Microsoft shows off new Xbox Series X games, including a terrifying H.R. Giger-style nightmare
If you’ve followed video game news for, oh, six months, you should pretty much know what to expect when a console-maker (non-Nintendo) announces that it’s going to show off a handful of the first new games for its new system. It’s going to be the meat and potatoes stuff, like the shooters, the Madden sequel, the Japanese role-playing game that doesn’t offer many details beyond the main hero’s anime-style hair, and the Assassin’s Creed that looks a lot like every other Assassin’s Creed but will nonetheless provide new and exciting ways to stick blades into people throats. One thing you might not expect, though, is some kind of alien—and by alien we mean Alien—penis coming out of a wall. Lucky for us, then, that Microsoft managed to include all of the above in today’s big showcase of the first games for its new Xbox Series X console, from the Assassin Creed to the… alien penis.
So let’s start with that, because it’s hard to talk about anything else. It came from a trailer for a game called Scorn by Ebb Software, which is apparently a first-person shooter/horror game that started life as a Kickstarter project. Hey, as long as it didn’t start life using any of the H.R. Giger nightmare shit that’s in the trailer, we’re on board.
Other than that, Microsoft didn’t show off anything extremely surprising. The stream showed a new Madden and talked about the new Assassin’s Creed that was announced last week, and multiple people reiterated that a lot of Xbox Series X games will support what Microsoft calls “Smart Delivery.” That means the cloud will know to let you download the best version of a game for the particular platform you’re on, so you can play Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on your dusty old Xbox One, but you can play a better version of it on your new Series X without having to pay for a Series X copy.
You can rewatch the whole stream below, which includes games like Dirt 5, a puzzle adventure about someone having webbed fingers called Call Of The Sea, a weirdly creepy space shooter called Chorvs (or Chorus), Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, a game called Scarlet Nexus with anime effects that look so good, and a cyberpunk RPG that is not Cyberpunk 2077 called The Ascent. Smart viewers will notice that there aren’t any games published by Microsoft here, like your Halos or your Forzas, as those are being saved for later this summer.