Features

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Today we’re bringing you something a little different: an Hill Climb course. Hillclimb 4ever by DeLtA MaN 117 is one of only a few Hill Climb tracks available through …
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The Weekend Gamer is brought to you each Sunday. We will post a compilation of all the XBLA News, Reviews and Features we have run giving you an easy resource to keep up with our favorite digital distribution platform: XBLA

New Game Announcements: The past week has been full of announcements for new games, including: Red Johnson’s Chronicles, Backbreaker: Vengeance, Space Channel 5 Part 2, Sega Bass Fishing, Deadliest Warrior Sequel [Title Pending], Ugliest American, Xotic, and Burnout Crash.

Upcoming Release Dates: Microsoft clarified some of the upcoming XBLA releases for April. The rest of the month will include: Section 8 Prejudice (April 20th), Pinball FX2: Mars Table (April 20), Fancy Pants Adventures (April 20th),  Outland (April 27th),Trouble Witches Neo (April 27th), Nin2-Jump (April 27th), and Bangai-O HD (May 4)

Reviews: We spent most our week reviewing Xbox Live Indie Games, but expect to see our Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes HD and Yars Revenge HD reviews sometime in the next week. We recommend you buy: Zombie Football Carnage (XBLIG) and Ikagura (XBLA) and try: Alpha Squad (XBLIG), Poker Night (XBLIG), On a Roll (XBLIG), Dirche Kart (XBLIG) and Mute Crimson (XBLIG)

Podcast: We spent the entire show this week talking Section 8 Prejudice with Mark Yetter. Steve is playing the game for review, but we can’t tell you what we think yet. Make sure to subscribe to us on iTunes!

Game Night: Just a reminder, but we will be playing Hydro Thunder Hurricance with the community on the 29th. You will not want to miss this. We have some cool giveaways planned leading up to the event.

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Torchlight wasn’t the first title to successfully mimic Diablo’s loot-centric gameplay on consoles, there were countless titles before it that satisfied that gear-gathering itch, most notably coming from a distinctly Japanese franchise not expected to go in that direction: Phantasy Star Online.

Sega’s last video game console, the Dreamcast, had a software library that catered to the hardcore gamer, and games like Phantasy Star Online were beyond its time featuring persistent, MMO-like worlds that constantly dropped the infamous “red boxes” that gamers grew to adore.

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Silver by Grimmigsten has two of our favorite things: beauty and flow. It has a unique color tint indicative of its name along with architecture that reminds us of …
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Before mankind faced its epic struggle with the Strogg in the Quake games II, IV, and Enemy Territory, before there was the deathmatch arena of Quake III, players fought against a hellish enemy force in the original Quake. Unlike so many games of its time, Quake was true 3D. Its predecessor, the Doom series did not feature a true Z axis (up/down).

Even games such as Duke Nukem 3D and Star Wars: Dark Forces featured only a psuedo-3D ability. No, if someone wanted true 3D in 1996, they turned to Quake. And nothing would make gamers of yesteryear more happy than to see the game that spawned a new series for Id Software make a return on XBLA.

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In a perfect world this article would have gone up on Wednesday, but due to some unforeseen circumstances it was delayed. Over the past week we have looked at …
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Gamers usually fall into one of the two following categories: those who sing and praise HD remakes as if they are gold covered in chocolate, and those who compare the HD remakes to the excessive milking of a cow. I tend to fall in the gold category, and for good reason—HD remakes are positive for both the gaming industry and gamers.

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Technically Brawler Week is over but we have a slight addendum…

Associate Editor John Carson recently got the chance to speak to Edmund Mcmillen and Tommy Refenes better known as …
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Here at XBLAFans, the editors are just as crazy about their games as our readers.  To celebrate Brawler Week, our staff chimes in on their favorite titles from Xbox Live Arcade. Since we have a wide variety of personalities and tastes, we decided to allow each writer to choose one of their favorite brawler, rather than doing a Top 10 list. Read on to see if your favorite was chosen.

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One of the beauties of being an indie studio is the ability to experiment; there is a freedom to development as there are no true limitations. The game can become a total fan service to the developers themselves. Brian Provinciano of VBlank Entertainment took the time to sit down with us recently and discuss this very fact. His title Retro City Rampage is a culmination of various pop culture references and game design mash-ups that merge into a totally unique game. We were given the opportunity to test it out and loved what we saw.

For the uninitiated, Retro City Rampage parodies the open-world action genre combining dozens of game mechanics into an 8-bit game. The game has a beautiful sense of humor, lampooning an entire era of movies, games and pop culture. Players take on the role of THE PLAYER, an anti-hero, who signs up as a henchman for a local crime syndicate. But things go chronically awry and he must soon defeat the EVIL GOOD GUYS, who will stop at nothing to end his RAMPAGE OF DOOM.

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