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Slender: The Arrival was developed by Blue Isle Studios and published by Midnight City. It was released on September 24, 2014 for $9.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Slender: The Arrival is inspired by the popular PC game, Slender: The Eight Pages and even features a scene similar to the original. There have been few survival horror games on XBLA and even fewer that have gotten the feeling of horror right. This has led to gamers waiting for some time to see a new survival-horror game appear on XBLA, one that could scare the pants off of them. I’m happy to report that Slender does exactly that, even on the easiest difficulty.

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John Baez doesn’t want Asteroid Base’s money. It’s as if the three men who make up the studio are old friends of Baez’s, and on this day they just happen to be patrons of his business. Their money is no good here.

They are not old friends, though. Baez, president and co-founder of indie game studio The Behemoth, only first met the members of Asteroid Base during PAX Prime of 2013. He noticed their still-in-production game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime had picked up a few awards and had a certain individuality to it. Lovers has a way of causing onlookers to gravitate towards it that’s not entirely unlike the way the game’s pink Death Star has a penchant for attracting the attention of enemy spaceships.

In the game, a pair of benevolent astronauts pilot a neon spacecraft around the universe, wishing only to survive. But then something catches their eyes, something they can’t ignore. A group of evil robots known as “The Haters” have ensnared innocent bunnies and locked them away in jail. The astronauts refuse to stand idly by while innocent creatures suffer, so they show some initiative, scrambling around the bowels of their craft and tinkering away at control stations that unleash firepower of a magnitude that they can only hope The Haters are unable to repel. Despite the protagonists’ violent response, Asteroid Base sees the titular lovers as good Samaritans. The pair have somehow survived this long on their own out in the frightening yet awe-inspiring uncertainty that is space, even managing to thrive in it without any support from large, external entities. Now they want to help other space-faring beings like them do the same.

The Behemoth knows the feeling. Founded in 2003, the San Diego studio responsible for such hits as Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers chose to go it alone in another dangerous environment. The developer released its games sans publisher in the competitive console gaming space. The Behemoth found success, but it wasn’t easy doing it through self-funding — Baez mortgaged his house, and co-founder Tom Fulp kicked in some of his personal savings to help finance development in the early days. But they did it, and they were successful enough that they’re now in a position of strength.

A few years ago, Baez and Company used that strength to quietly start something called The Gold Egg Project. Gold Egg is a funding initiative meant to help other indies bring their games to market, but unlike a traditional publisher, The Behemoth doesn’t take any of its beneficiaries’ profits — it only wants to help them. Now The Behemoth is helping Asteroid Base, and Baez hopes the studio will one day pass it on.

Being indie

For almost as long as there has been game design there have been independent game designers. The term “indie,” while well-established today, is newer. It means something; it’s just that no one seems to be able to agree upon exactly what that something is. So it was for The Behemoth back in 2005 when the tenderfoot studio’s Alien Hominid was winning Independent Game Festival Awards for Innovation in Art, Technical Excellence and Audience Choice.

Baez recalls of that time that “there was a lot of controversy [as to] whether we were indie or not, solely because we were on a console. Other developers said, ‘You can’t be indie because you’re on a console.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, we’re indie because we funded it.’ Now that’s our definition of indie.”

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Major Nelson has announced this week’s Deals With Gold promotional sales. Xbox One owners can get The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Contrast and 1001 Spikes at a 33-percent discount.

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This week’s schedule is as follows: Tuesday, September 23rd @ 8:30 pm (CST) – Recurring Tuesday Stream with Marshall. This week: Defense Grid 2 – Released today!

If there …
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The Xbox One recently launched in Japan and it certainly did not have the best of times overseas. In the first week of sales only 23,562 units were moved, …
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Capcom has announced that it will release Resident Evil Revelations 2 on Xbox One and Xbox 360 in early 2015.

At least, that’s when it will begin releasing …
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Stick It to The Man! was developed and published by Zoink Games. It was released August 28, 2014 on Xbox One and Xbox 360 for $9.99. An Xbox One copy was provided for review purposes.

It has been an awfully long time since the likes of Braid, Limbo and Super Meat Boy first began to demonstrate just how innovative and enjoyable smaller, digitally delivered titles could be. Unbelievably, though, there are still independent studios out there that continue to push the envelope. With Stick it to the Man!, Zoink games have done exactly that, delivering an entertaining, polished and highly amusing puzzle/platform game that oozes originality from every pore.

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Microsoft has been rumored over the past week to be in talks with Mojang about a $2.5 Billion buyout of the small indie studio responsible for Minecraft. The purchase …
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Xbox’s October update has been announced, bringing with it a slew of highly desirable features. First and foremost is some new functionality wherein double-tapping the guide button snaps a 360 guide menu-esque screen next to whatever you’re playing. This screen gives you easy access to a bunch of options: Friends, Messages, Game DVR, a clock, and a battery indicator. There are also improved options for opening and closing snapped apps.

They’ve also introduced enhancements to the Achievements app, the Friends section, and SmartGlass. The media player has been updated to include DNLA and MKV support for you AV-inclined folks out there, and there is also now the ability to assign devices to individual users and hide games from the library if desired. It’s a pretty massive list, which you can check out here or take a look at the video below the break.

One of the biggest criticisms with the Xbox One is that it undid a lot of the things that the Xbox 360 did right. The biggest issue many people had was that it was harder than ever to access social features like friends lists and messaging. While it has been getting better over the past year, the October update should finally put the nail in the antisocial coffin.

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Telltale Games recently announced via Twitter that this fall they will be releasing their acclaimed adventure games, The Walking Dead (both seasons) and The Wolf Among Us on Xbox …
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