Official Xbox Live Arcade Thread

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Battlezone images:

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ESRB Updates:

Vigilante 8: Arcade Activision T Mild Violence Xbox 360

Double D Dodgeball Yukes Company of America E No Descriptors Xbox 360

Roogoo Southpeak Games E No Descriptors Windows PC, Xbox 360
 
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/866/866475p1.html

Happy Tree Friends Release Update
A false alarm indeed.
by Erik Brudvig

April 14, 2008 - Rumors spread through the 'net last week that Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm would be due before April's end for Xbox Live Arcade and PC. The news spread from a post on the official Happy Tree Friends website that points to an April 21 release. Unfortunately, it looks to be a false alarm.

When contacted for confirmation on the day everyone could get their hands on the cuddly balls of violence, a SEGA representative informed IGN that the game is actually slated for a May release. It's not a major wait, but it looks like you'll have to hold tight a while longer.
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Where is Turtles in Time already? Why haven't we seen Double Dragon 2?

...and of course, why is Sega holding back on the goods? I swear, some of these companies act like they are allergic to making money.
 
Gilatif said:
Where is Turtles in Time already? Why haven't we seen Double Dragon 2?

...and of course, why is Sega holding back on the goods? I swear, some of these companies act like they are allergic to making money.
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I'm guessing Microsoft has some say in what these pubs can and can't put out tho.
 
Gilatif said:
Where is Turtles in Time already? Why haven't we seen Double Dragon 2?

...and of course, why is Sega holding back on the goods? I swear, some of these companies act like they are allergic to making money.
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See this is what I think happens.

Company has a long list of old classics, but they don't want to blow their load early. So they leave their big and popular games alone and start releasing their lesser known games, some old games, etc. But they keep releasing their minor games so long that their sales go down. Their sales go down, they cancel future projects. Therefore the BIG games everyone wanted in the first place never come out.
 
LakeEarth said:
See this is what I think happens.

Company has a long list of old classics, but they don't want to blow their load early. So they leave their big and popular games alone and start releasing their lesser known games, some old games, etc. But they keep releasing their minor games so long that their sales go down. Their sales go down, they cancel future projects. Therefore the BIG games everyone wanted in the first place never come out.
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That, and MS wants to have less old arcade ports now for some reason. They completely misunderstood us and thought we were saying "no more old games!" when, in fact, we were saying "stop it with the shitty fucking games and bring on the classics! nobody wants Discs of Tron!"
 
I've been getting heavily into XBLA games as of late. Last night we had a massive worms session for several hours. We invented a gametype where the only items are infite rope, infinite girders & infinite prodding. The match is 5 minutes long before sudden death. The game becomes a race to trap opposing worms with girders so they drown in the rising water, while at the same time getting one of your own worms as high on the map as you possibly can. It's tons of fun. We named it "Texas Chili Dog".
 
I took out like 3 tanks and the demo was over for Battlezone. Do they really think people are going to buy it on nostalgia alone? It doesn't have anything else going for it as far as I can tell.
 
This has definitely been asked before but I'm just too fucking stupid to search.

Do US marketplace points cards work on the EU marketplace ?
 
Zaangamer said:
This has definitely been asked before but I'm just too fucking stupid to search.

Do US marketplace points cards work on the EU marketplace ?
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Marketplace Points: NO
Live Account Codes: Yes
 
Dark Octave said:
I didn't wanna say anything, but I knew Battle Zone was gonna suck. It sucked back in 1995 (when I played it) and I don't see adding some Tron graphics making it any better 13 years later.

What a waste of a week for XBLA.
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Back in 1980 when it first came out it kicked ass. Unfortunately this isn't even the real Battlezone.

The demo has appallingly bad and showed me enough carnage that Stainless has once again set to some of my favorite classic arcade titles.

Battlezone's original classic emulation is so horrifically poor that it is laughable and sad at the same time. Right off the bat it is completely missing half the sound effects found in it.

How do these "ports" not only get released but butchered so badly in the first place? For crying out loud I was playing this game flawlessly emulated *13* years ago on my old Pentium 75mhz PC.

Can someone please pull the damned plug on Stainless now, please? PLEASE?

It makes me sad because as a classic gamer who would love to play these old games on the 360 with my buddies and make use of the kickass leaderboard scoring, unfortunately it seems no capable developer or programmer in the industry right now can faithfully replicate them.

Pathetic.
 
radjago said:
I took out like 3 tanks and the demo was over for Battlezone. Do they really think people are going to buy it on nostalgia alone? It doesn't have anything else going for it as far as I can tell.
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And yet when people DO buy it based on nostalgia what they will find is a game that isn't even what they played because it plays like a turd on a brick and isn't even faithfully reproduced.

So they will lose in both.
 
Namco Bandai also announces Powerup Forever

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52258

Namco Announces Space Shooter PowerUp Forever
by Nick Breckon Apr 16, 2008 7:00pm CST tags: PowerUp Forever
Namco Bandai yesterday announced a new downloadable game titled PowerUp Forever at its press event in San Francisco. The space shooter is set for a fall release on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network.

While I didn't get my hands on the Stardust HD-esque title, I did get to see an alpha version of it being played. From what I saw, I would judge it as one of the most promising titles within the Namco lineup.

Players will steer a fractal-based ship around a procedurally-generated level, firing away at various enemies. The visual style was very impressive, featuring whispy fluid dynamic-based shield effects that swished around the ship and the various enemies. Combat consists of shooting standard space shooter lasers and triple-shot guns using the right analog stick, with a full 360 degree field of fire. Nothing too exciting yet, but wait--there's more.

In a fantastic twist, as the player takes down parasitic monsters and bosses, the fractal ship grows in size. And while the ship may increase in volume, the level itself stays the same--the camera simply zooms out a little bit more after each growth. Taking notice of the larger target, objects that previously seemed like walls or asteroids show their true identities as gigantic monsters, coming alive to attack the player. It's Katamari Damacy meets Spore, and a really great effect at that.

The single player game will be continuously played on one "level," with only the background art and enemy encounters changing as the world becomes larger.
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ESRB Rating Updates

Golf: Tee It Up! Activision E No Descriptors Xbox 360
Crazy Mouse Ultizen Games E Comic Mischief Xbox 360
 
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18045

You’re doing a lot of tuning with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and I know you’ve written articles about it, but still: why simplify it?

David Sirlin: There’s been a lot of reporting that the game was dumbed down or something, but I think people are off base there. The changes that make the moves easier to do, do not really affect high-level tournament play at all. There’s a couple of cases where the move changes really do affect it, and I’ve changed the properties of the moves to compensate, but in most of the cases, it doesn’t really affect the balance.

People maybe think it does, but it’s making no change at the high-level play, and at low-level, it’s giving people a chance to experience more of the game. If you’re stuck at the level of, “I can’t do Cammy’s Hooligan Throw,” then you’re not really playing Cammy and not really playing the game or feeling the strategy.

I want to get you past the beginner phase into the intermediate phase, where you get the strategy and the fun. So that’s the idea -- don’t mess up the high-level play, but get the beginners to the intermediate stage faster.

I remember when I first played Street Fighter II; there was definitely a bar that you had to pass before you could even figure out what was happening in the game. There was some complexity that kept people out: how can you really communicate this to people?

DS: It’s really pretty straightforward actually. With Cammy, say, you give any player Cammy and her new Hooligan Throw command, where she flies through the air and throws you, is a quarter-triple towards, and then punch, like a fireball, they do it all the time.

It’s just immediately obvious that they’re able to do all her moves when they couldn’t before. Even I couldn’t before. I didn’t really play Cammy before HD Remix, so that’s one of the reasons I probably steered clear of her, even the experts can’t do the original motion every time.

It doesn’t seem to me that lowering the barrier of the move complexity is changing the strategy too much, because really, you’re just using the right move at the right time; it’s all about timing and strategy rather than complexity of input, right?

DS: That’s right. There’s still a lot of nuances of timing. One developer I worked with during the project, at one point said, that Cammy’s Dragon Punch move -- call it a thrust kick or cannon spike depending on who you ask -- is too good and has too high a priority. That was the claim.

I was playing as Cammy at the time, and he was playing as Fei Long, and later we switched characters so I was playing as Fei Long, and he said that Fei Long’s Flame Kick has too much priority, it’s like his Dragon Punch.

The thing is, the priority on these moves is actually about the same; I don’t have the frame stats off the top of my head, but I have a feeling that both of them are invulnerable for a certain amount of time, and both of them become vulnerable later.

It’s really about, did you do yours a little bit before mine or a little bit after? It’s all about those nuances in timing, and we’ll deliver there just as much as ever.

How do you balance the priority of these moves? Excel spreadsheets?

DS: [Laughs] Well, maybe it’s not as you imagined. Of course I have access to all of the hit box data which is tables and tables of numbers, and all the formulas and equations of how the trajectory is computed, so you could say I have access -- they’re not in spreadsheets -- but I have access to all this data and I must use some kind of analysis and some formula to come up with what to do, but it’s really not to do with that.

My biggest secret is that, even though I have a math degree from MIT, it’s not about math at all. If I was going to make a fighting game from scratch, starting with nothing, there’d be a tiny bit of math to make sure that, if you make them block a move, you can’t block it again to prevent infinite loops, so there’s already a little bit of maths done for me in Super Street Fighter, but when it comes to things like, should this guy’s priority be a little bit better or not?

It’s just this holistic approach. We know the results from all these tournaments from all these years, and it’s just having an intuition of what a tweak is going to do.

So for Fei Long, for example, he’s invulnerable for a certain amount of time, and then he’s vulnerable. Some people suggested he should be invulnerable for a greater amount of time. Now, I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me that’s a good idea or not. I just know that his Dragon Punch is pretty much effective as it is, and that’s not the reason he loses matches. So, when I look at expert players try to play Fei Long and try to be successful with him, it’s just that they cannot get in, can’t get close enough, and once they do, he has a lot of options and a lot of ways to deal damage.

There needs to be a trade-off, it needs to be kind of hard, but not as hard as it currently is. So I have to look at things and ask, what can I do to let him get in a little more easily? One example is that he has a flying kick where he flies through the air as one of his special moves. It’s really hard to do before, we made it much easier to do.

I made the small version of that -- there’s three versions, small, medium, and large -- I made the small version be able to go through fireballs at the beginning. So that’s one more option he needs to get in. The opponent can counter it by just backing up and sweeping, but he didn’t have any really good options. So it’s a feel, it’s intuition.
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I'm a little confused about Powerup Forever. In the announcement it's called Infinitum:

Infinitum
Release Date: Summer 2008

Platform: Xbox LIVE Arcade, PLAYSTATION Network

Get ready for high-octane, shooting action with Infinitum. Space and time are irrelevant in your search for evil forces as you fight a relentless horde of enemies across an endless spatial battlefield. Destroying elite enemies allows you to absorb their energy, transforming your ship’s size, shape and power. As your ship evolves and grows your world and its enemies shrink to insignificance, revealing even more massive and powerful enemies that were previously too large to see.
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http://www.namcobandaigames.com/news/press/press/284/page/1

??
 
womp said:
How do these "ports" not only get released but butchered so badly in the first place? For crying out loud I was playing this game flawlessly emulated *13* years ago on my old Pentium 75mhz PC.
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And all the MAME source is available for people to look at.
What's also annoying is how many reviews blame the game's poor quality on the original being poor or dated, rather than Stainless' quarter-arsed effort.
 
Just got cokfirmation about Infinitum:

Hi Ryan,

It's PowerUp Forever. The webmaster posted an old release, please disregard it. I've attached the correct release for you.
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There you go. the Namco Bandai page has been changed accordingly too.
 
Oh man. I just broke my high score in Pacman C.E. 334,220. I know it's not the best score but I'm really proud of myself! :p I love this game so much.
 
Dr Zhivago said:
And all the MAME source is available for people to look at.
What's also annoying is how many reviews blame the game's poor quality on the original being poor or dated, rather than Stainless' quarter-arsed effort.
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The thing is though the original edition of these classic games is why most people would buy them in the first place. It isn't like Battlezone is going to sell to a 13 year old, it is going to sell to old fogies like myself. F Stainless's updates, most updated graphics modes are horrible anyhow and the original game's emulation and overall quality are the important factors in something like this. Classic gamers or nostalgia buffs who are the audience for these releases don't give a rats ass about the shit updates. Asteroids is unplayable thanks to all the horrifically lame ass flashy effects they added.

I just can't WAIT to see what the hell they do to Warlords.
 
womp said:
I just can't WAIT to see what the hell they do to Warlords.
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If it's anything like the PSP version prepare to hate life.
I got sick of Atari Classics Devolved and downloaded a save to unlock all of the Atari 2600 games, no more fenaggling with shitty remakes.
 
PepsimanVsJoe said:
If it's anything like the PSP version prepare to hate life.
I got sick of Atari Classics Devolved and downloaded a save to unlock all of the Atari 2600 games, no more fenaggling with shitty remakes.
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Yea, it is pretty much going to be the same damn thing save for some shitty netcode most likely.
 
Hey guys, I don't know if you guys are aware, but for the past couple months I've been gifting MS points to people unable to afford the Heroic (at the time, it's now free) and Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3.

On my way to Target I stumbled upon a bunch of cards that had different arcade games on them such as Worms, Texas Hold'em and Geowars.

I'm thinking of buying a couple of these cards, and gifting them out to people in this thread at random. Unfortunately, these codes (just like the points codes) are only valid in the US, so foreigners, I'm sorry. :(

Anyways, just wanted to let you guys know. :)

Hugs and kisses.
 
soldat7 said:
I'm guessing Microsoft has some say in what these pubs can and can't put out tho.
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Probably. But, some of the choices puzzle me. For instance, E-SWAT. If that's the arcade version, I'll probably get it early. If its the Genesis version, what were they thinking? I think I speak for everyone would I say I'd kill for the arcade version of Shadow Dancer.
 
Domino Theory said:
Hey guys, I don't know if you guys are aware, but for the past couple months I've been gifting MS points to people unable to afford the Heroic (at the time, it's now free) and Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3.

On my way to Target I stumbled upon a bunch of cards that had different arcade games on them such as Worms, Texas Hold'em and Geowars.

I'm thinking of buying a couple of these cards, and gifting them out to people in this thread at random. Unfortunately, these codes (just like the points codes) are only valid in the US, so foreigners, I'm sorry. :(

Anyways, just wanted to let you guys know. :)

Hugs and kisses.
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Hi! I use an USA account, so the codes work for me (anyway I believe that points are region specif, but download codes for games aren't).

I already have Texas Hold'em and Geowars. But I would be interested in Worms if you still have it. Or any other game that you may have (if I already have the game I will return the code to you, I have a bunch of games like Robotron, Joust, etc).

Thanks a lot!!!!!
 
Domino Theory said:
Hey guys, I don't know if you guys are aware, but for the past couple months I've been gifting MS points to people unable to afford the Heroic (at the time, it's now free) and Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3.

On my way to Target I stumbled upon a bunch of cards that had different arcade games on them such as Worms, Texas Hold'em and Geowars.

I'm thinking of buying a couple of these cards, and gifting them out to people in this thread at random. Unfortunately, these codes (just like the points codes) are only valid in the US, so foreigners, I'm sorry. :(

Anyways, just wanted to let you guys know. :)

Hugs and kisses.
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That's pretty cool that you are doing that. Be sure to get Shard some games/points. :p
 
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