More Info on Xbox One titles D4 and Max: The Curse of Brotherhood at TGS

Xbox 360 hasn’t been a roaring success in Japan — and that’s a generous way of putting it. However, with a solid showing at Tokyo Game Show and Xbox One now confirmed for Japanese release in 2014, Microsoft have far from given up on the East.

Taking on Sony on their home turf, one of Microsoft’s most intriguing games of TGS was D4: Dreams Must Die, the new title from inimitable auteur Swery65. D4 is undeniably stylish and thematically interesting, but it’s the Kinect controls that have raised the eyebrows of gamers. Speaking about the controls in a TGS interview with Xbox Wire, Swery refers to Kinect as “the missing piece to my puzzle”:

“The player controls the character in a 3D space and approaches different objects to find clues. The player can also interact with a variety of unusual characters by speaking to them and monitoring them, and execute special actions in order to proceed through the story.

All of these controls use Kinect, and can be done from a sitting position on your couch.”

We don’t like being dragged from our sofas while playing games, so I’m sure his comments about playing from the couch are a massive relief to some.

Also on display, for the first time Xbox One, was Max: The Curse of Brotherhood. This is a sequel to Max and the Magic Marker, a cartoony platform puzzler which allowed the player to draw stuff directly into the game world. It was a pretty cool gimmick. In this follow-up, we see Max traversing a world of dark fantasy to retrieve his brother Felix, snatched by a monster. Another attempt by Microsoft to show that they too have an indie-friendly platform in Xbox One, and a cool-looking game in its own right.