About Nick Santangelo

This November will mark 12 years since the launch of Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming service that currently boasts more than 48 million global users. Ensuring all of those Live members are constantly connected with each other and enjoying all of the service’s many features is paramount to delivering the Xbox experience gamers have come to expect. To pull it off, Microsoft has staffers working around the clock at its Xbox Live Operations Center (XOC) in Redmond, Washington, reports Total Xbox.

As part of their job function, XOC staffers respond to clear-cut problems. The majority of their time, however, is dedicated to ferreting out issues that no one knows about. Team members search for irregularities and investigate them to discover whether or not they are problems that need solving. They can’t guess at whether something is a threat to uninterrupted Xbox Live service or not; they have to know. They have to find out.

Microsoft Gaming Ninja (yes, that’s his real job title) Eric Neustadter informed Total Xbox that his team has to be ready for anything at all times. “It’s a bit like being in the fire department or police, where you have to think through what would I do in [a worst case] scenario. My boss was in the fire department for years, and he went from doing that to running services like this. In a lot of ways, it is a similar mindset.”

Redundancy is Neustadter’s go-to tool for preventing an Xbox Live doomsday scenario. “We have all the things you need to run 24/7/365, like multiple power grids connected into the campus,” he explained. “When that fails, we have diesel generators with huge tanks out there so that we can run for roughly 72 hours without power, and then we can bring in tankers with more diesel and refill the tanks while they’re running. We also have a disaster recovery site… somewhere else on a different power grid with almost all of this replicated so we can go over there and work instead.”

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The crawlers keep crawling, and the drip keeps dripping in Defense Grid 2.

Hidden Path Entertainment’s sequel to its 2008 tower defense game features a new resource and score system known as “the drip,” and it works exactly as planned: it makes games winnable for greenhorns while keeping aces chasing after higher scores that are achieved by killing crawling aliens with all manner of haste.

Never having played Defense Grid: The Awakening, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect out of its follow-up when I picked up the controller at PAX East. From the outset, the player is confronted with a multitude of options for defending the base from unwanted pests and a cluster of information tracking your progress in this endeavor. The amount of data and options on the screen paired with the constant march of baddies out of their gate, towards my tower and back again with poached cores in tow could have been overwhelming. It could have been, but it wasn’t. Hidden Path Entertainment saw to that with its streamlined presentation of data, tower building options and drip-drop of resources. Everything was pleasantly intuitive and easily manageable.

Sometimes, divorce is the answer

Being intuitive for beginners while remaining fun and challenging for experts is exactly what Hidden Path was aiming for with its sequel. Though it’s impossible to report on the latter, I can tell you that the studio pulled off the former with aplomb. The drip, which Polygon first reported on here, allows for resources to constantly accumulate as a line graph tracks your score in the upper right corner of the screen. Regardless of what your score is, your resource distribution rate remains the same. The rate of the drip in the PAX build allowed me to erect large quantities of a mixture of the six tower types present (cannon, missile, laser, gun, inferno and tesla) and upgrade many of them to carry more firepower.

Executive Producer Jeff Pobst explains that his team separated score from resource distribution in Defense Grid 2 in order to avoid the “negative feedback loop” that many players got stuck in due to poor decision making in the first game. As Pobst describes it, novices would waste too many of their resources early on building the wrong types of towers or placing towers in poor positions. This would leave them unable to repel enemies and unable to gather enough resources to compensate for their mistakes. Meanwhile, top players would dominate early on and find themselves with an embarrassment of riches, making victory too easily achieved.

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While at PAX East last weekend XBLA Fans stopped by developer NinjaBee’s studio to take a look at Nutjitsu, which the studio told us entered Microsoft certification and should be releasing shortly. After our play session, the studio’s PR & Marketing Specialist Michael Purser had something else for us — a manila envelope full of photos he described as “recently declassified.”

Purser offered no further details in person and hasn’t responded to our email query asking what exactly we’re looking at in these photos. It’s likely that they are concept art from NinjaBee’s next game, especially considering that Nutjitsu for Xbox One is now content complete. The four photos, which you can view by clicking inside, contain imagery of what appear to be “top secret” plans for a mech; a scientist posing next to a giant fang in an airplane hangar; a Loch Ness Monster-type creature; and a World War II soldier aiming an artillery canon at a giant one-eyed beast.

We don’t know for certain what these Pacific Rim-esque pictures mean, but it’s possible NinjaBee is attempting to use the media to help it start a viral marketing campaign leading to the announcement of its next project.

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Nutjitsu has been submitted to Microsoft to be run through the console holder’s certification process, developer NinjaBee informed XBLA Fans this weekend at the PAX East video game convention in Boston.

Although games sometimes run into issues during certification that cause them to be rejected and resubmitted once those issues are resolved by the developer, NinjaBee Public Relations and Marketing Specialist Michael Purser says he expects Nutjitsu to release shortly on Xbox. Purser added that the studio is targeting a $5 price point for the game.

XBLA Fans was able to go hands-on with the title at PAX East, playing four of its 15 stages. Taking control of a ninja squirrel, we were required to either spend a specific amount of time on highlighted parts of the map in a king-of-the-hill-styled mode; collect acorns and deposit them into a sack; or pick up five scrolls to achieve victory.

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Microsoft’s Xbox team is aware that many gamers aren’t fans of its forcing Xbox One and 360 owners to pay $59.99 annually for Xbox Live Gold access in order to play games online and access apps like Netflix. It’s aware that rivals Sony and Nintendo don’t charge their customers an additional fee to access many of the same apps. And since many of these apps (Netflix, HBO Go, etc.) already charge users a subscription fee, that means Microsoft is the only console creator making its customers pay a second time to enjoy such apps.

That might be changing at some point. Maybe. Possibly.

Phil Spencer, who in March was promoted to lead the Xbox team, recently had an exchange with a Twitter user over the Xbox’s app paywall, reports Forbes. His words may be of interest to Xbox Live Gold’s detractors.

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Microsoft has plans in place to add one of the most-requested features missing from its next-gen Xbox One video game console — backwards compatibility. Responding to an audience member who asked if there were plans in place for Xbox 360 emulation on the Xbox One at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, the platform holder’s Partner Development Lead Frank Savage confirmed that such plans do indeed exist, reports Kotaku.

“There are [plans for Xbox 360 emulation on Xbox One], but we’re not done thinking them through yet, unfortunately,” Savage stated. “It turns out to be hard to emulate the PowerPC stuff on the X86 stuff. So there’s nothing to announce, but I would love to see it myself.”

When they launched this past November, neither Microsoft’s Xbox One nor Sony’s PlayStation 4 came equipped with backwards compatibility for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, their respective predecessors. The Xbox 360 was capable of playing select original Xbox games. Early PlayStation 3 models were capable of full PlayStation 2 backwards compatibility, while later versions of the console were only able to play digital PS2 games purchased on the PlayStation Store, not original disc-based versions of PS2 titles.

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The independent developer who brought XBLA gamers BattleBlock Theater, Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers has announced that, in addition to game development, it has two other ways it hopes will result in the best indie games possible making it “from conception to physical reality in the industry.” The Behemoth is now providing quality assurance and usability testing and what it describes as “no strings attached” funding for external indie developers.

Its testing lab, which the Sand Diego developer previously talked to XBLA Fans about at PAX East 2013, has been dubbed The Research Centaur and is said to staff testers with an average of six and a half years worth of experience in game testing. When he spoke of the testing center last year, The Behemoth President John Baez told us that it started as a purely internal department. Things went so swimmingly when testing BattleBlock Theater, though, that the developer decided to begin offering its testing services to external indie studios.

“I mean, one of the things we’ve done to kind of contribute to that [indie developer survivability] is we built a usability lab for Battleblock Theater, which has gone really, really well,” Baez said last year at PAX East. “It’s about a year old, and it’s only internal, and now we’ve opened it up. Well, there’s that and a QA department — very small, four people — but they’re very, very good at what they do. And now we’re beginning to open that up to other developers. So Bastion for all of iOS, we tested [it] and certified [it] to make sure that [Supergiant’s] game was good.

“So we’re opening that up to independent developers as a resource so they don’t have to go — I mean it’s not any cheaper than going to a big, gigantic test firm — but you’ll get the absolute attention to detail.”

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Following the announcement of his promotion to new Xbox boss, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer conducted a brief interview with Game Informer about his vision for the brand moving forward in which he continually stressed the importance of putting games first.

“My goal, first and foremost, is to make sure that everybody understands that Xbox is a gaming brand and it’s going to be gaming first,” Spencer told Game Informer. “That’s a leadership principle that I will bring to the program from day one. It’s not that it hasn’t been there in the past, but if you put the studio guy at the head, you kinda know what you’re going to get.”

Spencer headed up Microsoft Studios before taking over as the leader of all things Xbox. The brand took a huge hit in the eyes of the gaming public last year when its Xbox One reveal focused more on the next-gen console’s ability to play TV shows than to play video games. While Spencer said that performing multiple functions is necessary for any “incredible” electronic home entertainment product, he stressed again that games are priority one for the Xbox brand.

“We have always been, since the beginning, all about games at Xbox,” he said. “I want to make sure that shows up not only internally, but also externally.”

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It’s no secret: many developers who brought their games to Xbox Live Arcade last generation were put off by the process and Microsoft’s policies. Some even abandoned the platform as a result. It may have taken a few years and a lot of complaints, but word of the indie development community’s malcontent finally made it to Microsoft, and the platform holder decided to do something about it. That something is the ID@Xbox, for which 25 games were announced last week at GDC.

So what’s different this time around? Chris Charla, the program’s director, recently chatted with Digital Spy and answered that exact question. One of the biggest complaints about XBLA was its lack of visibility. Gamers who powered on their Xbox 360s and explored the dashboard weren’t finding most XBLA games. It wasn’t the gamers’ fault, though; Arcade games were buried deeper and deeper away in the increasingly convoluted Xbox 360 menu system nearly every time it was updated. Charla, reiterating previous statements Microsoft has made about ID@Xbox, explained how indie games are now easier to find on Xbox One.

“There’s not a separate section,” he told Digital Spy. “It’s just a game is a game is a game. Games that come through ID@Xbox will be right next to games from any other publisher.”

And since all games are just that, indie games will receive access to everything AAA games do on Xbox One: Kinect, SmartGlass, Upload, Twitch recording, achievements, etc. While Charla admitted that discoverability is a continuing problem for indie games on all distribution platforms, he believes that tearing down the walls that separated such games from big budget releases on Xbox 360 is paramount to solving the problem.

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The agents of Super Time Force‘s titular time-traveling force aren’t the only ones busy messing around with time. Capybara Games, the developer behind the upcoming XBLA and Xbox One action title, has moved the release timeline its targeting for the game to this summer, reports Polygon.

“It’s really tough to tell with Q&A and the certification process, but we’re really hoping for May or early June,” studio head Nathan Vella told Polygon this week at Game Developers Conference. “As soon as possible.”

In the game, players have the ability to call “Time Out” and rewind the action upon dying so that they can fight alongside previous versions of themselves in, as Capy’s website explains, “the good ol’ seconds of a few seconds ago, creating a veritable army of yous.” The ability to rewind and try again might be an attractive one to Capy Games, considering that it has had to change release plans for Super Time Force more than once.

Vella said last September that his game would “definitely” release in 2013. The studio president said at the time that the game was “feature-locked.” That was before an Xbox One version of Super Time Force was announced, though. The work necessary to make the next-gen iteration of the side-scroller a reality forced the release window for both versions back into “early 2014.”

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