About Vlad Micu

Having been in development for over five years, Fez is a indie/special/something game that has embodied many of the personal challenges its creators have faced, not making the endless development of it seem any shorter. The attendees of the yearly Independent Game Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco were witness to the emotional release of Fez creator Phil Fish and his colleagues when they accepted the Seamus McNally Grand Prize and $30.000 dollars in prize money last month. Fish, a personal indie hero of mine, is currently starring in the renowned and Sundance award winning documentary Indie Game: The Movie, where he is followed through-out trials and tribulations of finishing Fez. His team’s journey up until receiving this award, touched me in a very personal way.
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The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Naked Sky’s CTO Joshua Glazer. Naked Sky is also known for their previous XBLA title RoboBlitz, which was released back in November 2006z.

Microbot is a twin stick shooter that lets the player battle malicious viruses and diseases as a microscopic nanotech robot injected into someone’s bloodstream. As players travel travel through veins, bones, lungs and other organs, they can collected data fragments that allows them to customize their microbot with powerful weapons, defensive systems, movement parts, and special abilities. What got yours truly’s blood pumping about this title, is the planned cooperative drop-in/drop-out mode.
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It’s been a while since we broke the big news that Czech studio Amanita Design will not be bringing their beautiful adventure game to XBLA. With the high …
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Xbox owning Pilgrim fans rejoice! The downloadable Scott Pilgrim beat-em-up with epic 2D pixel art is no longer a Playstation exclusive.  The downloadable title based on the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series …
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Blacklight: Tango Down was developed by Zombie Studios and published by Ignition Entertainment for XBLA on July 14, 2010. Retails for 1200 Microsoft Points. A download code of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes.

What if the rumors of a futuristic setting for Infinity Ward’s next Call of Duty were right? It might’ve looked very much like Zombie Studio’s Blacklight: Tango Down. While the game was praised by many at E3 for it’s high price/quality ratio, the result is definitely remarkable for a downloadable title, packing a decent fast paced punch for a low budget multiplayer shooter.

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THQ’s vice president of core games Danny Bilson recently revealed a new downloadable game strategy in an interview with CVG. The first title to experience the strategy’s treatment …
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Puzzle Chronicles was developed by Infinite Interactive and published by Konami. It was released on April 21 , 2010 and retails for 800 Microsoft Points. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.

Right off the bat, Puzzle Chronicles is going to be compared to Puzzle Quest by almost everyone. But it deserves a moment of our attention. After playing the game for more than 20 hours, Puzzle Chronicles appears to stand on its own as a quirky, simple and fun puzzle game. And after two weeks of trying it out for this review, we’re still playing.

Puzzle Chronicles openly admits to its simplicity from the start, only giving you one main character to play the single player game with. Mixing Conan the Barbarian’s cousin with a cookie cutter RPG story, Puzzle Chronicles quickly introduces the player to its distinct puzzle mechanic, which follows an approach similar to classic titles such as Columns and Lumines. Though this might sound like two reasons not to get the game, the developers have managed to give it their own witty twist and turn it into a fun combination with a somewhat cartoony look that might suit younger gamers a bit better.

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This interview was conducted at the Casual Connect 2010 conference in Hamburg. It was used for a short article that created a lot of buzz about Microsoft turning down the chance to publish Machinarium on Xbox Live Arcade by Microsoft. Although our focus is Xbox Live Arcade related content, our editorial staff agreed that the following is an exception due to the recent circumstances.

Jakub Dvorksy, currently the lead designer at the Czech indie studio Amanita Design, is the original founder of the studio and brought together the team of creatives and artists that have been responsible for the highly acclaimed point and click adventure Machinarium. We recently had the pleasure of talking to this self-taught leader and look back at the history of the little studio in the Czech Republic.
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Czech game studio Amanita Design, creators of the critically acclaimed PC point-and-click adventure Machinarium, recently announced that they are making plans to bring the game to different platforms. Asking …
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Bargain time! Finnish game studio Redlynx is celebrating the fact that Trials HD won ‘Best Overall Arcade Game on Xbox Live Arcade for 2009’ and is celebrating …
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