Features

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

A bit of a slow week due to the holidays, but it’s hard to complain with a week of great XBLA sales. XBLA Fans wants to know if you picked up anything good during the holiday deals.

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‘Tis the season to buy XBLA
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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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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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