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The newest addition to the Star Wars Pinball saga for Pinball FX2 now has a release date. Star Wars Pinball: Heroes Within will release on April 29 for $9.99, offering four new tables for the price of three. Two of the new tables have already been highlighted in trailers: a table dedicated to Han Solo that takes place aboard the Millennium Falcon, and a table that runs through the major events of the original movie, A New Hope.

The Droids table stars R2-D2 and C-3PO after they’ve been kidnapped by Jawas. It’s up to you to navigate the perils and help them escape the massive Sandcrawler. Masters of the Force will pay tribute to the users of the light and dark sides of the force, from Yoda to the Emperor and everyone in between. Heroes Within marks the end of the Star Wars Pinball series, but considering how great the previous packs have been this last batch should be equally as epic. Check out the new trailers after the jump, and may the force be with you.

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Microsoft spokesman Larry Hyrb announced yesterday that Crytek Kiev’s promising free-to-play title Warface has completed beta testing and is now available to all XBOX Live Gold Members for the Xbox …
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In what is likely the strangest, most amusing case of life-imitates-art-imitates-life, it appears that the free-form, sandbox-y block-placing smash hit Minecraft will now be used to submit entries in …
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Xbox Wire recently posted an interview with Jason “6995” DeGroot, composer for Capybara Games’ highly anticipated downloadable title Super Time Force. DeGroot describes the soundtrack as based “around NES …
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Recently announced ID@Xbox brawler Wulverblade released its first trailer – a look at the premise behind the game’s story and some examples of the main character’s moves. The game …
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The crawlers keep crawling, and the drip keeps dripping in Defense Grid 2.

Hidden Path Entertainment’s sequel to its 2008 tower defense game features a new resource and score system known as “the drip,” and it works exactly as planned: it makes games winnable for greenhorns while keeping aces chasing after higher scores that are achieved by killing crawling aliens with all manner of haste.

Never having played Defense Grid: The Awakening, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect out of its follow-up when I picked up the controller at PAX East. From the outset, the player is confronted with a multitude of options for defending the base from unwanted pests and a cluster of information tracking your progress in this endeavor. The amount of data and options on the screen paired with the constant march of baddies out of their gate, towards my tower and back again with poached cores in tow could have been overwhelming. It could have been, but it wasn’t. Hidden Path Entertainment saw to that with its streamlined presentation of data, tower building options and drip-drop of resources. Everything was pleasantly intuitive and easily manageable.

Sometimes, divorce is the answer

Being intuitive for beginners while remaining fun and challenging for experts is exactly what Hidden Path was aiming for with its sequel. Though it’s impossible to report on the latter, I can tell you that the studio pulled off the former with aplomb. The drip, which Polygon first reported on here, allows for resources to constantly accumulate as a line graph tracks your score in the upper right corner of the screen. Regardless of what your score is, your resource distribution rate remains the same. The rate of the drip in the PAX build allowed me to erect large quantities of a mixture of the six tower types present (cannon, missile, laser, gun, inferno and tesla) and upgrade many of them to carry more firepower.

Executive Producer Jeff Pobst explains that his team separated score from resource distribution in Defense Grid 2 in order to avoid the “negative feedback loop” that many players got stuck in due to poor decision making in the first game. As Pobst describes it, novices would waste too many of their resources early on building the wrong types of towers or placing towers in poor positions. This would leave them unable to repel enemies and unable to gather enough resources to compensate for their mistakes. Meanwhile, top players would dominate early on and find themselves with an embarrassment of riches, making victory too easily achieved.

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Craving something sweet? Look no further than the new Minecraft texture pack! The Candy Texture Pack turns every block in the world into an edible treat. Forests are filled with ice cream trees, the ocean overflows with soda, and sheep grow thick coats of cotton candy. There’s just so much to see – check out all the delicious screenshots after the jump. You can pick up the texture pack here for $1, and as always you can check out the free trial before you buy.

Source: PlayXBLA

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Happy Wars developer Toylogic Inc. has announced that a Castle Crashers event is happening from now until April 23rd. Simply by playing the Bounty Hunters mode, you’ll be able …
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tinyBuild, the developer of No Time to Explain, announced that during PAX East a deal was made with Microsoft to bring a remake of the game to Xbox One. The …
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External storage for the Xbox One is still on its way, confirmed Xbox’s Director of Programming, Larry Hyrb, who is commonly known by his moniker, Major Nelson. This …
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