Pinball FX2

Zen Studios will soon release Star Wars Pinball: Heroes Within for Xbox One and Xbox 360. This pinball pack will complete the original Star Wars trilogy of pinball tables …
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Zen Studios has announced that more Star Wars Pinball tables will be coming to Pinball FX2. Heroes Within will contain for new tables, all focusing on our favorite heroes from the saga. First up we have the Han Solo table, where the action takes place on the Millennium Falcon. The titular smuggler and his buddy Chewbacca are heading to the Death Star, but not everything is going as planned.

R2-D2 and C-3PO get their own time to shine on the Droids table. They’re on their way to deliver the Death Star plans, and it’s up to you to guide them to safety. Episode IV: A New Hope gets its own table, focusing on the memorable moments from the first film leading up to the destruction of the Death Star. Masters of the Force is a table dedicated to the most powerful beings to wield lightsabers, both good and evil. Star Wars Pinball: Heroes Within will be available this spring. Check out the Han Solo trailer above, and screens from the tables after the jump.

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Zen Studios, most well known to XBLA gamers for Pinball FX2, is migrating a number of its titles to the Xbox One, including the well-known pinball franchise. In addition …
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Star Wars is in many ways the ideal environment for pinball. The space battles of the movies invite gameplay focused on delivering armaments (torpedoes, pinballs) to a target (a …
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Xbox Live Arcade began its life on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 simply enough. When eager gamers bought up Xbox 360s on launch day (November 22, 2005), they found a free copy of Hexic HD pre-loaded on their hard drives. Of course, it was another launch title that secured the platform’s success. Bizarre’s Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved both gave birth to the twin-stick shooter craze and demanded gamers take Xbox Live Arcade, which started in disc form back on the original Xbox, seriously as a digital games platform. Bizarre’s side project paved the way for the enormous variety of retro revivals, HD remakes, original indie projects, major studio releases, free-to-play games and more that have come to call XBLA home in the years since.

Today, we’re approximately one month away from the launch of the Xbox One, which will signal the end of XBLA as we have come to know it these past eight years. While Microsoft’s Xbox line will continue to be home to myriad low-cost downloadable video games, the XBLA moniker will not make the transition to Xbox One. It’s going down with the figurative (and literal) Xbox 360 boat. So what better time than now to count down the best XBLA games to ever grace the Xbox 360?

It wasn’t easy, but our staff has sorted through all of the best XBLA releases over the years and picked the ones that we feel are the true standout stars of the platform. Check back with us throughout the week as we run down five of Xbox Live Arcade’s top games every night. And don’t forget to head to the comments to let us know how much you love (or hate) our picks.

(Editor’s Note: voting was conducted in early September. No games released post-Summer of Arcade 2013 were considered eligible.)

25.) Pinball FX2

John Laster, Editor-in-Chief — Pinball FX2 shot out of the shoot pretty quickly and even three years later has shown very few signs of slowing down. Recreating a fantastic-feeling pinball experience in a virtual environment, Zen Studios has crafted a virtual arcade that will save you a lot of quarters and allow you to forget that you aren’t playing on physical machines. Utilizing a mix of original and licensed IPs, Pinball FX2 takes players from classic Rome to a galaxy far, far away with an entire pack of Star Wars tables and a plethora of other downloadable content.

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The sales stats are in for the majority of the month of August (July 29 – August 25) on the XBLA marketplace and they certainly make for interesting reading. …
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Coming this fall, owners of Pinball FX2 will be getting new DLC. But not just any new DLC, this time around Zen Studios has cooked up Star …
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The unofficial holiday celebrating everything that happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away is nearly upon us. In honor of Star Wars Day, May …
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Zen Studios launched a new Star Wars Pinball tournament this week. The first contest, which takes place on the Empire Strikes Back table, started on March 15 but runs …
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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members  of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and  which they’re …
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