About Ross Adams

One of XBLA’s breakout titles, Marble Blast Ultra, has been silently and mysteriously delisted from the Live Marketplace. The game proved popular with 360 owners early in the …
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MTV Networks Entertainment has announced not only the opening of a new developement studio, 345 Studios, but two more games based on shows from their networks. 345 will …
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Technically Brawler Week is over but we have a slight addendum…

Associate Editor John Carson recently got the chance to speak to Edmund Mcmillen and Tommy Refenes better known as …
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Cave have announced that their upcoming XBLA platformer Nin2-Jump‘s sales donated to the Japan Red Cross to help with the relief effort from the recent devasting earthquake. All …
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Jonathan Cole and Todd Schlickbernd join John and Andrew this week and the guys cover a lot of stuff. There’s a ton of news up front (links to the stories can be found below).

Last week saw three releases, not all of them great. Strania and Rush ‘N Attack are try it games at best but everyone is quite taken by Islands of Wakfu. It’s something a little different from the norm on XBLA.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is out this week (review’s up here) and Todd has played a lot of it. Needless to say he’s pretty in love with the game and sings its praises for awhile, even grunts some praise too.

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Apologies for the delay this week, numerous technical issues meant we lost our original episode and had to record again. We made up for it though with another 4 man show which runs for almost an hour!

As usual we discuss some of the past weeks more notable news stories, which this week includes Resident Evil 4 coming to XBLA, the awesome trailer for No time to Explain, Islands of Wakfu and some of the sales figures for the first House Party games.

Then Andrew talks a lot about Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, as he said in his review the game isn’t great and is plagued with technical problems. John has been playing a lot of Swarm too which thankfully seems to be much better.

We close out the show by talking about Brawler Week which we just kicked off yesterday. We’re going to have a ton of content for you guys so check out the hub everyday to see what’s new. We’ll even something special in podcast form very soon too.

As previously mentioned we’ve had to switch podcast hosts, sadly this means if you have subscribed before you will have to do so again. The new RSS feed is below and we hope to have the new iTunes link by next week, sorry for the inconvenience but it really couldn’t be helped.

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Castle Crashers was developed by The Behemoth and published by Microsoft Game Studios. It was released on August 27th 2008 for 1200MS points.

The Behemoth have quickly become a developer to watch. After starting life with the flash game Alien Hominid on Newgrounds they expanded the game to consoles and eventually to XBLA with Alien Hominid HD. The game had a unique and striking art style created by artist Dan Paladin, and breathed new life into the almost forgotten side-scrolling shooter (complete with punishing difficulty).

After Alien Hominid The Behemoth moved onto a completely new game in Castle Crashers. This time they decided to have a go at another classic genre, the side-scrolling brawler. Dan Paladin’s unique art style remains, but Castle Crashers is a much bigger and more ambitious game than Alien Hominid. The Behemoth took the basic 2D brawler gameplay and added a few things on top, with an RPG-like (or lite?) leveling system and a little more depth to the brawling itself.

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Tiny Build Games recently released a trailer for their upcoming game, No Time To Explain. Now this game isn’t coming out on PC and Mac till the summer and the …
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Battle: LA was developed by Live Action Studios and published by Konami. It was released March 11th, 2011 and retails for 800MSP. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.

Battle: LA continues a recent trend of movie license games coming to downloadable platforms. It’s a strategy that has been met with some success – Scott Pilgrim vs. The World took the spirit of the movie/comic it was based on and created a great game with it. Smaller downloadable games often have shorter development time and small budgets so it actually makes sense for publishers to target the market for these types of games.

With Battle: LA developer Live Action Studios appears to be trying to bring the big budget shooter experience, a la Call of Duty, to XBLA. It’s an idea that seems good in theory, most of said shooters have fairly short campaigns which would be well suited to an XBLA game, but does it work in practice?

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Another four man show this week, for no reason other than we felt like it! Myself and John Carson join Andrew and John Laster to discuss the upcoming XBLA releases and some of the cooler looking games on the horizon.

None of us bought Torchlight but that doesn’t stop us talking about it some, check out our review if you want some more informed information on the game. John Laster reviewed Full House Poker and Andrew tried it out, so they talk about that for a while. Then I talk for way too long about Battle: LA (review forthcoming) and Andrew chimes in with his thoughts too. Spoiler alert: we weren’t overly impressed.

Before we say goodbye John Carson talks about his experience watching the Game Informer guys break a world record and Andrew asks us what we think about how aesthetic changes are spread throughout games.

As mentioned before we’ve changed hosts for the podcasts, as a result the iTunes feed isn’t updating properly at the moment. We’re trying to get this fixed but in the meantime you can download the MP3 below or add the new RSS feed straight into iTunes or your favourite reader software.

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