Xbox 360

Xbox Live Releases for the Week of April 10, 2011

This week’s Xbox Live games feature a remake of an old Atari game and a HD version of a DS game.  This week we see the release of Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes which originally came out for the DS in 2009.  The other release is Yar’s Revenge which has the same name of the Atari 2600 game.

Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is a strategy RPG puzzle game.  It looks similar to the Advance War games that also came out for the DS.  You start the game as an elvish girl named Anwen.  She has trained to be the leader of her people, when her friends and family have been attacked by demons.  You must uncover the demons plot and stop the things that are behind the demons.  The DS version uses both screens to play, so it should be interesting to see how they are able to translate it to an Xbox Live game.

Xotic Shooting for XBLA this Summer

Continuing in the same style as The Club and Bulletstorm, developer WXP Games announced a new title today for Xbox Live Arcade called Xotic.

What they call a “hybrid” of the first person shooter and arcade genres, the goal in Xotic isn’t a high kill count; it’s climbing your way up the leaderboards with a high score.

Two Worlds 2 Expansion Coming, Flying Fortresses

While Two Worlds 1 was mostly atrocious, Two Worlds 2 was fairly well received. It seemed to have its own little unique charm that people ate up. Apparently, that game sold around 2.5 million copies. Also apparently, Reality Pump (the developers) enjoy adding content to it as there will be a new expansion releasing this September entitled Pirates of the Flying Fortress.

“The story plunges the player headlong into an adventure that is more than astonishing! The good old “Two Worlds” atmosphere waits, which is yet quite different this time around. Exotic flair, new enemies, new settings and new weapons – all fans are in for a shocking surprise!” –Press Release

New Backbreaker Game Announced, Tackle Alley Returns

Yesterday I reported that Natural Motion and 505 Games had teased a new Backbreaker game. Today they made it official by announcing that the new Backbreaker game will be titled Backbreaker: Vengeance and will be exclulsive to Xbox Live Arcade.

“Backbreaker: Vengeance takes the intensity and AAA appeal of the originalBackbreaker Football console game and combines it with the pick-up-and-play nature of the multi-million selling iPhone games to create a whole new one-of-a-kind sports experience for digital download on Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360. It takes as its inspiration the wildly popular “Tackle Alley” mini-game in Backbreaker Football to deliver an all-new arcade slant on football.”

New Backbreaker Game Coming?

Backbreaker released last June with mostly negative reviews.
I played the game and I can vouch for the reviews; that game was not so good.
The tackling system was unique and unlike anything you’ll see in Madden, but
that was the only unique thing. As a matter of fact, that was the only good
thing. Something Backbreaker could have benefited from was more dev time, which
it will hopefully get as 505 Games has teased a sequel e with the image you can
find at the end of this news post.

Backbreaker may have been mostly terrible, but I’m excited
to hopefully see a sequel. If only the developers had worked more on the actual
“football” part of Backbreaker, it could have been much better. Maybe they’ll
take those criticisms to heart with whatever their next project will be.

Boss Health Bars

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been working through my backlog that builds up every now and then. Nearly all of them involve boss battles in one way or another and I think it’s time boss health bars became standard across the board. They’re one of the few mechanics that can be included in a game that have no real downside; conveying clear information to the player is never a bad thing. Allow me to elaborate a little more.

Ideally, a boss should be the highlight of a particular level or section of the game you happen to be playing through and there are various things that determine whether a boss fight is great or not. The first one is that they are fair — nobody likes a boss with haywire attack patterns and moves that cripple you instantly. The second is a clear strategy that is obvious to the player relatively early on in the fight. It’s no good being at death’s door when you finally figure out what you should have been doing. The most important thing a boss encounter should be is consistent. Once you have figured out a strategy it should work every time. There are few things more irritating than thinking you have a boss fight figured out only to get destroyed on another run.

The Delayed Gaming Grammy Goes To…

Despite their high quality and genre-crossing sounds, it took until last month’s Grammy Award ceremony for any kind of video game music to be recognized for an award: a six year old song from Civilization IV. Now the Grammys are doing some trimming and 30 categories from their previously long list of 109 categories are going away. This means four new categories have been created to consolidate what has gone, each of which consider “Video Game Music” as a genre, and will be eligible for nomination.