The producer behind Final Fantasy XIV Hiromichi Tanaka said that Square Enix currently has "no plans" for an xbox 360 version of this game, althoug he did admit that the company is still in talks with microfoft.
But at this moment they are only working on the PS3 and windows version of the game.
He also days that the game is still on track to be relesed before the end of the year.
Darwinia does not fall into any one game genre, as it mixes elements from strategy, action, puzzle, hacker, and God games alike. I like it simply because it has a stylized retro look. Darwinia+ is coming to Xbox Live Arcade next month! See you online.
Leave Home is rising from the din of obscurity in the Xbox Live Independent gaming section. It combines a some 2D space shooter with somewhat unique retro graphics and game design. It costs only $3 via Xbox Live.
This recent history of video games are filled with modern games trying to capture or improve on classic games of a previous generation. Xbox Live is full of such attempt with surprisingly few true successes. Trails HD is one of those successes. It takes the formula of Nintendo's classic Excite Bike and adds a real physics system and current generation graphics into something that actually improves on the original. No small feat. (Take this from a person that worked on a follow up version of the original Tetris.)
The result is much of what made Excite Bike fun to play. Trying to make the best time racing and making and hitting your jumps on a virtual dirt bike. There are differences though. Trails HD is not a head to head racing game. The experience is purely single player but this doesn't take away from the core fun. In fact, making this a multiplayer game would detract from what makes it good and that is riding your bike through a progressively more insane series of courses. While the game is visually in 3D, the gameplay is 2D. Your race on a straight line with 4 main bike controls: Throttle, breaking, rider lean forward and lean back.
Each course requires you, the rider, to finish under a certain time and with a certain minimum of restarts. There are check points you pass while on the course that can be continued from mid-course in case you lose control and crash. There are also 4 different bike types that can be considered upgrades but you will find that using a lesser powered bike can make some courses easier and quicker to finish. There are also mini-games which are short skill challenges, like jumping a rocket powered bike off a ski jump type ramp for distance or riding your bike on top of a large cage type ball just to name two. More mini-games, bikes and track courses are unlocked as you pass courses.
Trails HD is not flawless however. After about and hour or two of gameplay, the courses start to become brutally difficult. So difficult, successfully finishing a course required me many (sometimes over a 100) retries. Each course as a gold, silver, and bronze achievement depending on your overall time and number of crashes you make before you finish. This is the biggest drawback to the game. They designers should have been confident in their core gameplay and not simply tried to up the skill level requirements to near insane levels to finish each course. What makes the game so difficult your bike's landing angle, forward and vertical velocities and how easily subtle differences in these make for success and failure in the more difficult courses.
Trails HD Trailer
The verdict
Hits:
Improving on dirt bike genre
Fun bike physics
Good course design
Irreverent sense of humor
Level editor included to make and share original courses
Project natal is soon here or..well.. if u are in US.. US going to be the first country. " At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft dedicated a significant portion of its keynote address to Project Natal. A 3D camera, the controller-free gaming device will be coming out before 2010 ends during the holiday time frame. Perhaps more interesting were the stats offered during a trailer shown at the conference.
Andrew Fitzgibbon, Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, discussed the specifics. "What Natal does, is it evaluates effectively trillions of body configurations every frame. We've made it do that 30 times a second." This is done through a combination of software and a camera that tracks the body's motion in three dimensions.
Though Natal will evaluate the room 30 times a second, that does not necessarily mean that the games will also run at that rate. That will be the effective number of times the game can receive new input from the user, however. "
I think i have to move to US.. im sure this game will come to sweden 2012 or something like that haha!
Defense Grid is simply the best tower defense genre game I have ever had the pleasure of playing. Even if you don’t like the genre you owe it to yourself to at least download the demo via Xbox Live or Steam for your PC.
What makes Defense Grid a great game is the simplicity yet subtle nuance of its core game design. You are given the task of preventing an army of mechanized bugs from stealing your base’s energy cores. You do this by selectively placing a variety of towers and turrets along the path the bugs take. Sometimes even influencing the path they will take to maximize your towers’ destructive capabilities.
Each tower type has its strength and weakness and you will find that you must and will want to employ them all in the right situation, place and time. For example, the cannon turrets do high direct damage at long range, while the laser turrets do more damage overtime. Machine gun turrets require line of sight but are cheap and effective. This to just name a few of dozens of types and upgrades you will have at the ready to employ.
The pure fun of playing the game is doing just this. The challenge starts out fairly easy but progressively requires understanding the nuances of each tower type and the interplay between the position you place them and the order you place them since your tower building resources are tight at the start of each level. The more bugs you destroy the more resources to build with you attain.
But take heart, the game utilizes a series of automatic check point save points as your progress through each level. So if you paint yourself into a corner, you can easily rollback a few minutes of progress and start anew at mid-level without having to restart from the beginning. This makes retrying different micro-strategies more fun than frustrating.
The invading bugs are also varied in their abilities and the patterns of waves they come at you. Some fly while others move quickly on the ground. Some are weak armored but attack in swarms. While still others generate shielding for large groups of their slow but well armored comrades.
The graphics are the best of any tower defense game I’ve seen. The battle effects and sounds are very satisfying. The environments are pristine and varied, from barren waste lands, to snowy mountainsides.
The verdict
Hits:
Addictive game play
Well balanced learning curve
Solid environments and sound
Inexpensive price: $10 or less via Steamor Xbox Live download
