About Nick Santangelo

Seemingly everyone’s favorite PC developer-publisher hybrid, Valve, is planning to ship out prototypes of its so-called “Steam Box” micro gaming PCs within four months’ time. The Steam Box — of which there will be many varieties produced by different manufacturers, including one from Valve itself — aims to transplant the PC gaming experience into a living room near you.

Dedicated game consoles have dominated that space ever since the Nintendo Entertainment System brought the industry back from the precipice of what many prognosticators of the time thought was a no-continue bottomless pit the home console business had fallen into in 1985. Microsoft entered the console business in 2001 and has been anything but shy about its designs on owning the living room. Its next console, believed to be launching this holiday season, is no doubt being discussed by some individuals in Redmond this very moment. In addition to the usual competition from Nintendo and Sony, Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox will have to deal with Valve’s boxes attaching themselves to the back of consumers’ televisions like some sort of hidden bloodsucking leach.

Microsoft isn’t worried.

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Update: Following our report this morning on developer IllFonic’s XBLA shooter Nexuiz having its servers shut down XBLAFans was able to get in contact with IllFonic Creative Director Kedhrin Gonzalez about the unfortunate situation resulting from publisher THQ’s bankruptcy. When asked if it was possible for the developer to take control of the servers now that THQ, the current server manager, is no longer around to foot the bill, Gonzalez explained to us via email that IllFonic does not possess the funding to do so.

“We certainly could pay for the servers to be up and running on XBLA outside of THQ,” he said. “However, the cost to do this is too much for IllFonic in our current state.”

As noted in our original story, the game disappeared from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace earlier this month only to reappear a short time after. Gonzalez explained that that too, as we suspected, was a result of THQ’s bankruptcy filing. He informed XBLAFans that the game was de-listed after its servers were taken down. “However, THQ tried to get them back up for a while longer to keep the game alive. Unfortunately, the costs are just too high for THQ or IllFonic to carry. We are very happy THQ tried to keep things running for as long as they could. This situation has been really sad for us at IllFonic and [we] wish there was something more we could do.”

Gonzalez reiterated the point made in yesterday’s Facebook post on the matter, ensuring PC players that the version of Nexuiz on their platform of choice will remain online since it is hosted on completely different servers than those hosting the XBLA version.

But with THQ planning to sell off Nexuiz as part of a lot of game properties to the highest bidder in April, what will become of IllFonic and its shooter? “Nexuiz will remain in the control of IllFonic even if a new publisher wins the bid of Lot 6 Licensed IPs,” said Gonzalez. “However, we are a developer that believes in working with partners…even if it comes through a unseen circumstance like this. We don’t know what to expect in the event someone does purchases the license. Whatever happens, we will do whatever it takes to make sure our PC players can continue to enjoy the game. However, if a new publisher or owner of the licensed IP wants to turn the XBLA lights back on…we certainly wouldn’t be against it.”

Original Story: Due to the much-publicized bankruptcy of publisher THQ, the servers for XBLA shooter Nexuiz have been shut down. IllFonic, the game’s developer, explained on Facebook yesterday that there is no one to maintain the servers now that THQ is defunct.

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Update: In the brief span of time since this article was published, Lab Zero Games was able to raise another $25,000, meaning it has hit its first stretch goal: Squigly will now get her own stage and story mode. Original story follows.

Lab Zero Games was hoping to reach its goal in 30 days. Some thought the notion of raising $150,000 for a DLC character for XBLA, PSN and PC fighting game Skullgirls would be “impossible.” As it turns out, it was — just not in the way many onlookers were thinking.

It didn’t take Lab Zero 30 days to raise the funds it requires to finish designing the character Squigly and get her into its game. It didn’t even take 30 hours. In less than a day, the independent studio that last year was sculpted out of some bits of clay that fell from Reverge Labs was able to raise the full $150,000 it says it requires to bring Squigly to gamers.

“In less than 24 hours, #Skullgirls has raised $150k for Squigly!” reads a tweet that went out this morning from the official Skullgirls account. “Everyone at Lab Zero is humbled. Thank you so much!”

Shortly thereafter, Lab Zero Games CEO Peter Bartholow provided XBLAFans with details on the character’s XBLA release. First, a title update and mandatory DLC pack that will add Squigly — along with any stretch items that the Indiegogo campaign is able to hit — will be released. An initially free-of-charge Squigly unlock will be released simultaneously. Squigly will remain free for a 3-month period and will set gamers back $5 from that point forward.

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He’s real all right. He is one man, and he really did gain inside knowledge of Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox, among other once-secretive industry projects. But he’s not a former Microsoft employee or developer who has worked on a game for the platform said to be codenamed Durango. He’s a hacker.

The skilled Australian hacker previously known to the public only as “SuperDaE” has at varying times gained surreptitious computer access to Microsoft, Sony, Epic and Blizzard. What exactly he was privy to once on the inside of any of these industry titans’ systems is still up for some debate, as many of the reported details differ between publisher and hacker. However, there was a time when he was almost certainly in possession of myriad whitepapers containing intricate details about Microsoft and Sony’s respective next-gen console plans.

“Was” is the operative word here. SuperDae, whose real name is Dan “Dylan” Henry and who once attempted to sell what was either an actual Xbox Durango development kit or an uncannily convincing replica of one, has been caught. On the morning of Tuesday, February 19, Australian police — along with an American who Dylan alleges to be an FBI agent — raided Henry’s home and confiscated enough items to fill a 6-page police report. In a tell-almost-all, Kotaku Editor-in-Chief Stephen Totilo recounts in fascinating detail not just the search and seizure of Henry’s belongings, but Totilo’s entire history of dealings with the man who is undoubtedly the most publicly known spiller of next-gen beans.

“I’ve lost everything,” Henry told Kotaku a few days ago. After the seizure of his computers, paperwork, his Blackberry, his Visa, banking records and, strangely, a phallic-shaped cup, the hacker described his life as now being in ruins. Members of Western Australia’s Technology Crime Investigation Unit who took part in the raid reportedly told Henry, who has not been charged with any crime, that he was not allowed a lawyer and taunted him over how he would be treated in prison.

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Arkedo Studio, the developer behind XBLA’s Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, will no longer be producing games. The independent French developer is not shutting down, but it no longer has any employees and will not be developing any future games, a blog post from Arkedo Creative Director Aurelien Regard explains.

“Arkedo, the company, is still here,” writes Regard in the post that was roughly translated from French to English by a fan. “But no one’s employed anymore. No more games are produced either. That’s the subtlety of the situation: Arkedo hasn’t closed down and is not bankrupt, going into administration or whatever big word, as it is managed properly. It is interesting for the structure to still be here as after Hell Yeah!, we’ve made two small games which are finished but you’re not aware of them yet. We hope to release them soon and it should be fine on this side.”

A lack of a publisher-funded future project to work on; an inability to sustain the mid-sized studio Arkedo apparently grew to be during Wrath of the Dead Rabbit‘s development; and divergent future plans of Regard and Arkedo co-founder Camille Guermonprez all contributed to the decision to let the team go and not produce any more software.

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This past Tuesday saw the release of the first trio of games — 1943: The Battle of Midway, Avengers and Black Tiger — in the planned 15-game Capcom Arcade Cabinet for XBLA and PSN. Capcom will bring three more selections from its 1980s library of 8-bit games to Xbox Live Arcade every two weeks, and XBLA gamers will eventually be able to purchase all 15 of the Capcom Arcade Cabinet games in one 2000-MSP bundle.

Neither Xbox Live Arcade nor Capcom are strangers to revisiting old classics, so why release these particular games? Why now? Speaking with Japanese site GAME Watch, Producter Kenji Kataoka “a lot of requests from users about porting our old games,” according to a rough translation provided by XBLAFans prolific tipster @lifelower. “We couldn’t at that time,” Kataoka continued, “but…Capcom’s 30th anniversary year is good timing for it. So finally, [we said,] ‘Let’s make a game for users.’ We also wanted to release games that are completely converted using [the] current gen consoles’ power as we can.”

Kataoka’s initial remarks didn’t quite explain why these exact titles were chosen, but GAME Watch pushed him further. “We roughly chose games based on popularity inside and outside of Japan,” the producer explained, “and narrowed down these 17 games. Most of them are requested a lot from users but we can’t release some games due to various reasons. Personally I wanted Street Fighter or Tiger Road.”

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Yesterday XBLAFans reported that developer Humble Hearts has some “exciting news” related to its debut effort, Dust: An Elysian Tail, in the pipeline. Humble Hearts hasn’t announced what …
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One-man development studio Humble Hearts will soon be announcing some news about last August’s Summer of Arcade title, Dust: An Elysian Tail. A Humble Hearts Facebook post states that studio head Dean Dodrill has “some exciting news to share over the coming month. The dust hasn’t settled yet!”

Dodrill has made no mention on Facebook, Twitter or the game’s official website as to what the news will be, leaving gamers and XBLAFans alike to speculate as to what it could be. Our best guess is that Dust is going to be getting some downloadable content, but a sequel or a PSN and/or Steam port are also possibilities at this time, as is just about anything else anyone can imagine.

A port seems unlikely given that Dodrill took the opportunity to also mention that yesterday marked the 6-month anniversary of his game’s release on XBLA and that he wanted “to thank everyone who has followed me and helped make the game a great success.” Certainly those statements don’t entirely rule out a port, but the XBLA callout would seem to imply that the news is XBLA-related.

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Microsoft’s still-unannounced next-generation Xbox console will ship with a new control pad, a 500GB HDD, a “much-improved” Kinect motion sensor and the ability to run multiple games/apps simultaneously, according to a Kotaku source who claims to be in possession of a development kit for the machine said to be codenamed Durango. According to Kotaku’s article, all Durango SKUs will not only ship with a Kinect sensor, but they will also only function when one is connected.

This latest next-gen scuttlebutt follows in the still-crashing wake churned up by another round of rumors that XBLAFans reported on just last week. The sources behind those rumors also asserted that the so-called Xbox 720 would bring with it a new and improved version of Microsoft’s motion-sensing technology.

Regular next-gen rumor followers will be familiar with Kotaku’s latest rumor source, who goes by the handle “SuperDaE.” He, as Kotaku identifies him, caught gamers’ attention last summer when he attempted to sell what he said was an Xbox Durango dev kit on eBay. Interestingly, SuperDaE said the sale was intercepted by Microsoft and prevented from going through on account of copyright issues. Microsoft has not acknowledged as much and is unlikely to considering that it has so far done everything short of wave its collective hand in front of a Kinect sensor like some sort of Jedi Knight and confidently state that there is no next-gen Xbox whenever the subject has been broached.

SuperDaE’s information, which was supposedly gleaned from a score of Microsoft whitepapers, points to the next-gen Kinect sensor being capable of tracking up to six gamers simultaneously (up from two in the current version) and 25 of each player’s skeletal joints (up from 20). Color and depth resolution and depth range are said to be getting dramatic increases, and “Active IR resolution” is reportedly being added to Kinect’s specs. The whitepapers say Kinect will always be watching users and that it will automatically detect players and associate them with their Xbox Live accounts.

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We have a winner! Congratulations to reader “KnuX86”! We’ll be in contact with you soon to explain how to claim your prize! The correct answer was “Antlion” from Castle Crashers (check the original image after the jump). Thanks for entering, everyone!

Welcome to the final day of our Battleblock Theater XBLA multiplayer beta code giveaway contest! At some point in February or March (the exact date has yet to be sorted out), The Behemoth’s Battleblock Theater will begin a closed beta, with 10,000 XBLA gamers getting access.

Sound like fun? Want in? Then all you have to do is guess which Behemoth game character (or other noun) is pictured in the above distorted image. Post your best guess in the comments below, and remember, if you don’t win today, be sure to keep coming back, because we’ll be picking a winner every day for an entire week. Good luck!

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