About Nick Santangelo

Have you ever had a friend that just doesn’t seem to get it? No matter how many times he’s informed that you’re just not into a band, a sport or some other such thing he just keeps on dragging you out to experience it. He can only be denied so many times before you reach the end of your Seinfeldian Excuse Rolodex and bite the bullet. So it is with MMA and one of my closest friends. Despite maintaining a serious passion for a number of sports, MMA excites me about as much as the prospect of playing Superman 64.

It’s of little surprise, then, that enthusiasm was low while trekking across the convention hall en route for an appointment to play 345 Games’ Bellator: MMA Onslaught. The nice folks at 345 ran through a quick overview of their fighting game and demoed a match in the blissfully peaceful office off the show floor. John noted how much better the visuals were than the last time he had seen the game. Then Matt McEnerney, senior producer at 345, and company showed off the game’s surprisingly deep RPG elements — character creation and progression. Once they were done tinkering, the fight was on. The more of the game that was shown, the more I suddenly found myself eager to give a try.

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Signal Studios (Toy Soldiers) enjoyed the special honor of having its next project, Ascend: New Gods, unveiled on gaming’s biggest stage last week. The action title was debuted during Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference, live in front of millions of gamers watching around the globe. Speaking with Games Industry International, Signal Creative Director D.R. Albright III said that the opportunity came about as a result of the strong bonds the studio established with the publisher while working on Toy Soldiers. Although working with a gargantuan corporation like Microsoft has on occasion tried Albright’s patience, he admitted that “certainly [Signal] wouldn’t be as successful” without its support.

“Ultimately, we do get a shot at doing things a lot of developers don’t get to do,” Albright stated candidly. “For example, Ascend had the only working Smart Glass demo at E3, at least for games. On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal – or maybe we are the only suckers who said yes. Either way, that ends up getting Signal a mention in publications like US Today which is a big deal. We probably only have small developer/XBLA level privileged access. I might know more about what’s happening than some guy commenting on a Neogaf forum, but I am pretty sure that the CoD and Assassin’s Creed folks are privy to a lot more information than me. That’s ok. It makes sense from a business standpoint that they would.”

So if the bond between the XBLA developer and Microsoft is so strong, is there any real possibility of Signal one day being taken into the Microsoft fold proper? The creative director was non-committal on the issue, but asserted that the ball was in the console holder’s court. However, he added that all of that funding and preferential treatment that flows from the software giant to its internal studios is certainly attractive, though working in a structured environment of such a massive size isn’t the most exciting proposition in the world to Albright.

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They’re crowding the front of the room on the 54th floor of a Los Angeles hotel, cameras flashing in rapid succession. A small group of men are before them, footage of their last work playing on a large screen. It’s difficult to get a good view of the promo vid that is running while all of the members of the Korean gaming press are nearly tripping over each other to secure the best possible angle from which to grab the perfect shot for their readers back home. The level of excitement among this crowd is palpable, if not completely understandable.

After all, what’s being shown at this point is nothing new, the footage is of 2010’s Dungeon Fighter Online (released in 2005 in Nexon’s home country of Korea). The speakers have thus far provided a nice little history lesson for the uninitiated, but those in attendance have hardly been treated to breaking news or exclusive footage at this point. With more exciting photo ops and demos of this fall’s hottest games vying for attention during E3 week than any one journalist can possibly tackle, why is the foreign press causing such a hullabaloo over a PC game that released seven years ago in their country?

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Zen Studios has announced that the Marvel Pinball: Avengers Chronicles DLC for Pinball FX2 will released on June 20 on Xbox Live Arcade. As should be evident from the …
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Announced during Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference last Monday, Matter is a Kinect-controlled XBLA title coming from Gore Verbinski’s (Pirates of the Caribbean) Blind Wink Games. Speaking with Joystiq, Phil Spencer, corporate VP of Microsoft Studios, expanded ever so slightly on the premise of the game that has thus far only been shown to the public in the form of a teaser-trailer. The rolling metallic ball in the teaser will be used as “a control surface for the game,” says Spencer.

“To a lot of people who haven’t played games for a long time, somebody standing completely stationary with a controller in their hands kind of seems emotionless, even though we know that we’ll be sweating or twitching,” Spencer adds. “And [it was Verbinksi’s] feeling, that with motion and movement, that the connection of the emotion that’s happening on screen and how the player feels would be more natural.”

Spencer stated that his ability to describe the project is limited compared to Verbinski’s, but he attempted to do so nonetheless. “The idea was that in your physical motion, your emotion actually comes through,” he said.

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Once upon a time, the opportunity to play it was passed over in favor of speaking at length to the man behind it. A tough decision for sure, but one for which there are no regrets. But this is E3, with all its glitz and gaudiness, its bass and babes, its bombshells and busts — both on the babes and on the press conference stages. This is the show, and Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit might just be the game coming to Xbox Live Arcade. Abstaining from experiencing firsthand at The Big Show, one of the most promising upcoming games for XBLA, simply wouldn’t do. Even waiting just a wink longer until XBLA Fans’ scheduled time with the game later in the week arrived just wouldn’t do. Read More

Talking behind closed doors at E3 2012 with Game Informer, Microsoft let slip that Homerun Stars is a thing. The previously unannounced title will have Kinect and SmartGlass …
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Speaking with XBLA Fans on the E3 show floor today, Microsoft revealed that forthcoming Dust: An Elysian Tail will contain an arena-type gameplay mode and difficulty setting for …
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Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade lineup was revealed earlier today as part of the console holder’s many Electronic Entertainment Expo announcements. Apparently just …
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The 4J Studios port of Mojang’s world-building PC title,