This week in video games, May 29, 2017: Xbox launches game-subscription service

This week, Tekken 7 gets released, Red Dead Redemption gets delayed, and The Long Dark gets a date for the full-fledged retail launch. But first, Xbox rolls out a game-subscription service.

Xbox Game Pass begins this week

Microsoft is giving people more ways to play games with Xbox Game Pass, a monthly subscription service that will cost $11.99 in Canada.

Subscribing gives you access to more than 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, including recent titles like Halo 5: Guardians and Lego Batman, older greats like Borderlands and Viva Pinata, and entire series like BioShock and the first Gears of War trilogy.

You're not just streaming these games, either. With your subscription, you'll actually download these games to your Xbox One so you can play lag-free and without using up your home Internet-data plan.

You'll need a free Xbox Live account to join Xbox Game Pass, and if you're an Xbox Live Gold member (which costs between $5 and $12 a month, depending on your prepayment), you also get early access to games that are coming to Game Pass.

An Xbox Live Gold membership is also required to play online multiplayer and also comes with the monthly "Games With Gold" program, which delivers full versions of games to members for free.

Titles that are part of Game Pass will change each month, and being a subscriber gives you a 20-percent discount on games you decide you want to own.

Xbox Game Pass launches in Canada on June 1. Microsoft is offering a free 14-day trial.

Hinterland's The Long Dark launches on all platforms this summer

On the east coast of Vancouver Island, game designer Raphael van Lierop and a group of developers have been working away on The Long Dark, a game set in an environment that looks a lot like the area around Mount Washington and the Comox and Cumberland valleys.

Van Lierop's studio, Hinterland, released the game on Steam as an Early Access game, which meant that people could pay less than a full game would cost (US$20), to be able to play a game that was still being worked on. A year later, the game became one of the first titles in Microsoft's Xbox One Game Preview, a similar program.

Well, the beta testing is coming to an end. The Long Dark is going to be released in its first retail version on August 1, and it's also coming to PS4.

In all this time, The Long Dark has really been only a game of exploration and survival. It provided the environment, the elements, and the systems and left everything else up to the players.

On August 1, with the retail release, Hinterland is also releasing the first two episodes of the game's story mode, Wintermute. The developers expect that the episodes will each bring three to five hours of play, and the final three segments coming in the next year.

The price of the game is going up to US$35 before the end of May.

Red Dead Redemption 2 delayed until spring 2018

The sequel to Rockstar's western epic has been pushed back a few months to allow developers to have the time they need to "ensure we can deliver the best experience possible for our fans", according to a release.

The game is being designed for PS4 and Xbox One. The publisher has indicated that more information about the game will be coming this summer, perhaps at the annual E3 event in Los Angeles in June.

Get caught up on the Tekken story in time for Tekken 7

Fighting game Tekken 7 releases this week for PS4, Windows, and Xbox One. The franchise started in 1994 with an arcade cabinet and since then has become one of the bestselling fighting-video-game series.

There's a narrative that underlies the games, starting with Heihachi Mishima throwing his five-year-old son off a cliff. Kazuya survives the fall and seeks revenge against his father.

Publisher Bandai Namco put together a video recapping the storyline through the first three games in the franchise. It was created with eight-bit graphics and it is hilarious.