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The XBLA Fans Twitch Stream Team has grown drastically in recent months thanks to the support of our viewers. I’d love to personally encourage each of our readers to check out at least one broadcast this week. We will be updating the site on a weekly basis with a plethora of streams for you to enjoy.

In addition to our scheduled streams below we also sometimes do impromptu streams. The best way to stay informed of those is to follow XBLA Fans on Twitter and follow us on Twitch.

If there is a game you want to see streamed, please contact us.

All times are listed in EST.

Monday 4/6

• 4:30p – 7:30p Manic Ado – Slender / Outlast
• 7:30p – 10:30p K4rn4ge – Tower of Guns

Tuesday 4/7

• 4p – 7p K4rn4ge – Stealth Inc 2

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Stealth Inc. 2: A Game of Clones was developed by Carbon and published by Curve Digital. It was released on April 3, 2015 for $14.99. A copy was provided by Curve Digital for review purposes.

One of the most unique things about XBLA Fans is our rating system, which encourages reviewers like me to rate games based on a simple “Buy, Try or Skip” scale. Although this can occasionally make our jobs more difficult, I believe that the system means that the written content of our reviews becomes ever more important in getting the message across about how a game plays.

With this in mind, there has perhaps never been a game more deserving of our “Try It” rating than Stealth Inc. 2: A Game of Clones. This is a game that riffs heavily on other roguelike and metroidvania games (not to mention the extremely popular Portal) but also offers its own brand of gameplay and humour across a very expansive package. Stealth Inc. 2 is likely to attract a number of diehard stealth fans, but the steep learning curve and a few minor issues might make casual gamers think twice.

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Microsoft is officially shutting down production of the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor and has no plans of producing a new sensor in the future, the company has announced. …
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The journey of a little girl and her teddy bear.. sorta.
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Super Time Force received a free update this week. The new Ultra Update includes the Helladecks, made up of 50 new challenge levels that force players to use their time-rewinding skills in a different way, and a new Ultra Force mode which is unlocked after you complete the game and is said to be an alternate style of time-forcing with extra-powerful versions of the Time Force team. Achievement hunters will also be pleased to know that the update brings five new achievements worth a total of 375 Gamerscore.

Sling TV recently launched a new app exclusively for Xbox One. The new app, which allows viewers to watch live TV instantly without a cable company, offers the same great features gamers have come to expect, including the ability to Snap, Pin to Home and use voice or gesture controls with Kinect for Xbox One. Microsoft are also offering a limited time deal of three free months of Sling TV service with the purchase of an Xbox One console via the Microsoft Store (US only).

And finally, current Xbox One darling Ori and the Blind Forest secretly paid tribute to one of XBLA Fans all-time favourites Super Meat Boy. Meat Boy himself can be spotted behind a hidden wall in the Blind Forest, apparently fallen victim to a bed of spikes. Check out the video on how to spot this charming easter egg after the jump.

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Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast and Furious was developed by Playground Games and published by Microsoft Studios on Xbox One and Xbox 360. It was released March 22, 2015 for free and will remain free until April 10, 2015 when it will begin costing $10.

When I first heard about Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast and Furious I was blown away by the fact that the power of advertising had reached this point. A limited-time free game to promote both an upcoming movie and a six-month-old game was completely mind boggling to me. But the sheer brute force of advertising that is apparent is actually quite irrelevant. All that really matters was if Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast and Furious was any good. And to be blunt, my mind was quickly put to ease about the game’s quality and soon focused on the task on hand: finishing sets of races to unlock the next new and shiny car.

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Resident Evil Revelations 2: The Struggle was developed and published on Xbox One and Xbox 360 by Capcom Entertainment Inc. It was released on March 17, 2015 for $4.99. XBLA Fans’ Michael Cheng purchased a copy out of pocket for review purposes.

The Struggle is a side story that bridges the gap between the end of Claire’s campaign and the end of Barry’s campaign and features Moira Burton and a character who was introduced in Episode 3 . As such, for continuity purposes, this episode should not be played until after finishing the main game.

The goal of the extra episodes seems to be to provide an alternative gameplay experience to the original campaign, and The Struggle does not shy away from that. About two minutes into playing The Struggle, I was already dubbing it “Moira Gear Solid 3,” as it contains small animal hunting for rations as well as stealth sections. After a hunting segment, multiple battles take place that function remarkably similar to Revelations 2‘s Raid mode only with the frailty of using a campaign character.

Is this extra episode worth playing?

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The Binding of Issac: Rebirth will at last be gracing the Xbox One after a period of exclusivity on the PlayStation 4 and on PCs. While there are changes to …
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Even if you’ve never played a video game before in your life, you won’t have trouble deducing where not to go in Adventures of Pip. A series of floating skull and crossbones symbols hover above each of the platformer’s bottomless pits. It’s an unambiguous message from the developers conveyed through art.

Tic Toc Games CEO Shereef Morse didn’t want to leave anything to guesswork. “It’s like, ‘Hey guys, you don’t want to go down there, all right?'” he told XBLA Fans at PAX East last month. “We said, ‘Why leave it to guessing, right?'”

Not unlike the studio’s approach to visualizing the dangers of bottomless pits, its central gameplay mechanic is also a very on-the-nose artistic reference to something — art itself. Adventures of Pip tells the story of a one-pixel underdog named Pip who gains the ability to be rendered in more pixels as he quests towards defeating the evil Skeleton Queen. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s meant to: Adventures of Pip is also the story of the games industry’s art evolution and what game art has had to give up in order to evolve.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Adventures of Pip tells the story of gaming’s art evolution @xblafans #gaming #XboxOne ” quote=”Adventures of Pip tells the story of gaming’s art evolution “]

The idea for this metaphor began germinating around 13 years ago — even if Morse didn’t realize it back then. In 2002 Morse was working as a production manager at WayForward Technologies, and he hired a promising young artist, Marc Gomez, fresh off an education at California Institute of the Arts. Gomez would go on create art for A Boy and His Blob, Contra 4 and Bloodrayne: Betrayal among others. The only thing those three games have in common with one another is that they share absolutely nothing in common, which is exactly the point. Years later, when Morse hired Gomez as his creative director at Tic Toc, it occurred to him that Gomez’s art styles had frequently changed during his time at WayForward. So had the industry’s at large.

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We are testing out new forms of video content with XBLAFans in an effort to bring our readers more choices for how they interact with the site. Check out …
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