We totally missed January, but the Monthly Recap is back for February! Yaaay. There’s an immense amount of news this month because for some reason February is XBLA month. There’s roughly a million game announcements and DLC as well. I suggest hitting CTRL + F and searching for the copious news about your favorite game. Or games. Or just read all the news, because that’s a good idea.
Beyond the “things that happened”, there’s also several Friday Top Fives and Most Wanted’s this month as we continue to beef up our feature repertoire. Our chief feature, A Year In Review (2011) is definitely worth checking out for some insight into the fluctuations in XBLA cost versus review scores. Lastly, amongst the five podcasts is our Music Special which showcases some of the best XBLA soundtrack tunes since its inception.
Without further ado, welcome to February all over again! Read More
Haunted Temple Studios has gone underwater. No they aren’t short on rent or paying their other bills – the studio behind the much anticipated XBLA game Skulls of the …
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It’s a bumper episode this week, with one of our longest ever. We kick it off by talking about last week’s release of Shank 2, which we pretty much universally enjoyed. Be sure to check out our character unlock guide if you decide to pick it up. Speaking of guides, after spending a lot of time with Rise of the Martian bear for the guide, Todd isn’t keen to play it again any time soon.
After discussing some of the other random games we’ve been playing Perry brings the news. Which includes some Kickstarter discussion and debate about Gotham City Impostors approach to DLC. Then Andrew poses @MizzouGaming‘s twitter question to us, which leads to a long discussion about our thoughts on the past and future of XBLA. He then challenges us all to play Assault Heroes, so check it out and let us know what you think on twitter or the comments.
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/XBLAFancastEp49.mp3[/podcast]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.
Huge thanks to the entire team of writers who worked on this article: Christine Mitchell, Nathan Bowring, Perry Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Todd Schlickbernd.
We’ve spent the past week searching the internet and hounding our industry contacts in an effort to compile the ultimate 2012 XBLA Game Release List. We anticipated one heck of a year for Xbox Live Arcade. So epic we couldn’t even fit everything on one page. So without further ado, check out the list:
For detailed descriptions of each of the games and videos check the links below.
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases A-B
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
Alien Spidy
AMY
Anomaly Warzone Earth
Awesomenauts
Babel Rising
Bang Bang Racing
Battleblock Theater
Black Knight Sword
Blade Kitten: Episode 2
Bloodforge
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases C-F
Capsized
Charlie Murder
Choplifter HD
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Deep Black Episode 1 & 2
Defenders of Ardania
Diabolical Pitch
Dust: An Elysian Tail
Dungeon Fighter Live (unannounced title)
Fez
We’ve spent the past week searching the internet and hounding our industry contacts in an effort to compile the ultimate 2012 XBLA Game Release List. We anticipated one heck of a year for Xbox Live Arcade. So epic we couldn’t even fit everything on one page. So without further ado, check out the list:
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases A-B
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases C-F
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases G-L
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases M-O
XBLAFans Anticipated 2012 Releases P-R
XBLAFans Anticipated XBLA Game Releases S
XBLAFans Anticipated XBLA Game Releases T-Z
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Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service has been running for over half a decade now seeing a major boost in content since the Summer of Arcade promotions began running and since last year House Party (previously Block Party) has joined it for Spring releases. A steady flow of releases during each month also bring a fair amount of titles to the downloadable market space. With a healthy mix of ports, original content, big and indie developers, it begs the question: how mixed is the genre offering?
Before examining what isn’t out there, it’s important to observe what is. Xbox.com has listings for the amount of games contained in each of their classifications, bringing up some pretty startling numbers. Leading the way (not surprisingly) are Action & Adventure games with 177 individual titles including Castle Crashers, Battlefield 1943, Geometry Wars and Shadow Complex. Puzzle & Trivia and Classics are the next highest below Action with 74 and 76 respectively. On the opposite side of the spectrum are some very niche genres including Kinect with 4, Music with 6, and Educational with 3. A genre expected to have plenty of titles would be fighting, but believe it or not only 13 titles are classified as fighting games on XBLA, while the nebulous Other category has 7. Above those are 23 Role Playing games, 20 Racing & Flying games and 33 Strategy & Simulation games. Also noteworthy you’d think there’s more than 38 platformers out there, but not according to Xbox.com. (as of October 2011) Read More
Every year in Culver City, California, a celebration of independently-developed games is held. The organizers of 2011’s IndieCade had the tough job of finding 36 finalists out of …
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In a recent blog post on Gamasutra, freelance game developer Borut Pfeifer gathered his thoughts on the viability of digital distribution in the gaming space. As an …
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