News

Tony Hawk made his return to video games earlier this month in the form of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD after the previously annualized series of the famous skater’s namesake took a one-year hiatus. According to statements made by Josh Tsui, CEO of Robomodo, the studio behind the XBLA release that remixed elements of the first two titles in the series, publisher Activision is ready to call it a comeback. Speaking with Gamasutra, Tsui said that “the prospect of a fuller game is definitely on the table — it’s just a matter of when and how.”

On the subject of why digital platforms were the right choice for a stab at a series comeback (PSN and PC versions will eventually follow the XBLA release), the CEO cited simple distribution and low price. “I think for now Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a very good way to reacquaint people to the franchise,” he said. “People are more apt to try games that are smaller and downloadable. Moving forward we’d have to see what our options are for a completely new experience, especially for any new platforms. But for now, downloadable games for a low price allow us great flexibility to try new things.”

It’s an approach that essentially amounted to the polar opposite of the studio’s previous attempt to bring Tony back. Original series developer Neversoft took over development of the Guitar Hero games after Activision acquired the brand but not its dev team (Harmonix), and 2007’s Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground fell off the rails. As Neversoft tried its hand at the then-in-vogue plastic peripheral market, Robomodo got its first crack at Tony Hawk and went in a similar direction.

Read More

Not only has Mimimi Productions partnered with Gambitious to continue development on their game Tink, but they also announced their game for XBLA. Tink is a third-person adventure game where you take the roll of Tink, a hero raging a war of color against The Creeping Bleakness. The villain is sucking all the color of the world and filling it with grey, emotionless creatures. Tink will use the power of colors to restore life to the world and alter the emotions of his enemies. According to CEO and Founder of Mimimi Productions Johannes Roth, Tink will also bring the color back to our world of violent video games:

“With Tink we wanted to create the kind of game that we miss playing in today’s climate of violent combat and bleak post-apocalyptic worlds. Our aim is to give players the same kind of feeling we had when we first played games like Banjo Kazooie, so it made sense to give our hero the power to bring colour back into his world, just as we want to do with gaming. We’re sure there are lots of other gamers out there who want it too!”

Read More

[springboard type=”youtube” id=”qEww33D0liE” player=”xbla001″ width=”480″ height=”400″ ]

Team17 has released their fifth and final developer diary for Worms: Revolution. In this edition, Lead QA Daniel Martin explains the …
Read More

5th Cell’s third-person shooter Hybrid will have a bountiful list of unlockables, including helmets, weapons, and specializations, all of which can be earned through natural progression. Those who want to get these …
Read More

There’s still news in this slow week!
Read More

Minicore Studios’ Laika Believes will be released episodically in three chunks, the developer has revealed. Staring a space-traveling dog and set in a Soviet-dominated world, the game was always planned to be a Metroidvania-style platformer, and the team feels that releasing it over the course of three episodes will allow it to dedicate more time to crafting levels of an appropriate scope for such a game while also getting content to gamers earlier than originally planned. Minicore is currently targeting spring 2013 for the game’s debut episode, with the other two set to hit the market place “within the following year.”

The studio’s latest blog post states that the focus of development will rightly be placed on “massive, nonlinear levels, choice-rich skill trees, and game mechanics.” All are elements that the team supposedly was looking to work into Laika Believes from the start; however, there were concerns internally that the enormity of those undertakings would end up being too much for the small studio to successfully juggle under a more traditional release strategy.

Supposedly the game already contains “natural break points,” allowing the devs to easily transition into the episodic format. Improved pacing and the ability for players to discover new sections of Laika Believes at their own pace are also components of the experience that Minicore thinks it can more deftly integrate into its title without the pressure of having to deliver the full experience in one release.

Read More

It looks like everyone was wanting to kickflip into a Darkside grind in the first week of Summer of Arcade. We certainly liked Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD a …
Read More

In the real world, Playdead’s Limbo first appeared on XBLA to near-universal acclaim in July of 2010, and released on other platforms a year later. Somewhere, however, in some alternate universe, it was PlayStation 3 owners who got the yearlong jump on everyone else.

Read More

Avatar FameStar was launched this Wednesday alongside Kinect destruction game Wreckateer and to tell you all about it, a new trailer has also been helpfully published on Microsoft’s PlayXBLA blog. Full …
Read More

This week on XBLA Wednesday we cover Wreckateer, the new Trials level, the Awesomenauts patch and this week’s sales & specials
Read More