Blog

JAM Live Music Arcade was developed by Zivix and published by Reverb Publishing and 505 Games. It was released May16, 2012 for 800 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

It’s been quiet in the world of music games recently, leaving our plastic guitars and drums to collect dust for over a year. JAM set out to deliver a brand new music experience, hoping to gamers a new reason to break out the fake six string. JAM lets players get creative with the game’s 32 tracks, allowing elaborate mixing and recording through the game’s soundboard. It may sound good, but it could have been so much better. There was potential, but it was crushed under the weight of trying to make it a game.

Read More

[springboard type=”youtube” id=”gaIWVrFcHtM” player=”xbla001″ width=”640″ height=”360″ ]

Beyond a couple screenshots, we haven’t seen much in motion for Blossom Mind’s Walter but that all changes today. They released their first …
Read More

Swedish developer Might and Delight announced this week it has paired with publisher D3Publisher (or D3P) to publish Might and Delight’s platformer Pid on XBLA. The partnership comes at the tail end of the game’s production, according to a news release, so “the vision has been entirely that of Might and Delight, while (D3P’s) years of publishing expertise will solidify Pid as a stunning success.”

Read More

The Lord of the Rings franchise is no stranger to video game adaptations. Of the many we’ve seen over the years, most of them are translated directly from the fiction into a playable form. We’ve guided Frodo on his journey to Mordor and fought to defend Minas Tirith as Aragorn. Guardians of Middle-Earth is not an adventure but instead a war waged by good and evil in a massive arena.

Guardians of Middle-Earth is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game with many of the genre staples. Unlike other MOBA forays on XBLA (Awesomenauts, Monday Night Combat), Guardians of Middle-Earth is the classic isometric experience complete with three lanes (in the main map), creeps, towers, the whole shabang!

Well. Mostly. There’s no hiding the core MOBA-ness of this game, but the developers at Monolith also want to bring new mechanics to the table and tailor the experience to the console. For instance, you can upgrade your minions and towers, but there’s no shop and there are shrines to fight over which grant buffs. How’s that for new mechanics? Read More

Zen Studios has announced that the Marvel Pinball: Avengers Chronicles DLC for Pinball FX2 will released on June 20 on Xbox Live Arcade. As should be evident from the …
Read More

Get to buildin’ for some swag!
Read More

Ubisoft have released a new trailer for this week’s XBLA release, Babel Rising. The game is an HD remake of a popular iOS and Droid game of the same name and …
Read More

Todd returns from E3 this week, so once we get the new releases out of the way it’s pretty much all Todd all the time. He tells us about some of the games he saw last week, a list of which you can find below. So if you were interested by the XBLA games being shown off last week, odds are we talk about them this week.

Please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on iTunes. We appreciate it! Check us out on twitter (@XBLAFans) where you can win codes for games, give us feedback or just ask a question. We are also now on Stitcher, so you can stream the show on your smartphone, give it a go!

Big thanks to Chris Green for the awesome theme music, be sure to check out his site BlurredEdge and why not follow him on twitter too @BlurredEdge.

[podcast]https://xblafans.com/xblafancast/XBLAFancastEp65.mp3[/podcast]

RSS | MP3 | iTunes Read More

Bargain hunters will be disappointed to hear that only one game made Deal of the Week this week, and there’s not much of a saving either. Ubisoft’s reboot of the god-game …
Read More

Announced during Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference last Monday, Matter is a Kinect-controlled XBLA title coming from Gore Verbinski’s (Pirates of the Caribbean) Blind Wink Games. Speaking with Joystiq, Phil Spencer, corporate VP of Microsoft Studios, expanded ever so slightly on the premise of the game that has thus far only been shown to the public in the form of a teaser-trailer. The rolling metallic ball in the teaser will be used as “a control surface for the game,” says Spencer.

“To a lot of people who haven’t played games for a long time, somebody standing completely stationary with a controller in their hands kind of seems emotionless, even though we know that we’ll be sweating or twitching,” Spencer adds. “And [it was Verbinksi’s] feeling, that with motion and movement, that the connection of the emotion that’s happening on screen and how the player feels would be more natural.”

Spencer stated that his ability to describe the project is limited compared to Verbinski’s, but he attempted to do so nonetheless. “The idea was that in your physical motion, your emotion actually comes through,” he said.

Read More