games

Drag Racing is a new game for your Windows Phone 8 device that has over fifty officially licensed cars that you can race down the strip. Everything from compact sports cars to muscle cars to sedans.

Drag Racing has plenty of upgrades to enhance your cars performance that can be purchased with your race winnings. You can race against the computer or choose an online opponent to challenge.  We've only messed with Drag Racing for about an hour and it comes across as a fun game for short bits of time as well as longer, marathon gaming sessions.

The Xbox One should offer an exponentially better entertainment experience than our beloved but aging Xbox 360. The gaming possibilities are greater than ever before thanks to beefier hardware (16 times as much RAM, for instance) and the new Kinect. That said, Microsoft chose to reveal precious few games during the event.

Let’s see what titles they announced and what we can expect when the console launches later this year…

The Xbox Windows Phone games SPY Mouse and Trivial Pursuit were introduced late last year as Nokia exclusives. That exclusivity ended today and both titles became available for all Windows Phones.

SPY Mouse is a puzzle game from the makers of Flight Control and has you playing the role of Agent Squeak, a super secret mouse operative. You guide Agent Squeak through over seventy levels spread out across six worlds. Each world has its own frisky hench-cat to defeat.

Since summer of last year, Electronic Arts and Chillingo have been pumping out Nokia-exclusive Xbox Windows Phone games. Players not fortunate enough to own Nokia phones sometimes feel left out and/or upset because they can’t access those games from their phones. But we are talking about timed exclusivity here.

Six months after release, Mirror’s Edge became available to all Windows Phone users, followed by Risk and Connect 4. So while owners of HTC, Samsung, and other non-Nokia devices have to wait a while, Nokia’s deal with EA does pay off for them as well.

This week, two more former exclusives became available to all Windows Phone users: The Game of Life and Parking Mania. As if that wasn’t enough, Shoot 1UP, an Xbox game that was found to be incompatible with Windows Phone 8 has just gained compatibility. Gotta love being able to play more stuff!

When Cut the Rope: Experiments arrived on Windows Phone last month, fans of the Cut the Rope series were of course pleased to see another installment on our platform. But the sequel’s arrival also reminded us that the first Cut the Rope had yet to receive an update since launch. The original game on Windows Phone had only 275 levels - 75 less than other versions.

As mobile Xbox gamers surely know, Rovio has been busy updating several of its Angry Birds games lately. Now it looks like Russian developer ZeptoLab has decided to join in the fun, because they’ve updated Cut the Rope at last! The update brings our version up to par with the iOS and Android games and gives players a great reason to rejoin Om Nom on his quest for candy.

Microsoft has unleashed this weeks Windows Phone Red Stripe Deals. Pricing has been slashed on the Xbox game Super Monkey Ball 2, glƏƏk!, and Hockey Nations PP.

For those not familiar, every week Microsoft discounts the pricing on a Windows Phone Xbox title as well as a app and game from independent developers. You easily identify them by the red stripe that surrounds the app/games Store icon tile.

Since last week we’ve been undergoing a small communications hitch with Microsoft’s gaming division that will hopefully be cleared up soon. Earlier this week though, French site MonWindowsPhone passed along the news that N.O.V.A. 3 would be today’s Xbox release, so we reported it as such. Of course we asked Gameloft to verify the release date, but they could only say for certain that it will come out in May – not specifically today.

A short while ago, a different Xbox Windows Phone game popped up in the Store: Monster Burner from Ubisoft! That’s not a bad thing, because it’s FREE, seems like a fantastic game, and runs on both Windows Phone 7 and 8. But given that Gameloft couldn’t say for sure whether N.O.V.A. 3 will come out today, we are left slightly unsure about its release status. Will we get one Xbox game this week or two?

That question aside, most of you guys will dig Monster Burner in a big way. Read on for our first impressions.