Community

We posted about this briefly in our Twitch schedule; however, I wanted to update everyone on tomorrow’s stream. We will be hunting down as many Achievements as possible from likely near a dozen different games. Nothing is pre-prepared, so we aren’t going for any kind of world record here. It should be a fun stream highlighting a lot of awesome titles, many of which have very easy Gamerscore.

We also had a bunch of awesome developers send us a ton of giveaway codes for the stream, which we will be giving away throughout the full 12-hour marathon. Just to highlight some of those games which you will for sure see during the stream as well as in giveaways: Roundabout, LA Cops, The Escapists, Dive Kick, and Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers. We also have another half a dozen games we will be running through.

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Hey everyone. With Xbox One now out on the market, its new friends and follow system is here. Back in May, Microsoft confirmed the friend cap, originally 100 on Xbox 360, would be raised to 1,000 total friends. In addition, fellow gamers can now follow other gamers without actually friending each other, thanks to the allowance of an infinite amount of follows and followers. How does the follower system work exactly? Let’s break it down.

Say there is Person A and Person B. Person A chooses to follow Person B, thus Person B has one more follower. If Person B decides to follow Person A back, then Person A and Person B have now just become friends.

Much like how some of you may follow our staff on Twitter, we thought we’d share some of our staff’s gamertags with those readers who are picking up the Xbox One. We feel that having you follow our staff will not only strengthen our relationship to our awesome community, but also better coordinate future community playdates, allow for bragging to each other about our leaderboard standings and so forth. So, here’s a few of our gamertags to follow:

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After three years here with the Involved Fans staff, the time has come for me to step back as the Community Manager here at XBLA Fans. The reason for my departure is not negative nor are any relationships here the cause of my stepping down. Sometimes life just happens and you need to take a step back. I simply don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with any day-to-day tasks anymore, and the site is better off if I take that step back and give another staff member a chance to take over the community side of things. Who knows, I may be back at some point in the future at some capacity but for now I’m simply a guy who watches from a distance while others continue to make the site thrive and grow every day. The staff here is excellent. Everything is in good hands.

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The  folks at Shoryuken who run the yearly Evolution fighting game series of tournaments (usually known as just EVO) are having a charity drive contest to determine which …
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Update: The trading system does not actually involve ripping off faces of any sort. The Behemoth has clarified that rather there is a trading post in-game where players can view their other players’ inventories and select what they want and the other player can do the same.

The Behemoth, developers behind XBLA sensation Castle Crashers and upcoming title Battleblock Theater, were kind of enough to meet with me at San Diego Comic Con. During that fantastic interview with Dan Paladin he revealed and explained Battleblock Theater’s unlock and trading system. (Link to interview forthcoming)

Fans and players of Castle Crashers will recall the massive frogelope (antler laden frog, I don’t know) wherein all the weaponry was stored was sometimes more trophy case than armory as players without the unlocked weapons could not access them. To circumvent that players would take the weapons into levels, swap them for easy to find weapons and allow newer players to pickup the rarer weapons they didn’t have. Dan says Behemoth got get rid of all that convolution and put in a full-fledged trading system into Battleblock Theater. Read More

The Weekend Gamer is brought to you each Sunday. We will post a compilation of all the XBLA News, Reviews and Features we have run giving you an easy resource to keep up with our favorite digital distribution platform: XBLA

Community Game Night: We had an absolute blast playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane with you guys. We hope to do another game night again soon. We would love to hear your ideas and suggestions for the next one.

New Game Announcements: The past week has been full of announcements for new games, including: Fruit Ninja Kinect, Hulu Plus, Pinball FX 2 Tables: Fantastic Four and Sorcerer’s Lair, three new Super Meat Boy levels, and some awesome Telltale games.

Upcoming Release Dates: This Wednesday’s title is Bangai-O HD (May 4), Gatling Gears (May 11)

Reviews: Very busy week for us with three XBLA Game Reviews and a whole lot of indie games: Nin2-Jump (XBLA), The Fancy Pants Adventures review (XBLA), Pinball FX 2 Mars Table (XBLA DLC), Weapon of Choice (XBLIG), SFG Beach Volleyball (XBLIG), Chus Dynasty (XBLIG), OSR Unhinged review (XBLIG), Fortresscraft review (XBLIG), Earth Shaker Review (XBLIG), SFG Soccer Review (XBLIG)

Podcast: Fancy Pants, Section 8 Prejudice, Bastion and Gatling Gears highlight this week’s Podcast.

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