Features

Weekly Roundup compiles all the biggest news stories, reviews and features from the week into one handy post on the weekends.

Another week of Xbox Live Arcade is in the books. This one’s been all over the map, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of a service that brings us all together. With so much happening on this platform of ours, it’s easy to lose sight of just how good we have it. If it weren’t for Xbox Live, none of us would be here, so XBLA Fans wants to know, what’s your favorite memory from the past ten years of Xbox Live gaming? Let us know in the comments and Happy Birthday, Xbox Live!

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XBLAFans was able to sit in on a conference call last week with Guardians of Middle-earth Producer Bob Roberts and Senior Producer Ruth Pomandl. They shared intricate details about the game’s development process, what it was like to balance a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game for the console space and some details about how various systems will work in the game.

Players new to the MOBA genre should consider checking out Monolith’s own video tutorial series explaining it. The basic idea, though, is that players choose one of a number of heroes (five of them are unlocked initially, and the others are unlocked via in-game currency), and fight on a team of five champions against a team of five other champions. While each champion has unique talents and attributes, there are five basic character archetypes. These include:

• Enchanters –- low maximum health and low physical damage, but they output lots of ability damage and withstand ability damage better than other classes.

• Defenders –- high survivability but low damage.

• Warriors –- the most balanced class and the most versatile as a result. They take a fair amount of damage and deal a fair amount in return.

• Strikers –- the physical damage equivalent of Enchanters, meaning lots of damage but very low survivability.

• Tacticians –- slightly more survivability than average but focus on AOE disruption and controlling the flow of movement across a lane.

In most PC MOBA games, players shop at an item store for items to upgrade their characters as the game progresses. Guardians mixes things up by introducing a less UI-intensive series of systems that should help make the console experience go more smoothly. Players can set loadouts similar to League of Legends rune and mastery systems  before a game begins, except that the loadout options in Guardians are even more extensive. There are three loadout systems in place for players to manage and utilize throughout a game — Potions, Commands and Guardian Belts.

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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and which they’re …
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OK, so we can relate to the N64 kid. The most obvious thing we at XBLA Fans have in common with him is this: we love video games. However, because our team ranges in location and age, we all have our own unique stories. Since it seems like everyone’s nostalgia bone loves to be tickled every now and then, we decided to take a look at some of our staff’s best gaming memories. Whether their first console was an Atari or an N64, it’s been chronicled here in this brief history of our gaming pasts. Join us as we relive some of our fondest childhood — and adulthood, in some cases! — memories.

Once you’ve read about us, hop into the comments and share some of your own favorite gaming memories!

My earliest memory, is me sitting with my teddy bear playing Super Mario Bros. The NES was my first console. You could nearly always find me glued to the TV playing games like Mike Tyson’s Punch Out (Mr. Dream just didn’t do it for me), Karate Kid, Double Dribble basketball, just to name a few. In fact, one of my best memories was watching my mom beat Super Mario Bros. 3. I soon beat it, because I couldn’t let my mom beat the game without me beating it too! On the other side, my dad and I would play NES Play Action Football  and WWF Wrestlemania constantly. Later in my lifetime I found out he was letting me win. Not cool, dad.

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XBLA Fans’ Calendar Update helps you keep track of all those XBLA release dates that often seem to spring upon you at the last minute and remind you of those promised games you were looking forward to that just seem to disappear without explanation. In this edition we’re taking a look at a particularly sparse November along with some hopefuls for December so you can start organizing your MSP and schedule in some serious controller time or sick days well in advance.

The XBLA release schedule seems to have gone a bit quiet for the last two months of the year. So far we only have 3 confirmed November game launches. In the first week of the month gamers can get their hands on the next release in the SEGA Vintage Collection, Toe Jam & Earl for 800 MSP on November 7. In keeping with the retro feel for this week, the remake of 1984’s Karateka will also release November 7 for 800 MSP. The only other confirmed release this month is for Warlords on November 14, also priced at 800 MSP. However Skulls of the Shogun developers 17-Bit, have stated they would like a November launch despite having previously announced it would release with Windows 8, and developers Chasing Carrots have also indicated they would like to release their top-down racer Pressure this month too.

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The following is an editorial. It represents the views of the author only, and not the XBLA Fans staff as a whole.

Every few years a new game surfaces that’s “cool” to play. In the early part of the 2000’s it was Halo, then it was Grand Theft Auto 3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare started a trend that’s seen yearly addon pa–err titles to the series. But the most recent trend of only three years is Minecraft. It’s a game that every teenage boy carries on his USB thumb drive, hoping that while in the computer lab he won’t get caught playing the no-need-to-install version on a school PC. But it’s become more than that. It’s a social thing now. PC players host and join mulitplayer servers, working and battling creepers cooperatively. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition brought a near-perfect experience to home consoles, and while it’s not quite as strong as it’s PC brother, it’s been enough of a success to post over 3 million players to the leaderboards and get the attention of Red vs Blue‘s Rooster Teeth, who have created a series of Let’s Play videos and challenges.

But I just don’t get the appeal of this game.

I get that it’s well made, that it has a social appeal, and that those who love it enjoy it immensely. And to that I say good for them. But try as I might I just look at the gameplay and scratch my head. Maybe it’s because I’m playing solo. Maybe it’s because I’m in my (early) 30’s. Maybe I just feel like it takes too much time to get to the fun stuff. Whatever the reason I wish fans and the faithful developers the best, but it was like grinding teeth for me to play this game.

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Heading to XBLA later this fall, Enigma Software’s Alien Spidy is a game that’s about as true to the descriptor “traditional platformer” as modern games come. It doesn’t arm the player with crazy weapons. It doesn’t have sandbox, shooter or RPG elements. Its story is set up with the time-honored tradition of the protagonist’s girlfriend going missing. Players guide a space-traveling spider from left to right and run, jump and swing over enemies, pits and other environmental hazards. Simple, right? Maybe when broken down like so, but it also has that other element of the classic platformer: when you play it, you sometimes die.

Certainly it’s not the first game on modern consoles to make simply progressing from left to right a challenge. Other games featuring far tougher gameplay have come and gone over the past decade, but it’s still a trait worth mentioning. Alien Spidy approaches difficulty by stripping the player of any and all offensive capabilities, putting deadly hazards in his way and keeping him coming back for more with a forgiving checkpoint system. Anyone who’s played a platformer before can pick this one up and immediately start progressing, but don’t expect to do so unchallenged. To find out more about how the game works, XBLA Fans spoke with Enigma CEO Daniel Parente.

Alien Spidy is, as the name implies, a game starring an alien spider. Now, it seems to me that there are plenty of good (bad?) spiders right here on planet Earth, so I have to ask: why make the character an alien?

Daniel Parente: Indeed there is quite a lot of spiders on Earth, but we thought that an alien one would give us greater freedom to make it different and less “spidery” with a more human touch to avoid the arachnophobia to take place. Plus, an alien spider was giving us the logical possibility of [a] player with power-ups [and] a cool spaceship.

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The pesky mythological creatures filled the sky, regularly swooping down to wreak havoc on the undead rock band engaged in a fracas with other, less well-intentioned zombies below. Our group of zombie rockers had been punching, grabbing and throwing its way through the streets towards a cemetery for maybe 15 or 20 minutes at this point, with seemingly everyone but the screaming living trying their darnedest to send us back to hell for good. There was enough chaos being caused by the slow, lumbering zombie baddies and occasional “accidental” punching of each other that the airborne aggressors were being largely left to their own devices.

But there is only so much pushing that a bulky undead drummer is willing to take before he grabs an agitator by her throat and repeatedly smashes her face into the ground. It had fallen to me to make the skies a little friendlier, so that’s what exactly what I did at PAX Prime while playing Ska Studios’ Charlie Murder. Another scream escaped from her throat as she bit the dust, and that was that. However, the magical flying creature impeding our progress had friends. Well, two can play at that game. The other members of the group had continued on their merry little way pummeling the crap out of the enemy zombies, causing various pickups to drop, including guns.

A few pulls of the trigger later and the XBLA Fans crew had achieved complete air superiority. The screams of a unicorn ringing through the headset were music to my ears. On-screen, the tormentors actually took the form of witches on broomsticks, but they were voiced by the studio’s very own one-horn. Ska Studios Art Unicorn Michelle Juett-Silva smiled proudly when explaining that she and her husband, Lead Dishwasher James Silva, had performed nearly all of the voice-over work for their game.

Another stretch of the demo showed off the unicorn’s pipes even more. A quick cut-scene showed some NPCs attempting to escape from the zombies with their lives intact by navigating through the clearly haunted cemetery. They ran right smack into a ghostly little ghost that bore a striking resemblance to the girl from The Ring. (Silva would later admit that they are indeed his homage to Japanese horror films.) The girls can’t attack, but operate more as environmental hazards moving in fixed patterns. Coming into contact with them elicited one of Juett-Silva’s recorded screeches and meant death for the player.

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