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Are you ready for The End?

No, we’re not talking about supposed endtimes scenarios that may or may not play out and obliterate the planet before you’re able to tear open your gifts Christmas morning; when we say “The End,” we mean the stark, desolate location in Minecraft which will make its way to the Xbox 360 Version with Title Update 8.

Minecraft’s topsy-turvy alternate dimension – and its difficult boss, the Ender Dragon – will offer players a new area to explore in the 360 version of the wildly popular world-building game. However, that’s not the only new stuff coming to 360 players of the game, as Title Update 7 is also forthcoming. TU7 brings a bunch of new features to the game, which can be found after the jump.

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Flight combat simulator Dogfight 1942 recently received a sneaky price reduction. The game was originally released on XBLA September 5 of this year for 1200 MSP but is now showing …
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XBLA fans may be wondering what happened to Grounding Inc.’s upcoming Kinect shooter, Crimson Dragon. The spiritual successor to Panzer Dragoon was expected to hit XBLA way back in …
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Last week, the Minecraft XBLA Team held a Q & A session at MineCon in Paris, France. Among some of the topics discussed at the …
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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and which they’re …
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Weekly Roundup compiles all the biggest news stories, reviews and features from the week into one handy post on the weekends.

A solid week for Xbox Live Arcade. We’ve got some big releases and DLC to pour over, a lot of great games on the horizon and a few impressive milestones for XBLA favorites. What did you pick up this week? Are you battling for Middle-earth? Hitting monster combos in Tony Hawk, or pitting historic figures against each other in fantasy duels to the death?

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Look after the pennies, and the pounds (or dollars, euros, pesos or whatever) will take care of themselves. Or at least, that’s what our parents used to tell us, right?

That may be sensible where traditional currency is concerned, but it’s not a strategy that converts well into MSP. Waiting for sales and bargains may be the cheapest way of buying XBLA games – but what if the game you want never goes on sale? What if everyone else has moved on and you lose out on the best bit of a fantastic co-op game like Lara Croft: GOL or a community-focused game like Section 8: Prejudice? What if you think you’re buying something you want, but actually you just bought it because it was cheap and you end up wasting MSP anyway?

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• Mojang published official sales numbers for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition as part of Gamasutra’s monthy Xbox Live Arcade sales analysis, which derives numbers from the game’s leaderboards. It currently sits at 4.47 million copies sold in just a bit over a reported time of seven months. For those who like breakdowns that’s roughly 640,000 sales per month, although in reality sales were much higher earlier on and have dropped somewhat of late.
• PlayXBLA announced the details for Minecraft‘s seventh title update. On the table are the majority of updates from the Java 1.0.1 version, minus The End. Breeding, brewing and baby animals are just a few things included in the update. 4J Studios stated via their Twitter account that The End still needs work, and that it will be part of title update 8. For a full list, hit the jump.
• Daniel Kaplan of Mojang tweeted that over 1 billion worlds have been started in Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition.

Sources: Gamasutra, PlayXBLA

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Citing “various reasons,” publisher Bandai Namco announced today that it has chosen to end development on Aero-Cross. It was just over two years ago when the publisher announced …
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Opening night for Suda 51’s newest bloody adventure Black Knight Sword is next week, December 12 on Xbox Live Arcade. This theatrical hack-and-slasher comes from Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality, the same star-crossed teams from Japan and Hungary that brought us Sine Mora earlier this year. We saw the game earlier this year at PAX East, where we noticed a striking similarity to a certain other over-dramatized villain. The reverent nods continue in the press release they sent earlier today:

Bring out yer dead! Bring our yer dead! And, no, it won’t cost ninepence because The Black Knight from Black Knight Sword is here to rid the world of treacherous evil for the thrill of killing. The wicked, bad, naughty, villainous, duplicitous, and super evil Dark Princess must pay the penalty! So never fear, The Black Knight will make his grand debut in Black Knight Sword on Xbox LIVE® Arcade for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft Wednesday, December 12. Even without arms or legs, The Black Knight will partake in an adventure through a strange spin on a classic fairytale to defeat the wicked creatures of the night.
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