Blog

Terraria was released on Xbox Live at the end of March 2013 and features action, platform, light RPG and world building mechanics in a similar style to Minecraft. XBLA Fans …
Read More

Magic 2014: Duels of the Planeswalkers was developed by Stainless Games and Wizards of the Coast and published by Microsoft Studios. It retails for 800 MSP and was released on June 26, 2013. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Magic 2014: Duels of the Planeswalkers (Magic 2014) is the fourth edition of the popular series to grace the Xbox 360 and unsurprisingly, it delivers new cards, new features (including a sealed play mode) and an all new campaign mode. Like any annual release such as FIFA or Madden, your decision to buy (or not to buy) Magic 2014 will largely depend upon factors related to whether or not you actually enjoy the core experience and what value the new features provide over previous iterations.

The Duels of the Planeswalkers series (DOTPW) is designed to provide a fun and cost effective gateway for new players to enter the Magic The Gathering (MTG) arena, and Magic 2014 carries on that tradition admirably. MTG is a complicated card game which features a basic set of rules for placing cards (spells) onto an imaginary battlefield. Each spell costs a set amount of mana, which is in turn generated from the placement of land cards. The real skill of MTG is found in building a deck of cards which complement each other well enough to overcome the opposing deck and reduce your enemy’s health from twenty to zero. Magic 2014 explains these complex mechanics through a series of simple tutorials positioned before the main campaign, and then with helpful text boxes from then on.

For veterans of the DOTPW series or those who have strong knowledge of MTG in general, Magic 2014 provides the most feature rich installment to date and we are pleased to report that all of the new features enhance the overall experience without detracting in any way from the core gameplay.

Read More

Those looking for a fun distraction this weekend will be happy to know that Doodle Jump for Kinect released today for 400 Microsoft Points. This Kinect version of Doodle …
Read More

He knows what he wants, Christian Allen does. He’s known since the start. Even before the start, actually. Before Takedown: Red Sabre’s 2012 Kickstarter campaign successfully raised over $200,000, Allen, creative director at indie development studio Serellan, knew he wanted to go back.

He wanted to take gamers back in time. Not too far, only a few years. Back to a time when “tactical” shooters felt more, well, tactical. They had realistic combat — or as close as video games of that could come to approximating it, at least. The Tom Clancy video games from early last decade didn’t play anything at all like the myriad Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty releases that dominate today’s shooter market. Certainly there is nothing inherently wrong with the approaches those games’ developers have taken to creating an FPS. There is something wrong, though: most everyone else is trying to make the same games as them.

Not Allen and his team at Serellan. Allen knows what he wants, and it isn’t Halo or Call of Duty. Lucky for him, he seems to have a team that knows how to deliver it.

Being a team player

He estimates that the least amount of experience anyone at Serellan has is eight years. Each member of the team has shipped multiple shooters for multiple platforms. As for Allen, between 2002 and 2007 he worked for Tom Clancy factory Red Storm Entertainment on various titles in the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises — tactical shooters. I ask if that deep and varied shooter development background meant Takedown would feature a lot of different concepts.

“I wouldn’t say it’s about concepts, because we’ve had a really clear vision from day one about what we wanted gamers to experience,” Allen responds. “The great thing about the different devs is that we’ve all shipped at least a billion dollars in revenue of games and almost exclusively shooter titles. So I know, for example, our weapons artist, our character artist, our environment artist — they know how to build shooter levels and content that works, so I can really fire and forget.”

Read More

Survivors everywhere can breathe a little easier. State of Decay will finally be getting its big update to smooth out some of the wrinkles still clinging to the title. The update, …
Read More

The cost of developing a title update may have just gone down significantly.
Read More

June has certainly been the month of State of Decay on Xbox Live Arcade. The zombie apocalypse simulator has broken records, becoming the platform’s fastest selling original IP, and garnering …
Read More

A Russian programmer known as Barabus is a big fan of the indie-hit-gone-arcade hack ‘n’ slash The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, so much so that he took it upon himself …
Read More

The fourth entry in the series, Magic 2014 – Duels of the Planeswalkers is available today on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 MSP. Magic 2014 follows the Planeswalker Chandra Nalaar and her fiery …
Read More

Today it’s all about randomness.
Read More