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Better try and find some friends this week for Deal of the Week from June 26 to July 2 has a multiplayer theme and sees up to 75% off …
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Released on XBLA last week, Zen Studios’ Marvel Pinball: The Avengers Chronicles DLC for Pinball FX2 offers up a quartet of new Marvel-themed tables for gamers to flip silver balls around for 800 MSP. According to the Penny Arcade Report, the foursome are the result of two years of collaborative work between Marvel and Zen. Each of the tables was in development for around eight months, with 75 percent of that time being spent on testing.

“The table I’ve been championing literally since we started this whole thing is The Infinity Gauntlet,” Chris Baker, the interactive manager at Marvel Entertainment, told the Penny Arcade Report. “I think it might actually be what prompted the idea for event-based tables in the first place, just because the idea of Infinity Gems becoming their own balls is so conducive to great video pinball missions. I think more than any table Zen has made so far, this is definitely a videogame and definitely not something you could see actualized in a traditional pinball form. One look at the Reality Gem in action, where the table warps your reality by literally flipping it upside down, and I think you’ll know what I mean.”

After going hands-on with the table at E3 and with the review copy, XBLA Fans has seen firsthand the genius of its intricate design. Zen’s blending of visually impressive comic book elements with satisfying silver ball play is the result of seasoned table designers, but the team behind Infinity Gauntlet wasn’t always capable of such innovative works, admitted Zen Creative Director Neils Sorens. “We started out as game developers who happened to be pinball fans,” he said. “Our lack of pinball design experience showed in our early work, which was derivative and doesn’t stand up well to what we’re putting out these days.”

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Toronto-based studio Capybara Games are not strangers to the XBLA platform or the digital market. They’ve released the wonderful Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes and the iOS indie-darling Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, an idiosyncratic kaleidoscope of music by Jim Guthrie and great art by Superbrothers‘ Craig Adams.

We’ve only known about one title they’re working on currently for XBLA with Super T.I.M.E. Force but in an interview promoting the Japanese release of Sworcery, they discussed they’re working on three new titles across XBLA, PSN, and Steam. Since we currently know about one game exclusive to XBLA, what could the other two games possibly be and could they be coming to XBLA?

Capy Games are known for their unique design and thought-provoking gameplay, so anything coming from this studio won’t be some tired old design you’ve seen before or a complete riff on an idea you’d think they were crazy to think of. Creative Director/Game Designer Kris Piotrowski talked about why their next titles would be coming to those platforms:
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Weekly Roundup compiles all the biggest news stories, reviews, and releases from the week into one handy post on the weekends.

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With Summer of Arcade looming on the horizon, we dip back into some recent hits to tide us over.
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Welcome to our Challenges & Encounters guide, two of the key returning features in Magic 2013! This page is for the Challenges, Encounters can be found here. As they were in the past, these puzzles require you to solve intricate victory solutions from abysmal situations. Most of these puzzles require you to win during that one turn, making this a very small, difficult piece of Magic strategy. Since these are puzzles, however, we can solve them the exact same way every time! As such, each solution will be in step by step format, so you can’t possibly miss a beat.

Important: We strongly advise you either view every step before trying these, or you stop the timer after each move, as some steps are between individual card plays rather than entire turn phases.

Again, there are 10 Encounters to go along with the 10 challenges, so if you want solutions or help with those, head on over to the Encounters guide page. Read More

The Encounters are back in Magic 2013 and that means single-minded AIs following patterns until you win or lose. These patterns will be the same every time, but keep in mind that they will still block and attack logically regardless of the pattern. Since this is a card game and you still have to draw cards normally in Encounters, it’s important to remember that sometimes you can’t win without the right cards. That’s perfectly fine, these may take a couple tries no matter how sound the strategy is. The first three are pretty simple Encounters so their solutions are pretty straightforward, but as you progress you’ll find these Encounters get more and more difficult (and more and more unfair), so we hope you’ll find this guide useful.

Also back are the puzzle challenges. These challenges dare you to solve intricate Magic puzzles with a very specific setup and solution set. You can find our solution set to those challenges here. Read More

Tequila Works wanted to create a realistic apocalypse story for their upcoming zombie puzzle-platformer Deadlight. In their second developer diary, the developers discuss how their story was created, from interpreting a …
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Microsoft has released a software development kit (SDK) for SmartGlass just a few weeks after announcing it at E3. The system allows various portable electronics devices – like, say, tablet computers or smartphones – to synch-up with an Xbox to display information based on what’s going on in-game: Showing a world map, for example, or allowing the player to create plays in Madden on your device for in-game use.

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Never heard of Spelunky? It’s a roguelike platformer where every level is randomized upon death with different item placements, pathways and such. It was released as a freeware game …
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