About Nick Santangelo

We spent last week ringing off 40 of the year’s biggest upcoming XBLA games. It was a collaborative process that saw the whole XBLAFans team put together a varied list of many of the top titles headed to Microsoft’s downloadable platform in 2013. Today we’re capping off our look forward with our staff members’ picks for the game each of them is aching to play most in the months ahead. You don’t have to agree with any of us, of course, so make sure you jump into the comments and let us know the game you think should be at the top of everyone’s list.

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Hollywood doesn’t like pirates. The movie industry continues to use the full firepower of its impressively financed and outfitted armada to sink skull and crossbones banner-flying sites sailing through the dark waters of the internet; sites which it claimed as recently as January of last year to be responsible for costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year and for killing 750,000 American jobs.

Though the Government Accountability Office has since reported those numbers to be bogus, no one can deny that internet pirates are plundering at least some of the movie business’ potential earnings. That’s why the Motion Picture Association of America was hopeful in November over the prospect of President Obama’s re-election helping it make progress in its war on pirates.

But Portland, Oregon — home to Minecraft: The Story of Mojang documentary maker 2 Player Productions — is most certainly not Hollywood. Still, one approach studio founders Pawl Owens, Paul Levering and Asif Siddiky have taken to promoting their film about original Minecraft creator Mojang is unorthodox to say the least.

They pirated it.

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Here we are once again at the start of what’s sure to be another fantastic year of XBLA releases. Each day this week XBLA Fans will be rolling out a list of eight of our most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade releases of 2013. While we can’t possibly cover every single XBLA game planned for this year, we’ll be giving you a varied list of 40 of the most promising titles we expect to release on XBLA in 2013. Once it’s all done, be sure to check back in next Monday when each staff member makes his/her picks for the game he/she is most looking forward to.

Alien Fear

Developer: City Interactive

Alien Fear is an Unreal Engine 3-powered sci-fi first person shooter headed to XBLA, presumably at some point in 2013. Though we’re assuming that the above image is a target screen rather than an actual in-game image, developer City Interactive is promising that the use of Epic Games’ ubiquitous engine is allowing them to create an Xbox Live Arcade title that boasts “visually stunning, large-scale environments with impressive long-range vistas and expressionistic lighting.” The co-op shooter has yet to be shown in action, but XBLAFans is looking forward to finding out if the game lives up to the promise shown in the above image whenever we get our first real look at it.

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The story of Skullgirls‘ development, release and post-release support just may have more twists to it than its top-heavy characters have curves on their pixelated bodies. It started with two men, each with a skill, a passion and an idea. In 2009, longtime fighting game fan and tournament player Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont began programming a fighting game of his own. Elsewhere, unbeknownst to Zaimont at the time, artist Alex “o_8” Ahad was drawing a new fighting game universe of his own into existence, complete with characters to populate it. Eventually the two were introduced and merged their pet projects together at Reverge Labs into the game that released on XBLA and PSN in April of last year as Skullgirls.

Critics generally gave the game a favorable reception, with its combined XBLA and PSN score averaging 80% on Metacritic. Gamers gave it a fairly warm reception, too. The developer was excited when Skullgirls sold 50,000 copies in its first 10 days on the market. Although the development team informed XBLAFans on Thursday that Skullgirls has failed to turn a profit to date, we were also informed that the game has performed well enough that publisher Autumn Games is interested in green-lighting a sequel if it can successfully dodge the sticks and stones City National Bank has thrown its way.

With a PC version, DLC characters and multiple sequels in the plans, things were looking up for Zaimont, Ahad and the rest of the crew at Reverge. Then everything went quiet. Months went by without a single update on the port, downloadable content or the sequel. It was eventually revealed that the Skullgirls team had been let go by Reverge Labs in June of 2012 after developer and publisher allowed their contract to expire without agreeing upon a new one. More sticks. More stones.

Whether it was the entire team that was let go or some fraction of it has been a matter that was up for some debate. Reverge blogged that it was some of the team, while the displaced developers once said it was “the entire” team. When questioned repeatedly by XBLAFans over the past couple of months, neither of those factions nor Autumn has been willing to go on record to clear the air. The one thing that has been abundantly clear, though, is that the contract expiration effectively brought about a game over screen for future Skullgirls content and its would-be creators.

Or did it?

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A release may finally be imminent for one of XBLA’s most-anticipated games. 17-bit studio head Jake Kazdal informed XBLAFans today that its turn-based strategy title, Skulls of the …
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It would seem that falsely predicting the arrival of The End is something reserved not strictly for ancient Mayan civilizations, but also for modern video game developers. Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition developer 4J Studios responded to fan questions on Twitter yesterday about the impending arrival of the floating island known as “The End” is actually not impending at all: the island will not be patched into the XBLA version of the game along with Title Update 8 (TU8), as the developer said it would back in December.

The reason for the delay is that the studio has been forced to dedicate time to creating fixes for bugs that popped up in Title Update 7 (TU7), which released on December 19. 4J tweeted that its assertion that The End would come to XBLA as part of the next title update was made “before we knew we were releasing a bug fix update for TU7. The bug fix update will be TU8, so The End will be later.”

Some of the bugs that will be addressed include one the “Kick Player” bug that freezes the player’s Xbox when the host tries to kick him or her and one that mistakenly prompts players that they cannot sleep in beds when monsters are around.

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Developer Telltale’s episodic zombie adventure game The Walking Dead has received no shortage of critical praise, winning myriad outlets’ Game of the Year awards (including XBLAFans’). According to …
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Update: Lab Zero has informed XBLAFans that the studio has been working with Microsoft and has successfully shrunken down the size of the update some, though they declined to go into specifics about the current size of the update. Look for a full follow-up article coming soon. Original story below.

Lab Zero Games, the studio now responsible for all things Skullgirls following publisher Autumn Games and original developer Reverge Labs parting ways last summer, still hasn’t been able to get the patch that released for the PSN version of its fighting game in November onto the Xbox Live Marketplace. The holdup, apparently, is Microsoft’s XBLA update file size limit.

A tweet from the official Japanese Skullgirls Twitter account went out on Friday claiming that the update is exponentially larger than what Microsoft will allow. The update Lab Zero put together for its fighting game is roughly 590 MB in size — a whopping 147.5 times the size of the paltry 4 MB limit the developer says Microsoft places on updates. A rough Google translation showed that the Skullgirls team is under the impression that it’s possible to be granted an exception, but the process is arduous.

The revelatory tweet came on the same day that the main Skullgirls Twitter account stated that the team was “frustrated.” It’s not clear whether its frustrations are directed at Microsoft size limits or the two sides’ inabilities to get something worked out, but XBLAFans has followed up in an attempt to find out exactly what the team is unsated with and will update this story if we get a response.

Regardless of where the developer’s frustrations lie, Lab Zero Games is working with Microsoft to get the patch out “as soon as possible,” so there is still hope that it will make its way to XBLA. Skullgirls fans might not want to get their hopes up too high for it to appear anytime soon. The patch has been “held up in MS submission and holiday limbo” since as far back as December 12, according to an earlier tweet by the game’s official account. Though the team was said to be “pushing hard” later that very week, the calendar is nearing an entire month later and it sounds as if little, if any, progress has been made.

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A demo for the Grounding Inc. and LAND HO! co-developed on-rails shooter Crimson Dragon suddenly appeared on the Japanese Xbox Live Marketplace over the weekend sans a formal announcement of its existence. Japanese XBLA players interested in test-flying a dragon were required to have at least a Silver Xbox Live account and be willing to part with a wallet-obliterating 4,294,967,295 MSP. The demo release, along with its ludicrous listing price, was a mistake, but it is said to be in a playable state.

Ground Inc.’s Yukio Futatsugi (director, Panzer Dragoon Saga) responded to questions about the nature of the demo over Twitter by saying that it was “mistakenly” (Google Translate) released, but that it was “actually playable.” XBLA Fans’ unofficial man in Japan, @lifelower, reports that the demo initially appeared to be a limited version of the full Crimson Dragon game, but Futatsugi shot that notion down, explaining that the download was a dedicated demo. The game designer also mentioned that he has been in contact with Microsoft over the accidental release.

Microsoft pulled the demo down on New Year’s Eve, but lifelower was able to grab footage of the English version of the game and toss it up on YouTube. The video, posted above, shows off the game’s menus and one of the six playable dragons soaring through the skies and mixing it up with airborne baddies in jungle and arctic levels.

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XBLA players will be able to ring in the New Year next week by partying like it’s 1999…or 1989…or any other year from the ’80s or ’90s, for that matter: developer Vblank Entertainment Inc. has revealed that Retro City Rampage will finally release on Xbox Live Arcade on January 2. The game first released on PSN and PC in October, but the announced XBLA and WiiWare versions were pushed back indefinitely.

Brian Provinciano, the man “almost entirely” responsible for developing Retro City Rampage, announced last month that an improved XBLA version was complete and had entered certification, but he was unable to provide a concrete release date at the time. Provinciano used the time between the October release on PSN/PC and the game’s November certification bid to tinker away on the XBLA version, ensuring it would be what he calls “a better experience.”

The retro-tinged open world game was designed from the beginning to require players “to stop and strategize” while playing. Unfortunately, he received player feedback following the October release that the game was frustrating when players entered into certain missions with “just fists and guns.” Additional tutorials and tip screens that show after a player has failed a mission a certain number of times have been added to the XBLA release in an attempt to smooth out the experience. Further softening the difficulty are additional checkpoints sprinkled throughout the game.

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