About Nick Santangelo

One of Microsoft’s earliest-announced Xbox One features might finally be added to the console later this year. Citing nebulous “sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans,” The Verge reports that Microsoft will …
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Update: After our story went live, a Twitter user claiming to be a member of Lizard Squad informed XBLA Fans that the cyber attack on Xbox Live took place between 9:00 and 11:00 pm UTC on Sunday. In a follow-up tweet, he stated that the alleged perpetrators “did manage to fix the lower restrictive server that allowed local play to be revived in a couple of hours.” Our original story is below.

Many gamers, including some XBLA Fans staffers, experienced difficulty playing multiplayer games over Xbox Live last night. If you were one of them, you now know who to blame for your woes.

Lizard Squad, the same collective of nefarious internet users behind attacks that brought Xbox Live to its knees this past holiday, has claimed responsibility for the network problems. In conjunction with the group Like No Other, Lizard Squad apparently hit Xbox Live with another shot from its weapon of choice: a DDoS attack.

Though XBL appears to have since fully recovered from the attack, this may have just been the opening salvo of Lizard Squad’s latest offensive. “More to come, it’s about time to re-ignite lizardsquad,” the group tweeted last night. Gamers may recall that the biggest holiday DDoS attack was preceded by a smaller one.

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Choice is everything in episodic titles from Telltale Games like Game of Thrones. Players make decisions in conversation trees and during action sequences that affect how the remainder of a season will play out. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

But for some players of Game of Thrones Episode 2: The Lost Lords, in-game choices aren’t amounting to much. Some copies of The Lost Lords for Xbox One are plagued by an issue preventing players’ choice data from migrating across episodes.

“We are aware of an issue with the Xbox One version of Game of Thrones – Episode 2: The Lost Lords, where customers’ choice data may not carry over correctly from Episode 1,” Telltale wrote on its forums. “We are working to determine the cause and will update here as soon as we have more information to share. We appreciate your patience and want to get you playing with your choices intact as soon as possible.”

That forum post was made on February 4 when the game was released. Today, Telltale posted an update explaining that it had submitted a patch it believes will resolve the issue to Microsoft for certification. The studio estimates this patch will be available within the next seven to 10 days.

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“It’s like Gone Home,” my roommate tells his curious D&D buddies of the game I’m playing for review. A cursory glance at the screen would lead you to believe that he wasn’t wrong, either. The game in question, Life is Strange: Chrysalis from Dontnod Entertainment and Square Enix, does feature a similar protagonist. Main character Max Caulfield is a young, confused girl looking for answers about the disappearance of another girl. After five years away in Seattle she’s returned to her small hometown of Arcadia Bay, OR to attend a prestigious boarding school. Chrysalis‘ setting puts Max in classes, at the school dormitories and at an old friend’s home. She’s not literally alone like Kaitlin Greenbriar in Gone Home, but as the shy kid in the back of the class, Max often feels like it.

If you stopped reading this review after that first paragraph, no one would blame you for describing Life is Strange as that game that’s “like Gone Home.” The two titles have one big difference, however: Gone Home is about solving puzzles, while Life is Strange is about solving conversations. And whereas video game puzzles usually only have one correct solution, conversations have room for many possible options to carry a game forward.

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Welcome to the Life is Strange review hub. Here we’ll collect our reviews for the individual episodes of the series as they are released. Once the series is complete, …
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StudioMDHR’s Cuphead grabbed a lot of headlines when it was teased as part of Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program during a montage video shown at E3 2014. Since then, however, news …
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You’ve read our picks for the best XBLA and ID@Xbox games of 2014. Now it’s time to look forward with us at what might be the best games of 2015. While fully acknowledging that some of these games likely won’t up to their billing and others may get pushed into 2016, these are the 2015 games that XBLA Fans is currently most looking forward to. If these releases aren’t on your radar yet, they will be after you’re done reading.

#IDARB

Developers: Other Ocean Interactive and The People of the Internet

#IDARB is a particularly interesting game to say we’re anticipating in 2015, seeing as XBLA Fans got our hands on what we were told was the “final” game in December and published our review already. This zany handball-meets-platformer game from Other Ocean Interactive and the fine folks of the internet — many features crowd sourced — isn’t officially out until February, though, when it will be part of the Games with Gold promotion. It’s difficult to explain just what #IDARB is, but it’s easy to recommend that you go play it when it releases next month.

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Ori and the Blind Forest will release March 11 on Xbox One for $19.99, developer Moon Studios announced today. The side-scroller will also be made available on PC the …
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Rogue Legacy is coming to Xbox One in 2015, developer Cellar Door Games has revealed. In response to a fan question about the rogue-like’s chances of making it to …
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It’s January, which means it’s time for XBLA Fans to take a look back at the best and brightest games of the last year.

2014 was a transitional year for the Xbox brand. It was Xbox One’s first full year on the market, and it bore witness to Microsoft going all-in on its complete reversal of the console’s strategy and public image. Redmond distanced its next-gen console from being some sort of multimedia wonderbox as much as possible and did its best to focus on the games. Despite a litany of exciting ID@Xbox game announcements, the program got off to a bit of a slow start, though. Ports and re-releases dominated much of 2014’s ID@Xbox release calendar, and last-gen Xbox Live Arcade releases on Xbox 360 were used to buoy Microsoft’s greater indie library.

If you paid as much attention to ID@Xbox as as XBLA Fans did, though, then you know there were some standout stars even if there was not a terribly high quantity of them. We’ve played the games and cast our votes, and how we present you with our 2014 Game of the Year awards. Don’t like our picks? Fair enough. Head to the comments and make your case for why yours are better.

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