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Zombie Studios have recently announced that Special Forces: Team X will be heading to XBLA February 6, 2013. The game is …
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Devolver Digital and Mastertronic, have announced that Serious Sam Double D XXL will launch February 20, 2013 on Xbox LIVE Arcade. …
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The story of Skullgirls‘ development, release and post-release support just may have more twists to it than its top-heavy characters have curves on their pixelated bodies. It started with two men, each with a skill, a passion and an idea. In 2009, longtime fighting game fan and tournament player Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont began programming a fighting game of his own. Elsewhere, unbeknownst to Zaimont at the time, artist Alex “o_8” Ahad was drawing a new fighting game universe of his own into existence, complete with characters to populate it. Eventually the two were introduced and merged their pet projects together at Reverge Labs into the game that released on XBLA and PSN in April of last year as Skullgirls.

Critics generally gave the game a favorable reception, with its combined XBLA and PSN score averaging 80% on Metacritic. Gamers gave it a fairly warm reception, too. The developer was excited when Skullgirls sold 50,000 copies in its first 10 days on the market. Although the development team informed XBLAFans on Thursday that Skullgirls has failed to turn a profit to date, we were also informed that the game has performed well enough that publisher Autumn Games is interested in green-lighting a sequel if it can successfully dodge the sticks and stones City National Bank has thrown its way.

With a PC version, DLC characters and multiple sequels in the plans, things were looking up for Zaimont, Ahad and the rest of the crew at Reverge. Then everything went quiet. Months went by without a single update on the port, downloadable content or the sequel. It was eventually revealed that the Skullgirls team had been let go by Reverge Labs in June of 2012 after developer and publisher allowed their contract to expire without agreeing upon a new one. More sticks. More stones.

Whether it was the entire team that was let go or some fraction of it has been a matter that was up for some debate. Reverge blogged that it was some of the team, while the displaced developers once said it was “the entire” team. When questioned repeatedly by XBLAFans over the past couple of months, neither of those factions nor Autumn has been willing to go on record to clear the air. The one thing that has been abundantly clear, though, is that the contract expiration effectively brought about a game over screen for future Skullgirls content and its would-be creators.

Or did it?

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It’s been a long time coming. After years of waiting and numerous delays building up our anticipation, it’s almost here. Developer 17-Bit announced today that …
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A release may finally be imminent for one of XBLA’s most-anticipated games. 17-bit studio head Jake Kazdal informed XBLAFans today that its turn-based strategy title, Skulls of the …
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That Telltale Games plans to follow-up the wildly successful Walking Dead adventure game with a second season is no secret. What form that will take has been a bit less clear; primary among the questions still to be answered is whether it will be a direct sequel to the first season or if it would follow an entirely new cast of characters.
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It would seem that falsely predicting the arrival of The End is something reserved not strictly for ancient Mayan civilizations, but also for modern video game developers. Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition developer 4J Studios responded to fan questions on Twitter yesterday about the impending arrival of the floating island known as “The End” is actually not impending at all: the island will not be patched into the XBLA version of the game along with Title Update 8 (TU8), as the developer said it would back in December.

The reason for the delay is that the studio has been forced to dedicate time to creating fixes for bugs that popped up in Title Update 7 (TU7), which released on December 19. 4J tweeted that its assertion that The End would come to XBLA as part of the next title update was made “before we knew we were releasing a bug fix update for TU7. The bug fix update will be TU8, so The End will be later.”

Some of the bugs that will be addressed include one the “Kick Player” bug that freezes the player’s Xbox when the host tries to kick him or her and one that mistakenly prompts players that they cannot sleep in beds when monsters are around.

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Developer Telltale’s episodic zombie adventure game The Walking Dead has received no shortage of critical praise, winning myriad outlets’ Game of the Year awards (including XBLAFans’). According to …
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Update: Lab Zero has informed XBLAFans that the studio has been working with Microsoft and has successfully shrunken down the size of the update some, though they declined to go into specifics about the current size of the update. Look for a full follow-up article coming soon. Original story below.

Lab Zero Games, the studio now responsible for all things Skullgirls following publisher Autumn Games and original developer Reverge Labs parting ways last summer, still hasn’t been able to get the patch that released for the PSN version of its fighting game in November onto the Xbox Live Marketplace. The holdup, apparently, is Microsoft’s XBLA update file size limit.

A tweet from the official Japanese Skullgirls Twitter account went out on Friday claiming that the update is exponentially larger than what Microsoft will allow. The update Lab Zero put together for its fighting game is roughly 590 MB in size — a whopping 147.5 times the size of the paltry 4 MB limit the developer says Microsoft places on updates. A rough Google translation showed that the Skullgirls team is under the impression that it’s possible to be granted an exception, but the process is arduous.

The revelatory tweet came on the same day that the main Skullgirls Twitter account stated that the team was “frustrated.” It’s not clear whether its frustrations are directed at Microsoft size limits or the two sides’ inabilities to get something worked out, but XBLAFans has followed up in an attempt to find out exactly what the team is unsated with and will update this story if we get a response.

Regardless of where the developer’s frustrations lie, Lab Zero Games is working with Microsoft to get the patch out “as soon as possible,” so there is still hope that it will make its way to XBLA. Skullgirls fans might not want to get their hopes up too high for it to appear anytime soon. The patch has been “held up in MS submission and holiday limbo” since as far back as December 12, according to an earlier tweet by the game’s official account. Though the team was said to be “pushing hard” later that very week, the calendar is nearing an entire month later and it sounds as if little, if any, progress has been made.

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