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Microsoft has dropped a couple of “mystery” screenshots for a motocross game on its Play XBLA site, but Eurogamer, as well as several commenters on the original story, was able to quickly decipher that the game in question is Avatar Motocross Madness. Not that doing so was particularly difficult: the file names of the images are AMX_Mystery_1 and AMX_Mystery_2, and the publisher trademarked Avatar Motocross Madness last month. The name of the game was to be officially announced during Microsoft’s pre-E3 media briefing on Monday, June 4, but it’s now obviously not going to quite be the surprise the publisher had in mind.

Avatar Motocross Madness will be the first release in the series since Motocross Madness 2 dropped in 2000. It was the sequel to the 1998 original, both developed by Rainbow Studios and published by Microsoft on PC. THQ acquired the developer in 2001 before shutting it down last year. The developer behind the Avatar-themed revival has not yet been revealed.

Sources: Play XBLA and Eurogamer

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A bit of a lull in XBLA games this week, but nothing Trials Evolution can’t plug.
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Anomaly Warzone Earth – 320MSP (was 800)

Anomaly is, in our humble opinion one of the finest games to be released on XBLA in recent memory. It is a …
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Tequila Works has been showing off thrilling gameplay for their upcoming zombie game Deadlight for some time, but the story that will back it up appears just as exciting. The …
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Dragon’s Lair was developed by Digital Leisure and published by Microsoft Studios. It released May 18, 2012 for 800 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Odds are, you’ve played Dragon’s Lair – or, at least, know the basic style and premise well enough. Since its release in the early 1980s, Don Bluth’s magnum opus has been released and rereleased literally dozens of times on as many platforms. The game puts the player in the shoes of Dirk the Daring, a knight who ventures into the lair of the evil wizard Mordroc to rescue Princess Daphne from the nefarious dragon Singe. Rather than controlling Dirk directly, the player controls his reflexes at periodic intervals as he traverses through the castle – think quick time events – and slow reaction time or choosing the wrong action at the wrong time spells certain doom for the hero.

Until last week, the Xbox 360 was one of the few systems the game hadn’t been ported to. How does Digital Leisure – no stranger to repurposing the game for new platforms – do with the transition? About as well as can be expected…but that may not be a good thing.

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Major Nelson has released the weekly most-played titles lists for both XBLA, XBLIG and Xbox 360 in general for the week ending May 14, and, unsurprisingly, Minecraft: Xbox …
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Bang Bang Racing is one of those titles that often has its name thrown around here at the XBLA Fans office. Playbox and Digital Reality’s top-down racer was a …
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Minecraft for Xbox Live Arcade will be getting its first free update in just a couple weeks, Roger Carpenter, lead producer of the fastest-selling game to ever hit the platform, has informed XBLA Fans. Digital crafters can look forward to what has been dubbed an interim update fixing a number of bugs when it arrives. Carpenter confirmed that dummy glitches, sleeping, clay issues and more will be remedied when it goes live.

A more robust update (1.7.3) will then follow at an undetermined date in July. Designed as the first in a series of post-release downloads to bring the port up to speed with the PC version, 1.7.3 will not include any additional Achievements due to it being free. (Those players who feel the itch to bump up their Gamerscore need not necessarily worry: traditional Xbox Live DLC with extra Achievements is being considered for sometime down the line.)

 
[springboard type=”video” id=”496935″ player=”xbla001″ width=”640″ height=”400″ ] Unfortunately the size of the maps (1024 by 1024 blocks) is not set to be bumped up yet. The reason, says Carpenter, is that the game’s creators want to make sure they have sufficient room to expand the game as it grows. Any PC bugs that were not fixed until later updates will not be taken care of with 1.7.3, but, as mentioned, the plan is to eventually update Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition enough so that it matches up with the PC version.

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Konami has released several new screenshots for Zombie Studios’ Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition, and unlike George Costanza‘s Frogger high score, these screens have successfully made it across the street to their destination: your browser window. Of course, not even Schlomo and Slippery Pete could have blundered this one. Ah, references.

In any case, this latest incarnation of the 31-years-old franchise, players will be able to square off against each other or the CPU in four-player matches to determine “who’s really the top frog.” And how!

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5th Cell made their name with fairly cutesy games like Drawn to Life and Scribblenauts. Both handheld games with a kid-friendly art style and gameplay that encouraged creativity. So when they revealed their first XBLA game and it turned out to be a third person shooter, we were certainly surprised.

What we weren’t surprised about was the fact they had decided to do things a bit differently. Drawn to Life was a fairly traditional action platformer but it stood out by letting players draw characters and objects that inhabited the world. Scribblenauts is a fairly simple puzzle game in theory but has endless possibilities thanks to players having the whole dictionary at hand to help them complete levels. It’s because of these unconventional takes on traditional game ideas that we fully expected 5th Cell to put their stamp on their third person shooter, Hybrid.

In Hybrid players do not have direct control over their characters movement, not in the traditional sense anyway. While the right stick does move your camera and onscreen aiming reticule, the left stick will only move you around while on cover. To move from cover to cover, you’ll have to point the camera at the cover you want to go to and hit A, at which point you can strafe among other things. It sounds like it might over-complicate things for no reason but in reality it takes third person shooter gameplay and makes it a bit more tactical.

We don’t want to get too bogged down on the minutia of controls and such. Instead we asked some of our writers who took part in the recent beta to tell us about their experience, check out what they had to say below.  Read More