Supergiant Games’ Arcade knockout Bastion has ranked alongside some of the most prolific AAA titles of the past year in the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences 2011 awards.
The awards ceremony, which takes place during the 2012 D.I.C.E summit on February 9, champions all corners of the games industry with prizes for retail, downloadable and mobile games as well as individual categories for specific genres. Said Martin Rae, president of the AIAS:
“These games exemplify the highest standard of excellence and quality, from the breathtaking cinematics, to the bold storytelling and the innovative technology. Our industry has really outdone itself this year and continues to exceed expectations with its creativity and craftsmanship. Bravo!”
Home alone on a Friday evening? You could do a lot worse than enlist with the XBLAFans team tonight (8-11 PM ET, 5-8 PM PT, 1-4 AM GMT) as …
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Sorry for the late show this week folks, lots of technical difficulties this week. As such the podcast may sound a bit odd in places, little jumps in audio and such. Not ideal but it shouldn’t effect your enjoyment of the show too much.
In this weeks episode we talk about the upcoming House Party promotion and then take the opportunity to discuss our most anticipated games of 2012.
Please subscribe, comment, review the podcast on iTunes and tell your friends! We appreciate it! Check us out on twitter (@XBLAFans) where you can win codes for games, give us feedback or just ask a question.
Big thanks again 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/XBLAFancastEp44.mp3[/podcast]Didn’t think we’d keep this going? Too much work? Too much copy paste? No such thing! The XBLA Fans Monthly Roundup is back again this time displaying a clear love for features! December was a month of features as we all tackled new ideas, new plans and executed them (hopefully flawlessly). Witness the beginning of the Friday Top Five, a top five list of things pertaining to one awesome thing (because why not?), and the XBLA Primer, a nifty batch of background history on a developer’s XBLA history as well as a list of their games. Hopefully these features will be well liked as we have plans to permeate the rest of the new year with them as well as our other veteran features.
Lastly, don’t forget to check out our Game of the Year awards listed in the Features section!
If you check your Xbox Dashboard for Community Events, you might see some friendly faces. For XBLAFans are proud to announce that we will be hosting our very own …
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XBLA Primer is an on-going feature in which we delve into the history of a given developer, catalog their XBLA releases, and look at why they make great games.
Way back in the 1980’s, a game designer named Tim Schafer started to make a name for himself at LucasArts. Working on and later leading development on cult classics such as Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, Mr. Schafer quickly garnered a reputation around the industry as one of the most creative minds in the business. At the turn of the century, Schafer left LucasArts and started his own development studio which came to be known as Double Fine Productions.
Double Fine blew out of the gates with a platformer named Psychonauts, a game that literally put you inside the minds of others. You can only imagine the crazy things you’d find in the depths of people’s minds. Next up, Double Fine released Brutal Legend, an action/real-time strategy hybrid centered around the fantasy world of heavy metal. While both Psychonauts and Brutal Legend were received very well by critics and gamers alike, neither game managed to create the bucket loads of cash that publishers now look for.
The 12 Days of XBLA was an amazing success and we hope to bring you all more contests like this in the years to come. Thanks to all of our awesome community members for participating with over 1700 entries in a twelve day span, that’s quite an impressive turnout. And a huge thanks to the fine people at Microsoft and all the developers/publishers that donated all the prizes. Without them, none of this would be possible.
With that said, let’s get to the moment we have all been waiting for. After all the dust settled and we ran our random number generator for one last time in 2011, we are now proud to announce @OnyxPrimal as the winner of the Grand Prize worth over $150! Congratulations, you have won a copy of the following XBLA games: Read More
2010 was a pretty great year for XBLA games. It’s hard to think it could be topped. Yet here we are at the end of 2011 with a crop of games that are arguably even better than last year. XBLA has continued to grow throughout 2011 and the diversity of games continues to rise.
We saw the year kick off with unique games like ilomilo, zeit2, and Stacking and it ends with impressive titles like Dungeon Defenders, Joe Danger: Special Edition and Trine 2. We’ve come a long way since the days of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
As a result this year’s XBLAFans Game of the Year awards were even more hotly contested than last year, with a few of the categories coming down to just a couple of votes. The list of nominees for the grand prize was almost excessive and could easily have gone into double digits. So without further ado, we are proud to present the second annual XBLAFans Game of the Year awards. Read More
Between October 20, 2010 and October 11, 2011, Double Fine released the XBLA games Costume Quest, Stacking, and Iron Brigade, as well as the retail game Sesame Street: Once …
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