Cuphead

In video games, boss fights usually come at the end of levels, acts, chapters, etc. You work your way through a series of smaller challenges, baddies or puzzles to earn the right to face off against a boss and, should you emerge victorious, move on to the next section of the game. That was the custom established decades ago, and it’s largely stuck ever since.

Not so in Cuphead, StudioMDHR’s debut old-time cartoons-inspired shooter. Cuphead has an overworld that you can wander around in and select where to go next, but your what you’re selecting from are boss fights, not levels. Yesterday at E3 XBLA Fans went hands-on with one of those boss fights — and died. Repeatedly. But damn if doing so wasn’t fun.

After selecting what looked like a rocking little music hall on the overworld, I was thrown into a boss fight with a pair of giant frogs with another random player at my side. Hurting the frogs was easy enough: keep holding down the shooting button and take aim at the one frog or the other. The overgrown amphibians soak up tons of fire coming from your characters’ index finger and thumb as they form the shape of a gun and spew forth a barrage of pew, pew, pews.

The bosses, of course, don’t just take this abuse laying down. One shoots ice balls at differing heights, requiring you to alternate between leaping over them and going prone to duck them, while the other spits out flaming bees that you can shoot out of the air. Once you inflict enough damage during this stage of the fight, one of the frogs rolls toward you before going into a new pattern.

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StudioMDHR’s Cuphead is coming to Xbox One in 2016, the developer announced today at Microsoft’s pre-E3 press conference. The game, a run-and-gun platformer centered on one-on-one fights, features 1930s-inspired …
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StudioMDHR’s Cuphead grabbed a lot of headlines when it was teased as part of Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program during a montage video shown at E3 2014. Since then, however, news …
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You’ve read our picks for the best XBLA and ID@Xbox games of 2014. Now it’s time to look forward with us at what might be the best games of 2015. While fully acknowledging that some of these games likely won’t up to their billing and others may get pushed into 2016, these are the 2015 games that XBLA Fans is currently most looking forward to. If these releases aren’t on your radar yet, they will be after you’re done reading.

#IDARB

Developers: Other Ocean Interactive and The People of the Internet

#IDARB is a particularly interesting game to say we’re anticipating in 2015, seeing as XBLA Fans got our hands on what we were told was the “final” game in December and published our review already. This zany handball-meets-platformer game from Other Ocean Interactive and the fine folks of the internet — many features crowd sourced — isn’t officially out until February, though, when it will be part of the Games with Gold promotion. It’s difficult to explain just what #IDARB is, but it’s easy to recommend that you go play it when it releases next month.

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At Microsoft’s E3 press conference on Monday morning, there was a video montage of a lot of games that are coming to Xbox One through the ID@Xbox program. Over the next few days, XBLA Fans is bringing you a slightly longer glimpse of those titles than what the montage trailer allowed for. Our coverage of these titles will be in alphabetical order. Below is a look at the first seven of those games.

Another World 20th Anniversary Edition

Previously known in the United States as Out of This World, Another World might recall the original Prince of Persia — both titles were animated in similar fashion, using rotoscoping to create more precise animations than were previously possible in the early 1990s. This 20th Anniversary Edition, developed by The Digital Lounge, looks to be more historical preservation than remaster, which shouldn’t stop modern gamers from getting a taste of the old world by looking at this forgotten gem.

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