About Steve Melton

Shield the Beat was developed by MBrio and was released on the XBLIG marketplace on April 4, 2011. It originally retailed for 400 MSP. The price has since been dropped to 240 MSP. A copy of the game was provided for review purposes.

Some would argue that rhythm-based games are no longer fun, and for the most part they’d be right. The Guitar Hero series has gone stale and luckily fizzled out, Rock Band 3 — as great as it is — can only have so many good songs each week as DLC — and games like Parappa the Rapper have long since been thrown in the bargain bin at your local used game store.

But there’s something about Xbox Live Indie Games that bring a fresh take on tired genres. Shield the Beat does just that. It requires no plastic guitars, but instead prefers a set of thumbs that spend their time playing dual stick shooters. The premise is simple: the on-board computer is trying all sorts of crazy maneouvers to evade four enemy ships while it prepares for a hyperspace jump. You control the ships defenses. In addition to overall shields your fighter is equipped with large red and blue defensive spheres. Catch enemy fire in them to keep the main shields from failing. The barrage is all set in time to an electric soundtrack that makes it an absolute blast to play.

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Signal Studios has released yet another trailer showcasing a playable unit in Toy Soldiers: Cold War. This time around it’s the AC-130 gunship which sports the scale version of …
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What we are playing is a weekly column that appears each Sunday. Various staff members let the world know what games had them hooked the past week and which ones …
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The Battletoads series is one largely unknown to the younger generation. It was one that ultimately didn’t make it past the Super Nintendo era. Some called it a blatant ripoff of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but in reality it was so much more than that. It starred three toads — Rash, Zitz and Pimple — in an intergalactic beat em’ up complete with a sexy villain and a difficulty level that rivaled Super Meat Boy. To top it all off the toads even had a crossover game where they joined forces with Billy and Jimmy Lee, the two iconic characters from the Double Dragon games.

With all of their success and the fact that publishers seem to be digging into past franchises it surprises us that they haven’t tapped into the trio’s charisma and power. While the classic games may not provide a large enough base to make a retail epic we certainly see the potential in an all new Xbox Live Arcade title.

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Roughly an hour ago Netflix users experienced issues streaming videos. Hunting for the source on the trusty interwebs we’ve found Twitter alight with hundreds of posts regarding …
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We’re really proud of our site, and even more so of the jump in readers (and the readers themselves) lately. As such our tired old server just can’t handle …
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Those following the progress of Windows 8 or indeed to progress of any Microsoft products know that Xbox Live integration is something they take very seriously. We’ve …
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Take a trip around a very RedLynx-style course.
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In the glory days of the Dreamcast Sega produced a lot of high quality titles. Unfortunately the ease of piracy on the DC along with several other reasons killed Sega’s hardware department. Luckily they realize that Dreamcast games themselves are still very much in demand today. They’ve brought Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure to Xbox Live Arcade.  Those were bundled with Space Channel 5: Part 2 and Sega Bass Fishing on disc earlier this year, and the former two titles are slated for later XBLA release. Even still we have a long list of titles that are must have on XBLA. Among those are Jet Grind Radio, Shenmue, ChuChu Rocket! and Sonic Adventure 2.

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Yesterday Game Informer found that both Resident Evil 4 and Code Veronica would be receiving 1000 gamerscore as opposed to the standard 200 Xbox Live Arcade games get. When …
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