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Feature List

XBLA’s Most Wanted: The Strike series
12 years ago

XBLA’s Most Wanted: The Strike series

With the release of Renegade Ops earlier this year, the name Desert Strike was name dropped a lot. In reality the games aren’t all that similar, but the few times you get to fly a chopper around reminded many of the long forgotten series.

Most remember the first game in the series Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf, which put players in control of an Apache attack helicopter. However there were actually five games in the series, with a sixth planned but ultimately cancelled (though it morphed into Future Cop: LAPD). The 16-bit era Strike games, Desert, Jungle and Urban were all fairly similar with the only changes being settings and the ability to pilot other (ground based) vehicles in the latter games.

With the jump to the PlayStation the core gameplay of the series remained the same but Soviet and Nuclear Strike boasted live action FMV. Of course this was all the rage at the time, usually looking extremely low budget and coming off as incredibly cheesy. While the FMV in the Strike games was a little cheesy and the acting slightly hammy, it was very well produced and often extremely effective. A lot of the praise goes to the fact they used FMV for everything, meaning you could look up videos on every enemy, weapon or mission objective. Even now we often have to trawl through a huge body of text to find out objectives or even learn how to play the game. Read More

Interview: IllFonic’s Kedhrin Gonzalez talks Nexuiz
12 years ago

Interview: IllFonic’s Kedhrin Gonzalez talks Nexuiz

We had the opportunity to ask Kedhrin Gonzalez, Creative Director at Illfonic, about Nexuiz the upcoming arena shooter for XBLA. A big thanks to Kedhrin for taking the time to answer our questions and give us greater insight into the team and the game. Nexuiz will be available as a part of the XBLA House Party promotion on February 29 for 800 MSP.

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Friday Top Five: Top five XBLA racing games
12 years ago

Friday Top Five: Top five XBLA racing games

Racing games are an interesting sort. Like shooters, they’re at times so oversaturated with decent-yet-forgettable titles that it’s hard to pick the quality ones out from a sea of titles. Luckily XBLA is limited to 20-ish titles that revolve around the genre. Even still we have our favorites that we feel best represent what Xbox Live Arcade racing games should offer. While 20 participants enter the ring, only five make our list.

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XBLAFancast Episode 50 – Anniversary Edition
12 years ago

XBLAFancast Episode 50 – Anniversary Edition

Believe it or not, we’ve been doing this for a whole year (to the day!). We’ve gone through a lot of changes but we like to think we have a pretty good show on our hands at this point, we hope you do too.

Andrew’s out this week so it’s myself, Perry and Todd. We kick things off talking about Warp and a little about Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Todd has a somewhat unique perspective having never played the original. Then Perry drops some news bombs as per usual. He also takes over Crews’ Community Corner, during which we have a couple of fairly long discussions about the future of the site and XBLA in general. Big thanks to @MRX93 and our own Steve Melton for their contributions to the twitter topics.

Please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on iTunes. We appreciate it! Check us out on twitter (@XBLAFans) where you can win codes for games, give us feedback or just ask a question. We are also now on Stitcher, so you can stream the show on your smartphone, give it a go!

Big thanks to Chris Green for the awesome theme music, be sure to check out his site BlurredEdge and why not follow him on twitter too @BlurredEdge.

[podcast]https://xblafans.com/xblafancast/XBLAFancastEp50.mp3[/podcast]

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Interview: Jeremiah Slaczka, CEO of 5th Cell talks Hybrid
12 years ago

Interview: Jeremiah Slaczka, CEO of 5th Cell talks Hybrid

Hybrid Logo

We recently had the opportunity to ask Jeremy Slaczka, CEO of 5th Cell questions about their upcoming sci-fi shooter Hybrid. During the interview we talk about the game’s unique control scheme, design, and the drastic departure that 5th Cell made in choosing to develop Hybrid. Read on to get the low down on what could be this year’s most unique multiplayer frag fest!

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XBLA’s Most Wanted: Riptide GP
12 years ago

XBLA’s Most Wanted: Riptide GP

Riptide GP. It was the flagship game for NVidia’s Tegra 2 chip on Android devices, and the second release from Hydro Thunder Hurricane developer Vector Unit. Having gained footing as a developer with Hydro Thunder, Vector Unit took the opportunity to go indie and put their amazing water engine to use on mobile devices. The result is something that is truly one of the best mobile gaming experiences to date.

The game is essentially a futuristic jet ski racer. Like the now-aged Wave Race 64 water physics play an important role, but instead of canned water, Riptide uses a dynamic system. Jet skis produce wakes, which in turn change up the way you have to race. The environments are over-the-top, just like another classic favorite, Jet Moto. With racers a dime a dozen it takes something special to stand out–something that keeps you coming back. Riptide GP has it in strides.

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Weekend Rant: The seven (or so) deadly sins of cooperative play
12 years ago

Weekend Rant: The seven (or so) deadly sins of cooperative play

Weekend Rant is a non-regularly occurring weekend mini-editorial. In layman’s terms that basically means that if a staff member has something they want to rant about they can do so on any given weekend.

There’s a list of disturbing trends that have developed within the gaming industry this generation, and they revolve around cooperative play. Co-op is nothing new to gaming. It has existed since the earliest days of coin-op arcade machines going back decades. This generation however, co-op has evolved. No longer do we just get to tread through a game’s campaign with a friend, sometimes we get an entire stand alone co-op campaign. In other instances, we get completely unique cooperative modes with their own setup and rules like the highly successful Horde mode in Gears of War, or Zombie mode in Call of Duty. More than ever, developers are taking advantage of the fact that its just plain fun to play games with your friends. The evolution of co-op has also unfortunately created problems. And its about time we start talking about them.

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Friday Top Five: Top Five Platformers
12 years ago

Friday Top Five: Top Five Platformers

From Mario to Sonic, one of the most prevalent genres in gaming has always been platforming. It hasn’t been as important as it used to be but games like Rayman Origins prove people still care about platforming. On the XBLA side, the platforming genre has seen many leaps forward with hard difficulty, precise platforming or a creepy atmosphere. We’re not even done with the genre either with upcoming games like Pid and Fez. Today we thought we’d take a look at five really great platformers and discuss why they’re so good on XBLA.

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