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Features

XBLA’s Most Wanted: StarCraft
12 years ago

XBLA’s Most Wanted: StarCraft

The real-time strategy genre is a category that has always eluded consoles. Every once in a while a developer will try to make an RTS game work with a controller. From time to time, it does work. Halo Wars for the Xbox 360 and Pikmin for the GameCube come to mind. But for some reason, real-time strategy games just haven’t been refined enough on consoles and the genre hasn’t taken off. Barriers such as the transition from mouse and keyboard to controller are often cited as the reason why.

Blizzard Entertainment is one of the few developers in the world, who never misses a beat. Every single thing they release is pure gold. They take care of their franchises, and they take their time to make sure that they release the best games possible. That is why I’m calling on Blizzard to be the ones to finally break open the real-time strategy market for consoles, by releasing the original StarCraft on Xbox Live Arcade.

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XBLA games you can’t pass on the cheap: Volume 1
12 years ago

XBLA games you can’t pass on the cheap: Volume 1

By  •  Features

In the past few years we’ve often had people ask us what Xbox Live Arcade games are worth the money, but unlike us they usually don’t shell out a lot on XBLA games each year. It makes sense, after all 1200 MSP every month or so adds up in the end. Every site has those “you should buy it” lists where games like Limbo, Braid, Castle Crashers, Bastion, and Trials HD sit, but sometimes with other games you’re still not convinced. That being said here’s list of games you shouldn’t pass up on a sale. After all, we’re all on a budget. So if you’re one of those that won’t buy it at retail price no matter how good the reviews are, take a look at this list for the best titles you can find on sale.

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Pinball FX2 Paranormal table leaderboard contest
12 years ago

Pinball FX2 Paranormal table leaderboard contest

Download the Paranormal table for FREE and compete to win 7 more tables!
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XBLAFancast Episode 35 – Most Wanted
12 years ago

XBLAFancast Episode 35 – Most Wanted

It’s a weird show this week. There’s not a whole lot to talk about XBLA related as a result this show is full of a few more tangents than the average one. We do talk some more about Dungeon Defenders though and there’s a few news stories to cover too. But we also hit a few retail related things, such as a certain Bat person’s newest game and some demos we tried out.

At the end of the show we try a little something new and bring the site’s Most Wanted feature to the audio realm as myself, Perry and Todd pick a game we’d like to see come to XBLA and explain why.

Please subscribe, comment, review the podcast on iTunes and tell your friends! We appreciate it! Check us out on twitter (@XBLAFans) where you can win codes for games, give us feedback or just ask a question.

Big thanks again 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/XBLAFancastEp35.mp3[/podcast]

RSS | MP3 | iTunes

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Interview: Valve talks Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
12 years ago

Interview: Valve talks Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

We recently had the opportunity to ask Chet Faliszek of Valve questions about the upcoming Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. When Global Offensive releases in the spring of next year, it will mark the first time that the true Counter-Strike experience will grace consoles. Read on to find out why Valve boldly believes that Global Offensive is the best iteration of Counter-Strike to date.

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What we are playing: October 23
12 years ago

What we are playing: October 23

What we are playing is a weekly column that appears each weekend. Various staff members let the world know what games had them hooked the past week and which ones …
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XBLA’s Most Wanted: Need for Speed Challenge
12 years ago

XBLA’s Most Wanted: Need for Speed Challenge

The Need for Speed series seems to be taking a different direction than the one many of us are used to. It’s grittier, more realistic–a far cry from the arcade goodness of games like Hot Pursuit 2 and Most Wanted. While a lot of people have bought in on this it’s still a direction that just as many folks aren’t happy about. Look on forums, in YouTube comments, etc. People are clamoring for the pre-ProStreet games to make a comeback.

That’s why we’ve come up with a synergistic solution: a new title that utilizes older game assets: Need for Speed: Challenge. It’s been done with Need for Speed: World, a MMO racing game that’s exclusive to the PC. It merges the cities from Most Wanted and Carbon together and provides an open-world, role playing-racing experience. Challenge would be something similar: all of the Micheal Bay story elements stripped out. Yep, it’s just raw, adrenaline fueled racing. The difference is that Challenge wouldn’t be an MMO. Rather than a persistent-world game, it would be a single player free roam racer with multiplayer race events.

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Dungeon Defenders super guide
12 years ago

Dungeon Defenders super guide

Dungeon Defenders, after a whole year of being postponed, is finally out and flaunting its massive amount of content all over the place! Admittedly, it’s quite a …
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Genre diversity on XBLA
12 years ago

Genre diversity on XBLA

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service has been running for over half a decade now seeing a major boost in content since the Summer of Arcade promotions began running and since last year House Party (previously Block Party) has joined it for Spring releases. A steady flow of releases during each month also bring a fair amount of titles to the downloadable market space. With a healthy mix of ports, original content, big and indie developers, it begs the question: how mixed is the genre offering?

Before examining what isn’t out there, it’s important to observe what is. Xbox.com has listings for the amount of games contained in each of their classifications, bringing up some pretty startling numbers. Leading the way (not surprisingly) are Action & Adventure games with 177 individual titles including Castle Crashers, Battlefield 1943, Geometry Wars and Shadow Complex. Puzzle & Trivia and Classics are the next highest below Action with 74 and 76 respectively. On the opposite side of the spectrum are some very niche genres including Kinect with 4, Music with 6, and Educational with 3. A genre expected to have plenty of titles would be fighting, but believe it or not only 13 titles are classified as fighting games on XBLA, while the nebulous Other category has 7. Above those are 23 Role Playing games, 20 Racing & Flying games and 33 Strategy & Simulation games. Also noteworthy you’d think there’s more than 38 platformers out there, but not according to Xbox.com. (as of October 2011) Read More