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We’ve been talking all week about the turtles’ return to game form and the specifics of Red Fly Studio’s plan to unchain your inner turtle. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is trying to do a lot of interesting things. It’s attempting to merge the original spirit of the fiction with the appeal and accessibility of the new animated series. It’s injecting personality into the titular characters, not just in their dialogue, but their combat styles and mannerisms. It’s building a fighting scheme that’s trying to marry fast and fluid with balance and intuition and imbue elements of control and variety more closely at home in a fighting game than a brawler. It’s attempting to do all of this, but at the end of the day, it’s still a game – so let’s talk about gamification.

There’s no place like home

If Out of the Shadows excels anywhere, it’s in going the extra mile to incorporate all those little pieces of Turtles fiction that really drives home the experience. The game’s main menu structure, which could have been a series of colored rectangles: Campaign, Mission, Extras – has been smartly incorporated into the turtles’ interactive underground headquarters. You’ll roam the halls and visit the many facilities, each one with a unique purpose, as Frechette explains.

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Finally, the long-awaited return of The Behemoth to Xbox Live Arcade is here! BattleBlock Theater released this past Wednesday for 1200 MSP, and has been generating quite a bit …
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Motocross Madness finally got a release date. The game was officially announced by Microsoft for XBLA back in June 2012 and while it now seems to have dropped the “Avatar” …
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Title Update 9 is now available for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition. Along with a bunch of add-ons and fixes including climbable vines, tweaks to crafting recipes and the ability for sheep to re-grow their wool, the update also brings with it The End, a new area where players can take on the Ender Dragon monster and hordes of Endermen enemies. For the full list of updates hit the jump.

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It’s out now. For 1200 MSP, you can buy it and start playing it right away if you’d like. Funny thing about that, though — that should be old news. And it would be if The Behemoth had followed through with its plan to release BattleBlock Theater on XBLA back in 2010. Obviously, things didn’t quite work out that way, with the beat-em-up platformer having only just released yesterday. What happened? How could the developer have been so confident about 2010 that it was ready to tell the world that was the year and then ultimately be unable to finish BattleBlock Theater until three more calendar years passed it by?

Level Designer Ryan Horn has an explanation: the game wasn’t as fun as the team thought it was going to be. “I think we were hopeful about where the game was gonna be when we [planned] to release it,” he tells XBLAFans while sitting down for an interview at last month’s PAX East. “And then in between the time when we announced [the release window] and when we planned to release it at the time, we saw the game going in a direction that was fun, but we realized that we could take it in a slightly different direction that was going to be a lot more fun.”

With Horn having said his piece, studio President and co-founder John Baez expounds upon why The Behemoth felt its game could reach a state in 2010 that was up to The Behemoth’s considerably high standards of fun. Instead of going back to 2010, though, he looks a little deeper into his past. “The other component of [the delay] is that in our previous experience — I mean, Alien Hominid? Fifteen months, two consoles. Done out the door with an Xbox [version] following three months after that,” he begins. “And then Castle, it’s like, ‘OK, bigger game, three years.’” The prevailing feeling around The Behemoth’s San Diego office during the earlier development phase of Game #3, as BattleBlock was codenamed back then, was that it would not be as an ambitious of an undertaking as Castle Crashers.

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“I wanted to take the balance of Arkham Asylum, you know – when to attack, when to counter, that balance – and add in more of a fighting game element,” says Chris Frechette, Lead Designer of Red Fly Studio’s upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. He wants to bring more control and variety to the scheme, as he says, “Recognizable combos and special attacks so you feel like, ‘I just did that,’ and it’s not just a random attack.” Frechette has been guiding us through his action brawler, intent on recreating the fast and fluid teamwork-centric combat that’s the cornerstone of Turtles fiction.

When it comes to three-dimensional fighting schemes, it’s hard not to consider Arkham Asylum’s one of the greatest of the generation. It’s easy to pick up and play, empowering when employed against the mobs of thugs and street-trash that attack from all sides, and it’s extremely difficult – and rewarding – to master. But Frechette isn’t content to just repurpose what’s been done. As he walks us through what to expect when Out of the Shadows arrives, it’s clear he’s aiming for a whole new level of combat.

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Get the gang together because Pocketwatch Games’ Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine will release Wednesday, April 24 on XBLA for 1200 Microsoft Points and Steam for $14.99, according to …
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In our last look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows we learned how Red Fly Studio plans to bring thirty years of TMNT fans together. That’s no simple task. The TMNT name has been scattered to the wind since shortly after its inception, divided among the many incarnations of the fiction, each with their own differences. There are fans of the comics, fans of the movies and fans of the many animated shows. There’s no right way to appreciate the Turtles, it would seem. But as XBLAFans delved further into the game, guided by Lead Designer Chris Frechette and his passion for Out of the Shadows, we discovered the unifying appeal might be the differences in the turtles themselves.

If there is one universal truth that pumps through the heart of every Turtles fan past, present or future, it would seem to be this: everyone’s got a favorite. The dynamic personalities of each turtle are anchor points to latch onto, letting you identify with a personality that mirrors your own. Individually they hold their own strengths and weaknesses, but together they rely on one another to form a fighting force. Whether you’re the intelligent one, the honorable one, the funny one or the tough one, you’re represented in the diversity of the heroes in a half-shell. It’s a powerful sentiment that Red Fly Studio aims to leverage in its forthcoming title.

“One thing we wanted to do was not only have their personalities represented in their bodies and their facial animations, but blend that into combat in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Frechette says. He’s loaded up the Shadowboxing mode in Out of the Shadows, where players will be able to get a feel for a turtle and his unique combat style. Unlike earlier games in the Turtles saga, Out of the Shadows will incorporate separate fighting disciplines for each turtle, bringing their personalities to life during combat, not just when they’re cracking wise and talking trash.

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Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is the rare platformer in today’s world that is simultaneously incredibly demanding and very satisfying. The game, ported to XBLA from the first batch of Steam Greenlight games, was originally part of a successful Kickstarter project. The game’s protagonist, Giana, derives her name from the original Great Giana Sisters of the 1980s which was most well known for being successfully sued by Nintendo for its close similarities to Super Mario Bros. The new game maintains the charm of an older era while demonstrating a keen awareness of how graphics and sound have improved in 25 years between the original and Twisted Dreams.

The game’s main mechanic involves Giana’s ability to shift between two different forms, which shifts the entire world’s graphics and music accordingly. Players will find themselves shifting back and forth between worlds extremely rapidly at times — it recalls the shifting of Ikaruga and Outcast, though with substantial changes to the environment also, not just the main character.

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