This, my friends, is what we call a dramatic turn of events. This week, Microsoft announced that it would cut the price of its current gen Xbox One console by $100 dollars thus making it competitively priced with Sony's PlayStation 4. How were they able to do this? By dropping the Kinect 2.0 peripheral.

Obviously this was a very Microsoft heavy episode of the ShockCast due to all of the news that came out of the MS camp. Not only do we go into detail about what this price drop means for the company and the gaming industry but also the Kinect's real importance (or lack thereof) to the Xbox One experience. On top of that we also talk about the other Microsoft related announcements such as the dropping of the Xbox Live Gold pay wall for apps like Netflix and also how Games with Gold is now mimicking the PlayStation Plus model.

This show wasn't completely about the green machine though. We talk about some other news items as well including our skepticism for Watch_Dogs and why we think it's awesome that Bruce Lee is in EA Sports UFC. As usual, we do a run down of this week's new game releases and chat about what games we've been playing.

This week I was joined by my fellow Staff Writers Ryan Meitzler and Jorge Jimenez along with Deputy Editor Joel Tavares and DualShockers TV Host Al Zamora. Thanks as always to El Blanco Niño for our custom intro and outro tracks.

Subscribe to the ShockCast on iTunes by following this link

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