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The Enrichment Center would like to inform you that Zen Studios is teaming up with Valve to deliver a brand new pinball testing initiative. Portal Pinball will take you through Aperture Laboratories as you guide Chell and Wheatley through a series of test chambers. Help the duo escape the facility by infiltrating the Turret Factory, teaming up with Atlas and P-Body, and battling GLaD0S. Portal Pinball will quantum tunnel its way to Pinball FX 2 the week of May 25. Check out screenshots of the table after the jump.

Source: Zen Studios Blog

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Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China was developed by Climax Studios and published by Ubisoft. It was released on April 21, 2015  for $9.99 on Xbox One. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Going from a game that helped to define the open world genre to a stylized 2.5D side-scroller, the Assassin’s Creed franchise takes a sidestep with the Chronicles spin-off series. Its first game, China, fully embraces both the mechanical and stylistic shift. Set in 16th century China, the game stars Shao Jun, who returns to her homeland seeking revenge for the near elimination of her brotherhood many years ago. Her main goal is to assassinate members of the Tiger Templar group, but since she has little to no support in the region, stealth is more important now than ever.

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Glory to the days of Robotron 2084.

If that is something you find yourself saying, Ultratron might be for you.

Set in a world where all humans have died out, one remaining humanoid battle droid sets out to avenge the human race. Along the way, many enemies such as Turrets, Chasers, Spawners and Minelayers attempt to impede the path of the battle droid’s quest in 40+ levels of glowing neon. If that’s not enough, four giant bosses- Ieiunitas, Bellum, Lues and Letum will attempt to give the battle droid some trouble.

Ultratron is a twin stick shooter that features retro-futuristic sound, graphics and a simulated CRT-curve to take the player back to the days of retro. The game will be available for purchase at the price of $9.99, €9.99 or £7.99 and is said to have launch discounts as well.

Check below to see a PC trailer for Ultratron.

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We post our streaming schedule each week, however, we’d like to start highlighting at least one of our more unique streams each week. Join us Tuesday from 10PM EST …
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The Kickstarter for Yooka-Laylee, a spiritual successor to the original Banjo-Kazooie 3D platformers, met its $270,000 goal in just 40 minutes last Friday, May 1. Now, only three days later, it sits at over $2 million.

Yooka-Laylee will feature large worlds to explore using a variety of special moves and abilities to collect numerous goodies and fight bosses. Yooka is a chameleon with a long tongue to grapple with, and Laylee is a bat with a sonar blast. Laylee can flap his wings to add a bit of distance to Yooka’s jump, just like Kazooie did for Banjo back in the day. With additional stretch goals now met, Playtonic also plans to add a quiz show level, mine cart levels, transformations and multiplayer modes. Clearly, Playtonic is sticking to as many elements from the classic games as possible.

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In addition to our scheduled streams below we also sometimes do impromptu streams. The best way to stay informed of those is to follow XBLA Fans on Twitter and …
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Telltale Games has a brand new partnership that seems to have come completely out of nowhere; they will be teaming up with Marvel for a game project. The project …
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Lifeless Planet will release May 13 on Xbox One, Stage 2 Studio’s David Board announced on Twitter yesterday. The puzzle-platformer first released on PC in June of last year …
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Developer Comcept has announced that they have partnered with publisher Deep Silver for the release of Mighty No. 9. The Mega Man spiritual successor will be available in the Americas on …
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Project Root was developed by OPQAM and published by Reverb Publishing on Xbox One. It will release on April 28, 2015 for $9.99. A copy was provided by Reverb Publishing for review purposes.

Shoot-em-ups are one of my favorite pastimes. There is an odd sense of satisfaction from seeing bullets fly by your ship (or equal equivalent) while shooting your own back and trying to survive. Failure occurs often, there is a thrill in seeing how long you’ll last before dying. In the old days, you’d coin feed an arcade machine until you (eventually) beat it. Nowadays, most shmups have reached niche status and rarely see support in the retail market. For every Deathsmiles or Akai Katana that sees a localization, there is another title like Eschatos and Ginga Force that fans hope lucks out with a region-free Japanese release. Occasionally, we saw XBLA shmup releases such as Triggerheart Exelica and Guwange, which are compact experiences. Project Root is one of the first shmups to reach the Xbox One and try something different: free roaming. As a fan of the genre and sub-genres like bullet hells, I was excited to try it.

Project Root can be fun. It really can be. However, the amount of time and effort to create that opportunity far exceeds the benefit. The game relies heavily on the player upgrading their ship to succeed, yet the experience system to level up for upgrades is atrocious. A majority of your experience will come from a first-time level completion bonus. If you can’t beat a level, you’re in for a miserable time. As is typical for progression systems, the other way to gain XP is to gradually fill the experience bar by killing enemies. The rate of gain, however, is slow, especially on the first few levels where you need it most. It takes one to two hours to level up once via killing enemies, and all of that effort is for a modicum of XP; it may not even be enough for the upgrade you’re pining for. Tack on having zero checkpoints and it becomes a frustrating sortie of trial and error. Adding salt to the wound, upgrades and progress do not carry over to other difficulties, so all of your hard work doesn’t matter if you want to try something harder or cruise through something easier. Outside of free roam, Project Root does nothing new or exciting to add to the genre. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone outside of the absolute diehard shmup fans that must have every shmup game.

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