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As what can best be described as Monkey Island meets Diablo, DeathSpank will be arriving on Xbox Live Arcade’s virtual shelves on July 14 for 1200 Microsoft …
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While Shank may still be referred to in some circles as an indie darling, the game packs a whole lot of production value. What may have started as a homemade knife, has been proven to be one gracefully elegant weapon. The title’s story is penned by Marianne Krawczyk, author of God of War. The game itself is presented in 9 layers of HD parallax taking art direction cues from Jeff Agala, creative director on the project and creator of Cartoon Network Original Series Atomic Betty. The game is being published by EA Partners, who is responsible for EA’s dealings with People Can Fly (Bulletstorm), Valve (Orange Box), Harmonix (Rock Band Franchise), and more. To call all of that indie, just doesn’t cut it.

That isn’t to say Shank has lost its indie roots. Klei CEO Jamie Cheng and Jeff Agala set out to make an adrenaline filled action fest that would also push the boundaries on how digitally distributed games are made. The game mixes and blends genres, as it feels part spaghetti western, part grind house film. Jamie Cheng described the plot to us as a “pulp fiction revenge story through and through.” The main character feels like a total badass combination of Stallone from Rambo and Brock Sampson from Venture Brothers. All in all, it’s a thrilling concoction of just epic ingredients you can only expect to see with the complete freedom of an indie studio.
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Konami has had a hard time catering to fans of the Castlevania series in the last few generations. It is a series deeply rooted in 2D gameplay, and adding a dimension some would say takes away the spirit of what made the earlier games great. Konami has decided to appease both 2D and 3D supporters by releasing two Castlevania games, one of which brings the style of Symphony of the Night and the recent DS games back to the home consoles. In reality, it looks like a widescreen SNES or Genesis game in the best way possible. Castlevania: Harmony of Despair not only retains the level structure and gameplay from those games, but also the characters.

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Monday Night Combat is a true fusion of genres. The title is a third person shooter tower defense hybrid very much in line with DoTA. This should be no surprise considering the lineage of the Uber team: many of the developers worked on the DoTA game Demigod. The hybrid concept alone creates a very addicting blend, but the developers kept building on the idea. They created a humorous, quirky design that draws clear parallels with Team Fortress 2. They developed six highly varied character classes, each with their own unique style, moves and weaponry, as well as a create-a-class option. They then pushed the limits for an Xbox Live Arcade game with in-depth persistent career through single player, co-op and online multiplayer modes. In the end, it becomes increasingly hard to classify this game, as it breaks many typical molds; however the game is easy to describe: it is flat out awesome.

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Along with all of the new Kinect games and slim 360, Microsoft unveiled its list of games for their annual Summer of Arcade event. Summer of Arcade began the …
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After months of speculation and rumors, SEGA has officially announced that Dreamcast games will be returning in digital form to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network later this year.

Sonic …
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Doom II was developed by Nerve Software/id Software and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released on May 26, 2010 and retails for 800 Microsoft Points. A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.

Fifteen years ago, Doom II was released on the PC and was at the cutting edge of first-person shooters. Of course, games have gotten exponentially more complicated over the years, but this doesn’t mean that Doom II is unplayable – far from it, actually. The game is still fun and full of personality, even if it is a pixelated mess by today’s high definition standards.

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Playdead’s silhouetted puzzle-platformer has been given only one destination in it’s production afterlife following a mistake that was made when 2010 IGF Finalist, Limbo, was rated by the ESRB …
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Since the launch of Xbox 360 Arcade, Microsoft has struggled to keep sales up during the second quarter of the year, according to research firm FADE (Forcasting and Analyzing Digital Entertainment). But last April, Microsoft might have figured out how to beat this – a huge sale. According to the numbers, XBLA sales in April 2010 were up 11 percent over last years sale. Add that into the increase of total Arcade sales (7%), bringing the total revenue for the year thus far up to $33.8 million.

With a huge inventory blowout on older games, XBLA grossed over $500,000 just off these titles, with many actually seeing a 200-400 percent increase in sales. Add in a strong lineup of releases like Toy Soldiers, Mega Man 10, Perfect Dark and Battlefield 1943, and Microsoft might have a winning formula, with Toy Soldiers leading the sales for two months even with a 74 percent drop in sales from the first month to the second.

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The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Jamie Cheng, CEO of Klei Entertainment. For the uninitiated, Klei Entertainment is currently developing Shank for Xbox Live Arcade for summer release.

Redefining digitally distributed games

About five years ago, a young video game developer with some big ideas on how small game companies should work walked away from a position with an established developer in the hopes of completely redefining how digitally distributed games were made. Jamie Cheng sold his shares of THQ and went out on a limb to accomplish his dreams. This is where the story of Klei Entertainment begins.

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