Whether players are revisiting these iconic titles or experiencing them for the first time, they’ll see them with the stunning visuals only the Xbox One X can deliver.
Xbox 360 games enhanced for Xbox One X run at a higher resolution and 9X the original pixel count. The power of Xbox One X enables the Xbox 360 emulator to showcase the very best version possible with the existing assets—all without touching the game code.
Check out an up-to-date list of all Xbox 360 games that have been Xbox One X ''Enhanced''.
When you play Enhanced Xbox 360 games on Xbox One X, you can now choose how to experience them—with enhanced graphics or in their original form. Enhanced graphics will be turned on by default, running your game with higher resolution, 9X the pixel count, increased texture details and anti-aliasing, allowing you to enjoy greater visual clarity than ever before. If you turn off the Graphics setting, the graphics will be comparable to the experience on Xbox One or Xbox One S. Here’s how to access the setting. Note, once you change the setting, you’ll need to restart the game:
Major Nelson has announced that starting February 26, 2013 and running through March 4, 2013, over 60 Xbox 360 Games on Demand titles will be on sale up to 75% off with some as much as 85% off for the "Xbox Ultimate Game Sale".
Each day, a different set of titles will be on sale, so be sure to follow Major Nelson on Twitter where he'll announce what that day's special offer is. The Ultimate Game Sale only occurs once a year so you won’t want to miss it. Content availability and pricing may vary by region.
For a comprehensive list of titles you can expect to see on sale this year continue reading just after the break and don't forget to visit the 360-HQ games database for all of our previous coverage.
While the cake may be a lie, the fact that Valve is giving away free copies of Portal is certainly real.
From now until September 20, Steam users can download and install either the PC or Mac version of the classic puzzle game.
The most anticipated question is whether or not this is simply a free trial or in fact a 100 percent free game. We are happy to report that the latter is the case. So long as you download and install the title before the 20th, it’s free and will remain that way indefinitely.
Portal is being given away to help promote Valve’s “Learn with Portals” program, an education-based initiative designed to teach school-aged children about science. The program allows kids to design their own Portal levels, meaning they need to use physics, math, logic, probability and spatial reasoning to succeed. What better way to teach admittedly boring skills than designing a video game? It sounds like a win-win for everyone involved.
If you are unfamiliar with the series, Portal was launched in October 2007 as part of a game bundle called The Orange Box. Portal is a first-person puzzle game that requires the user to use a handheld portal device to open inter-spatial portals between two flat planes. The main character is instructed to complete varying tasks by an artificial intelligence called GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) with the promise of cake once all tasks are completed.
The sequel, aptly named Portal 2, was released on April 19, 2011 and is currently available on Steam for $29.99.
Over the course of the last year of owning an Xbox 360 my Gamerscore has been steadily climbing, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's impressive. My score is exactly 11,715, which I suppose is a decent number for only a year of gaming. According to the new "Achievement Progress" tab on my 360's dashboard I have a potential Gamerscore of 51,640. This is, of course, made much higher by games that I popped in for only a second before never playing them again (Spiderman 3, Fable 2, Too Human, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Prototype, Flock, Need for Speed Carbon, and many others among them), but I've also only gotten 100% in one game in all of my hours playing the 360 over the course of the last year, that game being the original Banjo-Kazooie for XBLA.
Needless to say, I've gone for 100% in many of my other games, but with no success. Several achievements for Left 4 Dead alluded me due to the necessity of having a great team to acquire them (Safety First and Nothing Special come to mind), and I put over 100 hours in Tales of Vesperia before deciding halfway through my second playthrough that I simply did not have the time to go for the full 1000. Despite my lack of success at getting all the achievements in each game I played, I often spent hours grinding away at games that I otherwise would have put down much sooner; I did this all for the sake of getting something extra tacked onto the big flashing number that greets me whenever I turn on my console.
While going for the insanely difficult "Manbearpig" achievement in the surprisingly fun XBLA release, South Park Tower Defense, I had a bit of an epiphany. As I restarted the level for the 10th time due to the drunkeness and overall inability to do anything correctly of my teammates, it hit me that I was not having fun. I had performed a meaningless task in a game that would have otherwise been enjoyable for hours, with no reward to myself. Even if I had gotten the achievement, I still could've spent those hours of my time doing something interesting instead of just tacking on another 20 points to my Gamerscore. What other games could I have been experiencing for the first time if I had chosen to spend my time with them instead? Mass Effect and The Orange Box are sitting unplayed in my library, and I know that once I dive into those games I'll enjoy them a lot, so why would I waste my time going for achievements in games that I have already played to the point of souring them?
Take for instance the "Smile" achievement in Geometry Wars 2, where players not only have to beat the ridiculously difficult "Sequence" mode, but they have to intentionally fail on some parts of it in order to make the sequence board look like a smiley face. That's not fun! I had to spend hours just to beat sequence in the first place; beating the mode while intentionally doing badly on the 2nd, 4th, 11th, 15th, 17th, 18th, and 19th levels of it (as the "smile" achievement requires) would likely take an entire day, and the reward of getting 25 meaningless achievement points would simply not be worth it.
I'd love to hear from someone who got the "Light Seeds Master" achievement in Prince of Persia. Tell me, was that fun for you? I bet following around the predetermined paths and revisiting all of the environments more than twice, all for the mindless collection of over 1,000 of those God-forsaken light seeds was just a blast. How about it, those of you who found every flag in Assassin's Creed? Were those few points really worth the hours upon hours that you spent holding down the trigger button and running laps around the cities?
For me, I think that while achievements are often fun little distractions that can add on significantly to the amount of time (and ultimately value) that players get out games, really hard achievements that require repetitive action, grinding, or otherwise boring activities that wouldn't be considered fun should be completely ignored in favor of spending gaming time with something new. Instead, it might be better to just enjoy games for what they are, playing through the campaign and, if necessary, letting that stand as the experience that was had with the game.
Despite my rather staunch stance on the fact that a Gamerscore isn't worth anything and shouldn't be pursued with too much of a person's time, I do believe that achievements are a great way to get more out of a game in an interesting and fun way. The best achievements are ones that can be acquired through cooperative play, as getting in other people on a challenge can make for a fun experience. I eventually got the "Manbearpig" achievement in South Park TD by playing the game locally with friends, and explaining the game's mechanics and successfully completing the challenge was pretty enjoyable, but I don't think that I'll ever return to the game to go for the other two achievements that I'm missing. As gamers, we should always get our money's worth out of games, but we should also know when to put a game down and go do something else, regardless of whether or not we've wrung all the silly achievement points from it. There are too many fantastic games available on the 360 to only experience a few, so go ahead, rent some random games that you think might be fun to just play through one time. Dig into the back catalog for your game system and just have fun.
VALVE has been talking about a patch for Team Fortress 2 for a long time now and has finally got it on the way but the patch is not just for the PC gamers out there, it looks like all the updates the PC has got in the last wile will be going to the 360 now.
VALVE reports: We've been pretty quiet lately, but thankfully, that's about to end. In the next few days we'll have an update out that has a couple of new features for the Engineer and Spy, and a variety of other smaller fixes.
* Teleporters will be upgradeable to level 3. As the teleporter is upgraded, the cooldown will decrease.
* Dispensers will be upgradeable to level 3. They will heal faster and generate metal faster as they are upgraded.
* Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground.
* We've made a bunch of minor changes by adding particle systems and upgrading the HUD to show things like deaths by critical hits, players that are overhealed, and giving more information to medics when people are calling for them.
These are just to work on some class balance and depth issues that we've seen in the wild with these two classes, but aren't meant to replace their entire class packs. They will be getting more attention further down the road.
While that's in testing, we're off working on several things that folks have been emailing us about, so we thought it'd be good to provide some detail:
* The next class pack will be the Scout. One of the main goals we're focusing on for him has been to provide tools that make him useful in maps like Dustbowl & Goldrush. If you have any ideas for what you think would work well, post them over on the Team Fortress 2 Forum and we'll take a look.
* We are actively working on a massive XBox 360 update, which will include pretty much everything we've shipped on the PC in the last year. We'll provide you with a rough date when we have one.
* We're also working on bringing over a variety of engine improvements from Left 4 Dead into the TF2 engine, but it won't be a wholesale replacement of the engine. This means we'll get some of L4D's performance improvements, like the better multicore support, but not all of them. For example, we can't bring over some improvements without dropping support for DX8, which we're not prepared to do.
Still mad that the cake was not real and that you damn near died for it?, still mad about the end shot that shows you cake but knowing they never set out to give it to you?, if so join the club and get ready to head back to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center for your slice of that cake.
GamerScoreBlog.com is reporting the following: You are invited to return to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center this Wednesday, October 22 at 9 a.m. GMT (2:00 a.m. PDT) via Xbox LIVE Arcade. Due to the unforeseen conclusion of your last visit, all necessary precautions have been taken to ensure that “Portal: Still Alive” is a sanitary, objective, and mostly non-lethal testing environment.
In addition to the original award winning first-person puzzle experience, Aperture Science is proud to provide 14 new challenge maps exclusive to Xbox LIVE Arcade. Six advanced maps will also be provided to help guide you along the way.
Though prior test subjects proved to be unstable and may have presented false information, Aperture Science is pleased to inform you that your cake is indeed waiting for you and that the Weighted Companion Cube misses you in your absence. Come visit them again for 1200 MS Points.
Terminator: Survivors confirmed for Xbox Series, PS5 & PC via Steam Play as a survivor in the aftermath of Judgment Day in Terminator: Survivors, a new open-world survival game by NACON (@Nacon). Build the resistance and defy the machines in Terminator: Survivors, com..
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Each day, a different set of titles will be on sale, so be sure to follow 
