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We haven’t heard much about Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus since its announcement in February. There’s now a release window for the game and it’s coming out this summer, alongside another fighting game with Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown. Developed by Arc System Works, who’ve worked mainly on the Guilty Gear series, in addition to last year’s Hard Corps: Uprising. It’ll have ranked and player matches for online support and we have some new screenshots to show off much of the fighting action. Get ready to start a brawl this summer and check out the new screenshots after the jump.
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Exalted puzzle/platformer Fez has hurtled into pole position in this week’s Live Activity leaderboards, warding off strong competition from Skullgirls which debuted at number 2. Comments from controversial helmsman …
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Klei Entertainment’s new title Mark of the Ninja throws a shuriken at a dart board for a development team used to creating violent brawlers like Shank , but the shift in genres is a natural fit considering how gruesome Mark of the Ninja really is. Gruesome in a delightful way, of course.

Our demo at PAX East began with our protagonist lurking in the shadows of a scarcely lit environment with lots of vents, rooftops and things to hang from with the grappling hook, so gamers can expect plenty of options to wipe out foes. And wipe out foes they shall, because the silent takedowns are visceral and satisfying to execute. When you approach an enemy from behind, instead of having a simple button press do the trick, the game enters into a quick time event (QTE) mode where players must press a combination of the analog stick and the X button to kill. It adds an extra layer of interaction rarely seen in a game of this type.

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Awesomenauts‘ zany 1980s look is immediately appealing. Inspiration for the graphics was drawn from Galaxy Rangers and the Earthworm Jim and Bucky O’Hare franchises. The bright shades and disparate characters that clash in the outer-space battlefields send a message that the game is something fun and ridiculous. Aside from everything playing out on a 2D plane, though, nothing felt especially exciting when I first took the controller in my hands at PAX East. My options were pretty much limited to jumping or shooting in the early-going and death came swiftly. That all changed after building up some coin and getting the hang of what was going on. It was then that I began experiencing the joy and gratification the game’s silly character design and pretty colors had initially implied I would.

Playing as a cowboy character named Sheriff Lonestar I ran into the thick of things at the outset and began firing his laser blaster at the mindless drones marching ceaselessly towards my team’s first turret. Someone on the opposition was playing as the heavy robot class and he was relying on his thick armor and powerful weaponry to shred up poor little Lonestar. There are multiple levels to platform between in each map, but the side-scrolling nature of Awesomenauts still made it feel like there wasn’t much room for evasion. That coupled with the fact that there didn’t appear to be any way to recover from damage was making the situation look grim for our team of XBLA Fans writers.

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A LinkedIn profile page for Praveen Rutnam, group product planner at Microsoft, has outed the publisher’s plan to roll out a new strategy for generating revenue through Xbox Live starting this a holiday season. The experience section of Rutnam’s profile explicitly states that he created a “strategy to further monetize [the] Xbox LIVE subscriber base.” It mentions this holiday season as the target date for the new monetization efforts to go into effect.

Although no specific details as to what the strategy will entail are laid out in the listing, Joystiq has gone ahead and done some speculating. One possibility is the implementation of an online pass of some sort, not unlike those utilized by publishers EA, Ubisoft, THQ, Sony and Warner. The publishing houses using them have seen a strong backlash from gamers over online passes, but the consumer resistance has done little to stop their growing ubiquity.

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While we did record a regular show last week in addition to our three PAX specials, it got lost in the dark recesses of my hard drive never to be heard from again. So here we are back with a regular show, minus one Andrew Crews. Myself, Perry and Todd struggle on without him though and discuss some of the big releases from the past week. We hit on The Splatters and Skullgirls but the bulk of the game talk goes to Fez, don’t worry though there’s no spoilers!

Perry rushes through what little news there is before taking the opportunity to talk about some of his favourite XBLA games he saw at PAX.

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/XBLAFancastEp57.mp3[/podcast]

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We’re making a quick exception for this week’s Trials Tuesday post by showing off a track made by Redlynx that will be included in Trials  Evolution when the game …
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As a salvo of flattering reviews surface across the web, Ubisoft has let loose one final trailer for the hotly-anticipated Trials Evolution (out tomorrow). At this stage pretty much …
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Focus Interactive, the publishers behind dungeon crawler Realms of Ancient War or just R.A.W. if you’re feeling particularly brutal, have released a new trailer showcasing the Warrior. The Warrior …
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The first chunk of third person shooter Deep Black arrives on Xbox Live Arcade April 25. Scant details have emerged regarding the XBLA version, but the full PC game, …
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