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Recreating a classic game is never an easy feat. No matter what approach the developer takes, there always seems to be some group of detractors complaining either that not enough or too much was changed. That means that — despite the abundance of remakes that are green lit each year — recreating something that was once popular is hardly a surefire path to sales success, so it’s not surprising that Robomodo hit some pushback from Activision when they first discussed the idea of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD.

“To be honest, Josh (Tsui, president of Robomodo) and I pushed Activision to do it repeatedly until we laid it out that this can happen, in this timeframe, for this cost. It was a long battle,” Tony Hawk explained to GamesIndustry International in a recent interview.

The major concern that the world’s biggest third party publisher had was that the development costs for such an undertaking would be higher than what could be recuperated through sales. Hawk understood Activision’s trepidation, but neither he nor the team at Robomodo were about to let that stop them. “We knew that once people saw it in this light it would get the attention it needed,” Hawk said.

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I Am Alive was developed by Ubisoft Shanghai and produced by Ubisoft. It was released on March 7, 2012 for 1200 MSP. 

It’s two hours before any act of kindness befalls Adam, I Am Alive’s gravelly protagonist. Two strangers sheltering from the callous outdoors offer him some meat. It’s cooked, Adam’s nursing wounds, and his is a world in which food is hard come by. The men huddle around a fire in full blaze and in a city ravaged by earthquakes and shrouded by a plume of killer-dust, the scene in the gloomy subway is about the most heartening yet. Adam scoffs the meat down and sets off again. Perhaps there is good still in this most ruthless of worlds. And then you stumble upon the cage; a 4×3 foot coop home to a human skeleton and some leftover slabs of meat. Damnit.

Like so much of I Am Alive, it’s a scene anchored in Cormac McCarthy’s comfortless classic The Road, but Ubisoft could hardly have chosen a more worthy inspiration for its bleak survival horror.

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Hot on the heels of the debut trailer, above, Telltale Games has announced the pricing for their upcoming adventure game series The Walking Dead. Each monthly episode will be …
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Five Xbox Live Arcade titles, including two from Double Fine, have had their prices temporarily cut. Costume Quest, Stacking, Voltron, Warhammer 40K: Kill Team and Apples to Apples have all seen price reductions of 50% as part of the THQ Publisher Sale. The deal applies to both Gold and Silver account members. In addition, all downloadable content for Stacking, Costume Quest and Apples to Apples has been reduced to half price. But are the games any good?

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First off, apologies once again for the spotty audio this week, techinical difficulties once again mean we’re stuck with the lesser quality backup.

We mix things up a little this week, after a talking about the latest releases it’s onto Todd Talk, in which Todd tells us his thoughts on leaderboards. Todd then has to leave us but that means Perry can drop his news bombs mostly uninterrupted. We finish as always with twitter topics and discussion of Andrews game of the week. Be sure to try out Mutant Storm Empire for next week and share your thoughts 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/XBLAFancastEp54.mp3[/podcast]

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Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc is being re-released tomorrow on XBLA in glorious HD and we get a look at the new landscapes in this trailer. You’ll start in the …
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Our friends over at Play XBLA have provided a list of the games they’ll be showing off at PAX East in Boston next month. We …
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PopCap is certainly no stranger to XBLA with Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies on the platform and they’re looking to bring one more blockbuster to the table. The wildly …
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When I arrived at Haunted Temple Studios, the cab driver gave me a smug look. I’d asked him to stop one door over from a strip club at what looked to be an abandoned construction area. The gears in his head were turning and his face read “this kid just doesn’t want to admit he’s going to Dreamgirls.” He continued to prod me about being in the wrong location, but my trusted iPhone assured me this was the address Jake Kazdal, founder of Haunted Temple had given me. I wandered into the construction area hoping this was the right location. The glitz and glamor of the neighbors distracting the average onlooker from the amazing gem inside an unmarked building next door made arguably the perfect metaphor for an indie studio’s plight in the industry. Inside this large open, warehouse of a building, Jake and his team were putting the finishing touches on Skulls of the Shogun, literally hours after rescuing the game from a flood.

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Konami has verified the existence of Frogger: Hyper Arcade Edition following an Australian Classification Board leak last month. It launches on Xbox Live Arcade this spring.

Hyper Arcade Edition arrives …
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