12 years ago
Weeknd Rant: Why I don’t want another Xbox
Microsoft’s first foray into the video game business was a risky and expensive maneuver. Despite having Halo as a stellar launch title and hardware capable of feats its competition couldn’t possibly produce, the original Xbox failed to maintain the flash and evolution of its distant brother: the Xbox 360–which is nearly celebrating its 7th anniversary on the market.
Console generations generally don’t exceed the pre-determined life expectancy predicted by its creators, but sometimes an unexpected boom of success prompts the decision makers to reconsider. Last November, Microsoft sold 1.7 million Xbox 360 consoles in the U.S., defeating Nintendo’s Wii and 3DS consoles by a large margin. Profit incites investors, potentially explaining why Microsoft has yet to formally announce a successor to its commercial darling. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is create competition for its own product.
12 years ago
XBLAFancast Episode 51 – Alan Wake’s Canadian Nightmare
With no Todd this week we’re joined by our other guide co-ordinator, Shawn Saris. He joins myself and Perry in a pretty long discussion of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, so if you want to hear why you should be playing that, come listen.
Perry has some slightly more organised news bombs this week, with lots more announcements and such to talk about. After a week off Andrew brings back Crews’ Community Corner with a twitter topic and the Remember the Days game of the week for everyone to play.
Check out the music special we put out to celebrate the podcasts one year anniversary.
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/XBLAFancastEp51.mp3[/podcast]
12 years ago
XBLAFancast Music Special
To celebrate our recent milestone of 50 episodes, which also coincided with our one year anniversary, we decided to do something a little different. In this special episode of the XBLAFancast we focus on the music of XBLA, with some choice tracks from some of the best soundtracks XBLA has to offer. So please, sit back and enjoy the XBLAFancast music special.
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!
[podcast]https://xblafans.com/xblafancast/XBLAFancastMusicSpecial.mp3[/podcast]
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
12 years ago
What folks need to understand about launch day DLC
It’s not a matter of trying to swindle gamers
Read More
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.
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.
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]