XBLA Wednesday: March 7
It looks like the House Party is coming to a close as I Am Alive is the only release this week on XBLA Wednesday. Players will have to survive …
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Contest: Social Media Celebration!
Time for another leaderboard competition!
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Microsoft: XBLA will continue to evolve and then die
Xbox Live Arcade will eventually cease to exist. Every Xbox 360 owner who has spent time enjoying the growing selection of titles on the service has surely had that thought dawn upon them at one point or another. Even assuming that the wait for a new batch of consoles is going to last a few more years, and that technical restrictions will prevent the most ambitious blockbuster releases from appearing on XBLA for some time yet, it’s impossible to not think about the service’s inevitable end. Now, however, Microsoft itself has acknowledged the mortality of XBLA.
When asked by Vox Games if the plug will one day be pulled on the service, Michael Wolf, global marketing manager for XBLA at Microsoft Studios, replied, “Personally, I’d say absolutely, yes. I think digital distribution has to be like that.”
The sound of pitchforks being taken to grindstones can now be heard echoing across the internet. There is no cause for the XBLA faithful to panic just yet, though. Microsoft’s popular downloadable platform most likely has a number of potentially excellent years ahead before its light is snuffed out. “I don’t think XBLA will be leaving soon,” Wolf clarified. “It is an incredible platform. We have XBLA fans, I don’t think it’s going to be announced anytime soon. One thing Microsoft has proven is that we continue to try and adapt and innovate in experiences.”
XBLA’s Most Wanted: The Strike series
With the release of Renegade Ops earlier this year, the name Desert Strike was name dropped a lot. In reality the games aren’t all that similar, but the few times you get to fly a chopper around reminded many of the long forgotten series.
Most remember the first game in the series Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf, which put players in control of an Apache attack helicopter. However there were actually five games in the series, with a sixth planned but ultimately cancelled (though it morphed into Future Cop: LAPD). The 16-bit era Strike games, Desert, Jungle and Urban were all fairly similar with the only changes being settings and the ability to pilot other (ground based) vehicles in the latter games.
With the jump to the PlayStation the core gameplay of the series remained the same but Soviet and Nuclear Strike boasted live action FMV. Of course this was all the rage at the time, usually looking extremely low budget and coming off as incredibly cheesy. While the FMV in the Strike games was a little cheesy and the acting slightly hammy, it was very well produced and often extremely effective. A lot of the praise goes to the fact they used FMV for everything, meaning you could look up videos on every enemy, weapon or mission objective. Even now we often have to trawl through a huge body of text to find out objectives or even learn how to play the game. Read More
XBLAFancast Episode 50 – Anniversary Edition
Believe it or not, we’ve been doing this for a whole year (to the day!). We’ve gone through a lot of changes but we like to think we have a pretty good show on our hands at this point, we hope you do too.
Andrew’s out this week so it’s myself, Perry and Todd. We kick things off talking about Warp and a little about Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Todd has a somewhat unique perspective having never played the original. Then Perry drops some news bombs as per usual. He also takes over Crews’ Community Corner, during which we have a couple of fairly long discussions about the future of the site and XBLA in general. Big thanks to @MRX93 and our own Steve Melton for their contributions to the twitter topics.
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/XBLAFancastEp50.mp3[/podcast]
XBLA Wednesday: February 22
Not much for this Wednesday but go into the darkness with light to fend off the Taken in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. As Mr. Wake, you’ll be whisked to …
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Has Haste become Mad Riders?
With all the talks of ratings, some things get newer titles than others like Alan Wake’s American Nightmare originally was Night Springs. In Australia on their rating board, a …
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XBLAFans’ Most Anticipated Games of 2012
Judging by the amount of games we expect to release this year, we already know that 2012 is going to be the biggest year yet for Xbox Live Arcade. With that in mind, we decided to ask each of our staff members to choose one game that they’re really looking forward to playing this year, and tell us exactly what we have to look forward to and why. Without further ado, we present to you XBLAFans Most Anticipated Games of 2012.