About Steve Melton

Venture Beat reported yesterday that Red Bull is teaming up with Microsoft Studios to bring Red Bull Crashed Ice Kinect to Xbox Live Arcade. The game will be a …
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Compulsion Games rather quietly announced Contrast back in March. At the time the platforms were announced. Recently our favorite tipper @lifelower did some digging. First he noticed a post …
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Roughly 45 days ago we posted the above image celebrating 3 million Minecraft players. That number was after only two months of sales. Now inching towards its fourth month …
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The following is an editorial. It represents the views of the author, and as such does not represent the views of the XBLA Fans staff as a whole.

I’m often in the minority around here. I’m not really a fan of the more “indie”-styled games, I like the more “franchise”-y ones. I’ve been railed multiple times on our podcast for my opinions (all in good fun, of course), and often find my views completely polar to other staff members. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD was a perfect example of that. I absolutely loved the game. Other staff, however, had varying opinions, some feeling it was downright awful.

Fair enough. To each their own, right? I’ve seen other staff gush about Bastion, LIMBO, Super Meat Boy, and pretty much every other big indie game. And in a way I can see why those games merit their love. They’re all solid games with tight gameplay. That being said, I often find that I’m not a fan of those kinds of games. But there’s a difference–I can concede that the more indie-esque games have solid gameplay, whereas the rest of the staff often finds gameplay issues in games I love–things I often am able to overlook. Such is the case with Tony Hawk, so let’s address what could have truly made it great, totally memorable, and what would have given it a better Metacritic score of 66/100. (which, if I’m honest, is probably an accurate blend of all the different opinions I’ve seen/heard)

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Romino Games recently launched Awesomenauts on PC via Steam, and with it a new character was released. Currently exclusive to the Windows, the monstrosity known as Gnaw has an …
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The Xbox 360 isn’t known for its wide range of codecs. The list is rather small, and it gets even smaller when you want to run in HD. DivX, …
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Spidey is no stranger to video games. Wikipedia lists over 30 titles under the webslinger’s banner. But let’s be honest here, only a handful of them stand out. One that is stands near the top of that list is Spider-Man for the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Mac and PC. It was the first time players really felt like Spider-Man. No longer were we limited to two dimensions. We were (relatively) free to choose our path. While the levels were linear, they had a certain feeling of freedom. You could cling to the ceiling, wrap a thug in webbing, and even web swing for a short time. It was innovative, it was entertaining, and it had all the Spider-Man charm. We want it back.

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Bring color to a world that’s as drab as a Philco Predicta screen. Mimimi Productions continues to grind away at their color-laced adventure game Tink. While we don’t have …
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Focus Interactive and Spiders (yes, Spiders) recently announced their new red planet-based action RPG, Mars: War Logs. Players control renegade Roy Temperance in the midst of a war for …
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Humble Hearts’ Dust: An Elysian Tail wrapped up this year’s Summer of Arcade yesterday, and in just over 24 of your standard Earth hours the leaderboards have jumped to …
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