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If a series of tweets from Indie Game Winter Uprising orgraniser Robert Boyd are to be believed Microsoft may be putting their weight behind the iniative sometime soon. While there’s no official confirmation as yet, Boyd’s tweets (which you can read for yourself below) heavily imply that Microsoft are planning to do something to help with the promotion, or at least the games that will be released before the 23rd of Decemeber.

Presumably this help will be in the form of advertising on the dashboard in a more prominent location, possibly the spaces usuall reserved for Deal of the Week sales and the like.

This would certainly be a win for the Indie Game developers, with the Uprising being a response to Microsoft’s lack of advertisement of the service.

Due to several delays the Uprising hasn’t been quite the success it was expected to be, as a result it was extended to the end of the month. You can find out more about the event and the games involved by visiting our Winter Uprising hub, which has now been updated with more reviews. Read More

Ubergridder was developed by BadgerPunch Games, and is available for 80 Microsoft Points ($1) under the Indie Games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Xbox Live Indie Games are quickly becoming one of the best places to find retro-inspired games from the arcade and NES era. One of these latest games is Ubergridder, a maze-chaser that features gameplay mechanics similar to Pac-Man, which was a clear influence here for BadgerPunch Games. As Robert the robot, players must move along grid lines to repair a busted ship, all while being chased by aliens. It’s not the most original idea, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

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Major Nelson has released a lovely post outlining what will be coming out on Xbox live on December 21 and lasting until December 31.   I am not sure if this has anything to do with the deal days they are planning that counts down to the new year.    Click read more of course!

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Perspective is key in the long unreleased indie darling Fez. A new trailer released by developer Polytron Corporation has given us perspective as to where development has taken them …
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The game was designed originally by Konami and then brought to XBLA by Backbone Entertainment, a division of Foundation 9 Entertainment.  The player chooses one of six X-Men:  Cyclops,  Colossus,  Wolverine,  Storm,  Nightcrawler, or Dazzler. Their objective is to stop the villain Magneto from wreaking havoc on human civilization. They must fight through an army of hundreds of Sentinels and supervillains such as Pyro, Blob, Wendigo, Nimrod, The White Queen, Juggernaut, and Mystique.  Later, Magneto kidnaps Professor X and Kitty Pryde, prompting the heroes to go on a rescue mission. The heroes fight their way to Island M and ultimately to Magneto’s base on Asteroid M where the final battle with the Master of Magnetism takes place.

If you were lucky your arcade had the full on 6-player mode, and if you didn’t have the nice arcade, you had the cheesy 4-player cabinet.   The question is, how well did this classic age?   Is it worth spending the 800 MS Points ($10 US)?

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Drizzle is a game that is damn hard to assign to any specific genre.  You could call it a puzzle game, a strategy game or a casual/family game.  It was developed by Annihilated Games although the marketplace lists the developer as AnonymousDevs.  This game has been well over a year in the making after many setbacks.  It sells for 240MS points ($3) on the Indie games section of the Xbox marketplace.

Drizzle places you in charge of riding the world of pollution.  You control a robot hand that places cups under acid rain clouds in order to filter and recycle the rain water.  Different colored clouds require different colored cups to collect the rain.  The water is used to grow trees and make the world a better place.  A few unlockable robot friends will help you along the way while evil corporate robots will try to stop your progress.  It sounds like a terrible idea but it’s actually pretty fun. Read More

Section 8 was a flawed gem. A diamond in the rough relegated mostly to bargain bins, the original Section 8 pushed new ideas into the first person shooter genre. It overcame minor bugs, mixed reviews and the stigma of being a full priced multiplayer only game, developing a small cult following along the way. Section 8 is back and ready to do an orbital drop again, but this time TimeGate Studios is rewriting the rules.

With the freedom that self publishing gives them, TimeGate Studios is pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally accepted as normal. Section 8 Prejudice is a fully fledged sequel to Section 8; however, it will be released on Xbox Live Arcade in early 2011 for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15), nearly a fraction of the cost of the original. The transition from a $60 retail product to an Xbox Live Arcade sequel is a new one in this industry. We had some trepidation that the production values would suffer or that the game might feel too much like a rehash of the first, but that was all alleviated when we went hands on with Prejudice this past week.

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Score Rush is a mix between a schmup and a dual-stick shooter.  It’s the latest installment from seasoned XBLIG developer, Xona Games.  It sells for 80MS points ($1) on the XBLIG section of the marketplace. Read More

You may, or rather should have heard of the Indie Games Winter Uprising by now. But if you haven’t here’s what you need to know. The developers behind the Indie Games on Xbox Live Marketplace decided they wanted an event in the vein of a “Summer of Arcade” and other such promotions. Resigned to the fact Microsoft wasn’t going to make one for them they took it upon themselves to do so. Thus the Winter Uprising was born, originally intended to take place during the first week of December it has now been extended to include the entire month.

We here at XBLAFans are passionate in our feeling that the Indie Games section deserves more recognition than it currently receives. As such we have created this hub for the games that will be included in the Uprising. Here you’ll find a brief description of the games, a link to the developers website, screenshots, trailers, pricing (if available), and for those games already released there will be download links and reviews.

The games are being released pretty irregularly, with several having already been delayed due to last minute bugs so be sure to check back often and see what’s new! Read More

The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Naked Sky’s CTO Joshua Glazer. Naked Sky is also known for their previous XBLA title RoboBlitz, which was released back in November 2006z.

Microbot is a twin stick shooter that lets the player battle malicious viruses and diseases as a microscopic nanotech robot injected into someone’s bloodstream. As players travel travel through veins, bones, lungs and other organs, they can collected data fragments that allows them to customize their microbot with powerful weapons, defensive systems, movement parts, and special abilities. What got yours truly’s blood pumping about this title, is the planned cooperative drop-in/drop-out mode.
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