Why ladybugs are the only way to truly appreciate the power of the new Xbox One X

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If you really want to impress your friends with your new Xbox One X, forget about the ridiculously pretty Assassin's Creed Origins, leave Forza Motorsport 7 alone, and sit down for a gentle journey through a meadow with Insects, Xbox's super demo for the consoles 4K and HDR capabilities. 

The interactive movie lets you toggle the 4K and HDR on and off, which should help soothe away any buyer's remorse you had about dropping $1000 on a 4K TV or upgrading your console. Disclaimer: our video player isn't so great at handling HDR, but it should give you a sense of why 20 people in our office ended up standing around a TV gawking at bugs. 

When we spoke to Albert Penello, the senior director of Xbox Console Marketing, he revealed it was his personal favorite, and developed in-house by the Xbox research team. 

"It's really short, it's about a minute and a half but if you really want to show graphical representation of what your TV can do it's actually a remarkable demo," he says. 

"It was built by our advance technology group as a teaching tool for developers to author in wide color gamut and high dynamic range, to show how the engine can scale between 4K and 1080p, and we saw it and it's just magical. We said 'can we ship this out to customers' and basically it's our own little interactive Planet Earth."

Insects is free to download on your new Xbox One X from the Microsoft Store. 

Rachel Weber
Rachel Weber
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Rachel Weber is the former US Managing Editor of GamesRadar+ and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She joined GamesRadar+ in 2017, revitalizing the news coverage and building new processes and strategies for the US team.