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Nearly one year ago Stainless Games announced that it was reviving the vehicular-combat Carmageddon franchise it created back in the late 1990s with the Square Enix-published Carmageddon: Reincarnation. Then nothing happened for a while. Well, not publicly it didn’t, at least.

In reality, a lot was happening behind the scenes at the Isle of Wight-based developer. After dropping “well over a third of a million dollars getting the rights back,” Stainless began prototype and design work on the revival. The hundreds of thousands the dev spent on the investment reportedly “rerepresents all of [its] profits from our other work,” but the team thinks it’s “worth it.” Yet it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough, actually. And so the studio has announced its intentions to have the public fund the remaining $400,000 USD or more through Kickstarter. As of this writing, over $135,000 USD has already been funneled into Stainless’ coffers by nearly 4,000 individuals who want to see the Reincarnation completed and released.

“We want to spend the money doing what we do best: making video games,” says Stainless Executive Director Neil Barnden in a new promotional video that could pass as a low-budget version of a late ’90s video-game commercial.

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Folks who can’t pony up the dough for an HDTV are up in arms over the lack of splitscreen  gameplay in Minecraft. It’s not broken or anything–at least that’s what they say. But SDTV players are entirely locked out of any splitscreen games, the option only available if your console is hooked up to some sort of HD output, Kotaku reports. It’s left some players on the Xbox.com forums completely clueless as to the problem, while others up in arms. It’s something that most reviews, including our own, didn’t catch–so yes, SDTV gamers are few and far between.

We’ve spoken our distaste about this recently, but this goes far beyond not being able to read text. This is locking players out of major features, players who spent money with no warning they’d be locked out. Players who are confused and mad. Take a look at just a few of the complaints below.

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Last week Microsoft announced that it would be discontinuing production of Inside Xbox in the U.S. and as a result this content would also no longer be available in Canada, …
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Is 1600 MSP too much for you? Residents of the United States can pick up Minecraft today for $15, the equivalent of 1200 MSP. Head on over to BestBuy.com …
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The day has finally arrived this XBLA Wednesday for all your building and recipe-making craft hands. Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition finally hits XBLA today at 1600 MSP. You can …
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Retro City Rampage looks to be fighting for the title of Most Pop Culture References in a Video Game. While we already knew about cameos like Mr. Destructoid and …
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A marketplace listing has been spotted for an arcade version of wartime flying series Combat Wings. However it’s unclear whether the game will be a spin-off to the initially planned retail game Combat Wings: The Great Battles of World War II, or a downloadable replacement. Though both marketplace listing remain despite Combat Wings: GBWWII missing it’s scheduled release date of March. Both games are being developed and published by City Interactive who recently posted on their Facebook wall that Combat Wings has not been cancelled and will be going digital, but it remains to be seen how many games fans can expect.

From the game’s description players can expect to be piloting a wide range of aircraft and engaging in aerial dog fights and dangerous fighter missions across the major theaters of war during WWII. The game is said to feature realistic aircraft and cutting-edge flight dynamics with but with arcade accessibility and offline multiplayer action for up to 2 people. The marketplace listing also shows the game’s release date as June 15 but don’t put it in your diary just yet, it’s likely to just be a placeholder at this time. Many thanks to @lifelower for this tip.

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A return to the full regular roster leads to a slightly longer show than usual this week. Myself, Perry, Todd and Andrew get straight down to business with game talk, starting with Fable Heroes. We weren’t too keen on it ourselves but you can check out Christine’s review for a more in depth look at the game. After that is a lengthy discussion of Awesomenauts, in which Todd tells us all about MOBAs while Andrew and I lament our disconnection issues.

Perry of course brings all the big news stories from the past week, then Todd uses this weeks Todd Talk to ponder bots in multiplayer games and what their roles should be.

Andrew rounds things out with Crews’ Community Corner, this weeks remember the days game is Golf: Tee It Up!. Be sure to send your thoughts to us on twitter.

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/XBLAFancastEpisode60.mp3[/podcast]

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Another week, another set of great tracks. This time around we’ve upped how many we’re showcasing. Too many great creations come out each week. To download these tracks by entering Track Central, selecting Get Tracks, then pressing X to search. Enter the gamertag below to find the track. Be aware that the search is case sensitive. A big thanks to the Trials Evolution community for the borrowed videos. Hit the jump to see this week’s picks.

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Minecraft: Xbox 360 Version was developed by Mojang and 4J Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. It is released May 9, 2012 for 1600 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

If you’re any kind of gamer, odds are you’re at least tangentially familiar with Minecraft. If you’re unfamiliar, a brief synopsis: You’re dropped in the middle of a seemingly endless world, left to fend for yourself. Just about everything in the game world can be deconstructed, reconstructed and combined to rebuild the world around you as you see fit (think of it as a world made entirely of LEGO blocks). When the sun goes down, though, the monsters come out to play – and when that happens, you’d better have some weapons or shelter to fight back (you remembered to build a sword, didn’t you?).

In a way, Minecraft is the quintessential open world game: The player is left to his or her own devices without that pesky story campaign getting in the way of the fun. When the game first released on PC in 2009, it became a sensation for its simple-yet-deep gameplay – and the fact that you could build anything from a scale replica of The Legend of Zelda‘s game world to virtual representations of human anatomy didn’t hurt either. Now, the game makes its long-awaited debut on XBLA: Does it retain the simple charm PC gamers have enjoyed for years, or is it lost in translation?

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