4), NBA 2K14 and Lone Survivor (both PS3) and Dragon’s Crown and Surge Deluxe (both Vita).

And finally…

Joystiq have reported that Siliconera have reported that Inside Games have reported that Adidas have made available a Japanese football team replica shirt featuring Pikachu (a popular videogame and SM:tv character). Not particularly interesting GNEWS I’ll concede, but GNEWS all the same.

* Please note that there wasn’t enough space for the full GNEWS this week because of all the essential hounds gold I wrote at the start.