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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 …
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Get to buildin’ for some swag!
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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 …
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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.

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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]

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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 …
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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.

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Few things are more impenetrable than the mighty castle. Around the 10th century or so, major countries defended their population from sieges with these massive stone structures. Typically castles were constructed several miles apart in strategically superior locations. In CastleStorm, they’re right next door to each other.

Perhaps the real estate was good at the time or maybe the world of CastleStorm is just ridiculously crowded but things get cozy in this 2D tower defense. Your castle has a massive ballista on the front of it, which you use to mow down waves of ground forces and lay siege to the enemy castle. If the one-size-fits-all weapon weren’t enough, you can also dispatch your own forces and use magical abilities to affect the battlefield. Destroy the enemy castle or capture their flag to secure victory.

Real time strategy and the second dimension have blended before with games like Grim Grimoire and Swords & Soldiers, but it’s not the most common of sub-genres. That said, CastleStorm blends the RTS with even smaller genres including artillery shooters (Worms) and tower defense. The resulting smoothie is not only delicious, it offers a unique flavor. Read More

We are introducing a very special feature here on XBLA Fans. Each Monday for the foreseeable future, we will be showcasing a community member’s world. If you are interested in being …
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During all the hoopla of E3, Xbox Live Arcade snuck silently past a rather large milestone as noticed by friend of the site, @Lifelower. Our own XBLA historian, Andrew …
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