Search Results for: shank

Over the last few years, the “last man standing,” battle royale scene has been growing larger and larger. Starting off mostly as mods for PC games, they have grown into …
Read More

The Escapists was developed by Mouldy Toof Studios and will be published on Xbox One by Team 17 Digital. It is set for release on February 13, 2015 for $19.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.

The Escapists positions itself as a kind of craft-em-up roguelike set across a number of fiendishly designed secure facilities including prisons and POW camps. Think of it as somewhere between Terraria, Monaco and any number of top down action-RPGs. The main difference is that in order for you to be successful, The Escapists demands significantly more time and patience than almost any other game I’ve played — and what’s more, it’s perfectly suited to being a cute 8-bit indie title.

With only a very small number of simple core mechanics to rely upon, The Escapists turns the table on the typical sandbox approach taken by similar games. Instead, players are literally forced to adhere to a strict regimen of roll calls, mealtimes, break-times and work whilst simultaneously plotting their escape. It’s an inspired system that asks an awful lot from players and results in the rewards being all the sweeter.

Read More

This week’s deal offers up the seminal adventures of Mega Man on Xbox Live Arcade. Capcom’s Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 are both available now, through February 4, for …
Read More

We show you how to keep to the shadows and collect all the game’s scrolls.
Read More

When Konami’s legendary game designer Hideo Kojima shows up to discuss what he’s been up to and then proceeds to show it to the world for the first time, it tends to expose the fact that the event he’s showing it at has become a bit of a big deal. There was no need for Kojima’s traditionally obligatory exclamation points to suddenly appear over the heads of the PAX Prime enforcers to make that much clear. The Big Stealth Game, Metal Ground Solid: Ground Zeroes, was revealed on the big stage to the delight of seemingly everyone watching.

Not all eyes were glued on Kojima, however; back on the show floor PAX’s little stealth game was leaving everyone who found their way to Klei Entertainment’s little corner in the not-so-little Indie Megabooth equally impressed. The XBLA Fans team had previously gotten our hands on Mark of the Ninja back at PAX East, but that didn’t make us any less eager to take it for another spin or to speak with its lead designer, Nels Anderson.

On Friday the game will release on XBLA. Long before getting to that point, however, the studio had to commit to setting out in a completely different direction than it did with its previous work on the Shank franchise. Doing so meant forging a mostly new path, since very few 2D stealth-oriented games had come along over the years to lay down the groundwork. I asked Anderson if that meant Klei had some unique challenges to overcome while developing the game. Laughing, he rhetorically replied, “Um, all of them?”

“All of them, in fact!” the designer exclaimed, now seemingly convinced that it was in fact all of the systems that presented challenges. “Because no one’s ever really done one, right? Like there were a couple very, very small ones, but certainly nothing to this scope or magnitude — at all. So then it’s like, we just sort of had to like really look at 3D stealth games and sort of reconstruct them design-wise. Like, ‘Why did they make the kinds of decisions they made?’ And then take that up a level and translate it back down to 2D.

“I mean, there aren’t templates or schemes to drop in in this context — at all. Which is good, it just means we had to try a whole lot of stuff that didn’t work before we got to stuff that actually did work.”

Read More

The announcement of Mark of the Ninja‘s release date came without a price tag, leaving us to wonder whether the game will be priced similar to Shank or Shank …
Read More

When was the last amazing Friday release? Fez? The Simpsons Arcade? Add one more to the list with Shank developer Klei Entertainment’s new, original title Mark of the Ninja. …
Read More

Anyone who has grown up in the last decade or so most likely has an affection for Cartoon Network. We’ve seen some rad old shows show up on their programming line-up from Batman to Bugs Bunny, but they’ve also had a great share of original programming. Things like Ben 10 or Johnny Bravo proved that modern animation could still be as good as the olden days. Here at XBLA Fans we thought some of that original programming could use an XBLA game or two. So here’s our top five shows that need XBLA games:
Read More

Every year, E3 seems more hectic than the last. We spent five hectic days getting our eyes and hands on every XBLA game possible and we’ve picked out eighteen games that stood out from the crowd. Here is the run-down on the very best XBLA titles from E3 2012. Read More

A new gameplay trailer for Mark of the Ninja has snuck out of E3 and onto the internet. Developer Klei Entertainment, the masterminds behind the Shank series, have created a game …
Read More