The eyes of the internet, or at least those of us who grew up playing countless hours of Sonic games on our little black boxes, were on the video included below.  Supposedly, this video shows leaked gameplay footage of Sega’s upcoming Sonic game, Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, which was recently announced.

Even if this video turns out to be a fake, I’m still super pumped about the upcoming game.  My only hope is the price isn’t too steep.  For now, enjoy the video.

[Source: Gametrailers, via Joystiq]

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The PC indie hit is coming to Xbox 360 Live Arcade!  Enjoy exciting first-person brawling action, brought to you by the folks at Atlus.  The game will be available for XBLA March 31, 2010.

While you wait, why don’t you check out the fresh new screenshots, posted in the gallery below?  Or, you can check out a video in case you missed it.

[Source: Atlus]

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If you’re looking forward to the Ultimate Edition of Zeno Clash for XBLA, then you’ll enjoy this video, which shows off the new attacks found in this updated version.

“Initially, ACE Team had offered to demonstrate the new moves in Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition in person for the Atlus staff,” chuckled a grimacing Aram Jabbari, Manager of Public Relations and Sales for Atlus.  “We all thought they were kidding when they talked about cool-sounding moves like the ‘headbutt’ and ’spin kick.’  After a week in the hospital, I’m happy to say that fans can expect to find those and equally punishing new attacks in Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition, and that the moves deliver the same satisfyingly visceral feel as all the other injury-inducing first-person melee combat Zeno Clash has to offer.  In other good news, the doctor says the swelling on my head will go away in about a month or so.”

For more info on the game, which is set to release March 30, 2010, exclusively for XBox Live Arcade, check out http://www.zenoclash.com, or scroll down for an ACE Team roundtable interview, discussing frequently asked questions about the upcoming title.

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Want some freakishly bouncy-bright cuteness in your Arkanoid? UK developer Strawdog Studios have announced a game to fit the bill. Space Ark, releasing in the spring, has you bouncing animals around to collect various items. You know how you bounce around a ball to break bricks in Arkanoid, yeah, the cute little animals are the balls. (more…)

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It’s Wednesday and time again for more Xbox Live Arcade titles to be rolled out. This week’s releases include Square Enix’s Death by Cube and Konami’s Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment. With Death by Cube adding a little depth to its speediness and Vandal Hearts adding speed to its in-depth tactics-rpg gameplay, this week’s releases will be sure to leave you a little light in the pockets.

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Less than a month since the release of 0 Day Attack on Earth, Square Enix, the game’s publisher, has dropped some DLC for us titled “London Map Pack.” The 560 Microsoft Point expansion allows you to battle invaders among the cityscape of London, adding to the included Tokyo, Paris, and New York. Also added is new invaders, the ability to select a higher difficulty setting, and a boss battle.
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I’m not the biggest fan of remakes, but there are enough classic games out there to justify companies like Team17’s decision to bring them back. They are best known for the Worms series, but they also created a popular Aliens inspired PC game released in 1990 called Alien Breed.  The top-down shooter had you fighting through a space ship taken over by aliens as you try to discover exactly what happened in the abandoned craft.

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Capcom hit the airwaves this morning with a few announcements concerning two of their upcoming releases, Final Fight:  Double Impact and Tatsunoko Vs Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars.  First up is a contest concerning throwback PSN and XBLA title Final Fight and coloring!  Not really kidding about that.  The contest basically asks fans to color the box art (pictured left, click to enlarge).  Yes, it sounds odd (particularly as the game is a digital download), but who I am to criticize a contest?  They’re giving away a copy of the game, as well as an all-expenses paid trip to New Orleans to party with the Capcom crew at their “Captivate” event.  That alone sounds cool enough to warrant entry into the contest, but the winner also gets a poster of their colored art and some more undetermined swag. 

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Just a few weeks ago, indie game developer Foley weaved together the soothing, enjoyable platformer Along Came a Spider onto the Xbox LIVE Indie games channel. When I first heard about it, I watched a gameplay video of it, and it instantly reminded me of those simple, artistic, relaxing platform games you can play in between some of your more brutal gaming endeavors.

I got a chance to download the full game and try it out more extensively; it had a lot more to offer than I was expecting. With 20 levels and 4 bigger boss fights, it’s one of the lengthier indie games out there, though it does come with a price: 400 MS Points, to be specific. The levels quickly set the pace for increasing difficulty as you move onward with each level. It of course understands many gamers’ need for collection, so whilst you’re rolling about, grasping onto silk, pandering to gravity and weaving your silken web lines to the end, there are 3 flies per level fluttering about to be eaten, collected, whatever you want to call it! But they don’t just sit and flutter, they get scared and run when they see you coming as you progress, and lead you through a tangled new path of their own before you’ll be able to catch them. A lot of it requires timing and strategy to outwit the flies, and also to get to the end of each level.

It’s charming and attractive, though not for everyone. Check out the gameplay trailer below to get your eight silky legs wet with Along Came a Spider.

Along Came a Spider – Xbox Live Marketplace

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The Rainbow Islands series spun off from Bubble Bobble as a sequel, opening the door to a brand new franchise. Following the “true ending” of the original Bubble Bobble game, the game was an adventure involving human forms of the iconic dragons Bub and Bob, escaping from rapidly sinking land masses via rainbow. It might sound silly, but it garnered mostly positive critical reception and received several sequels. The latest of which, Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure, was recently released via WiiWare and the Xbox Live Arcade. While it manages to capture most of the magic that made its predecessors memorable, much of the whimsy is dwindling with this next-gen update.

(more…)

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I went into this game with tainted expectations, had to force myself to play it most of the time, and am not a fan of the aesthetic in general.  I completely judged the book by its cover, in other words.  I had seen Wallace and Gromit on DVD covers, always kind of raising an eyebrow at the crude claymation efforts of its creators.  Don’t get me wrong, I love just about everything to do with England.  Something about this dog and man couple irked me though.  I’ll probably never quite put my finger on what.  Perhaps they remind me of a long lost tormentor somewhere in the mists of time.

To get back on topic, I did play Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Ep 2: The Last Resort, and despite not having played Episode 1, I jumped right in without being lost or confused.  Let’s just say the narrative isn’t cohesive enough between episodes that entering midway is a problem.  I am familiar with point and click  adventure games, though this was the first I had played on a console.  My experience generally includes Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton, and one could argue that those particular adventures are quite different from your classic PC point and click.

And that brings me to my first issue with the game.  Point and click adventures are aptly named.  They originate on a computer and involve pointing and clicking.  This Xbox adaptation takes the pointing away and leaves players with a scroll through option or a proximity option I guess one could call it.  When controlling either Wallace or Gromit, moving around with the joystick works well enough, and even finding the objects to select is fine, but it does not work as well as a Wiimote, stylus, or mouse would.  In fact, it adds much time to the experience and takes away from it for that.  There is a handy highlight feature that will show players what can be interacted with, but I generally forgot about it because usually it was obvious.  It just wasn’t always easy to click what I wanted to click.

Controls aside, the story of The Last Resort is fairly humorous.  Wallace decides to build a beach in his basement because it’s rainy out (it’s England), and he needs a vacation.  The game is divided up into 4 chapters, each with its own mini story.  The final chapter is about five minutes long, but the previous three border on one to two hours each, depending on how fast you can figure out what to do.  For those uninitiated in the adventure game genre, this game follows a classic formula.  Players have an overarching objective to fulfill.  They fulfill this objective by interacting with objects, people, and combining objects and people.  In a way it’s just a graphical math formula.  The story is vaguely funny, as is most of the dialogue.  I did have a few laugh out loud moments.  The characters, for the most part, are very one dimensional.  Gromit, who is a dog and never speaks a work, is oddly enough the character with the most depth.  He is ever suffering his master’s idiocy, but also seems to care about him in a sarcastic, suffering way.

The puzzles, if one could call them that, are usually not too difficult.  The ones that do provide a challenge do so because they are unintuitively stupid.  These are few, however, and actually paying attention to what people say and to one’s surroundings will heed answers probably 90% of the time.  For instance, it’s no leap of logic to assume the guy driving around with 40 bags of sand in his truck is the one players need to talk to for a basement beach.  Thus the overall difficulty of the game doesn’t approach something as convoluted as Layton.  It also makes it less enjoyable.

The Last Resort is not a bad game.  I did have to force myself to play it for the first half, but I warmed up to it and genuinely enjoyed the latter part of it.  It’s not something I would ever replay, and I’m not terribly excited to start up episodes 3 and 4, but neither do I dread those eventualities.  The story is quirky, the characters humorous if not laugh out loud hilarious, and while the genre does not work near as well without a mouse or at least a pointer, it was not overly frustrating to navigate.  At the very least, I know now that my initial judgment of the cover was not entirely fair to the pages within.

Title: Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Ep2: The Last Resort Publisher: TellTale Developer: TellTale Platform(s): Xbox Live Arcade Release Date: 11/04/2009

Doin It RIGHT: -Humorous at times. - Puzzles are not frustrating. -Good voice acting.	Doin It RONG: -Starts out very slow. - Puzzles are often too easy. - Some of the characters are nothing short of annoying.
FINAL SCORE: 5 / 10

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Wow! What a turnout we had for our Call of Duty Classic contest! Seriously, thank you to each and every one of you for leaving your mark on the site, voicing your opinions and letting us know all about what you agreed with or didn’t agree with. Modern Warfare 2 is indeed a hot topic of discussion, and it’s exciting to see all your different opinions and viewpoints. Still, we could only choose one winner, even though you’re all winners in our books for visiting the site and showing your support in a number of ways.

The winner has now been chosen!

You will be contacted shortly with your code. Enjoy the game and please keep coming back to Spawn Kill for all  your gaming needs! Thank you to each and every one of you for participating and we hope to see you back here again soon.

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A while ago, I stumbled upon a gem of a game called Puzzle Quest for the Nintendo DS. An intriguing concept, the combination of role-playing game with puzzle was immediately addicting. Not only for me, but for my Dr. Mario addict, casual gamer of a wife. Though my affections for the little portable system have since diminished, the RPG and puzzle game mashup has been purchased, and played through again, for my 360.

Earlier this year, when Square Enix announced that, in collaboration with PopCap, they would be releasing a puzzle-RPG title that would use elements from Bejeweled Twist, I knew Gyromancer would find its way onto my Xbox. PopCap plus Square Enix definitely equals “yes, please” in my book. Obviously, one cannot help but compare the game to the excellent Puzzle Quest, but how does it stack up?

Immediately, it was apparent that this title was a lot shinier than Puzzle Quest. Though it still has the cardboard illustrations for characters that are just there for illustrative purpose, the atmosphere of the game, the cleanness of the illustrations, the music, the experience was impressive.

In fact, upon boot up, I was addicted. The story was interesting, in the beginning, and the gameplay was crack. Seriously, if you haven’t played Bejeweled Twist, the puzzle backbone of Gyromancer, try out the flash version here because it is really fun. By just looking at a screenshot you might mistake Twist for the original Bejeweled. However, the mechanics of the game change significantly based on how you move the jewels. To create matches of three or more jewels, you do not swap the gems, but instead rotate a group of four clockwise. At first, it was really frustrating that you could only rotate in one direction, but I got used to it and, later in the game, it was infuriating when the rotation direction was changed.

But this is a puzzle-RPG game, and it cannot survive or be successful based on the puzzle aspects alone. You are Rivel, a mage that is chasing after a rebellious group called Temperance. This group is led by a man named Qraist, who is essentially the bad guy of the story. However, that’s about it for narrative. It is dull, uninteresting, and brought me out of the game. The story is a tacked on element to Gyromancer and truly makes the RPG element of the game weak. Not only was the story tacked on and dull, it was annoyingly superficial. For example, one of the characters dies, and comes back to life, three times. Eyes were rolled. Three times.

So, is the puzzle aspect the only saving grace of Gyromancer? Not exactly. Though the story elements are extremely weak, the questing and gameplay are interesting and fun. You want grinding? Gyromancer has it. You want random battles? It’s there. You want adventurous journeys? Yep. How about the ability to summon badass creatures with unique abilities? Well, read on, because Gyromancer does do some of these things right.

There are ten basic levels, one final boss level, and a challenging endurance level called Challenger’s Door. In the basic levels and boss level, you are given a bit of the story at the beginning and then you play. The story does not come back into the picture until you have beaten the level. In the beginning you are given an overview of the map, a shot of where you are trying to get and then, finally, you are shown your begin point. You move your character along a path and you will encounter monsters along the way. Some of the monsters will be stationary on the map, some will move as you move, and some will be hidden in treasure chests (“monster-in-a-box!”). As you move on to increasingly difficult levels, the creatures will advance as well.

To destroy these monsters, you have in your arsenal three creatures of your own. Once you are in a level, any damage to your monsters is permanent until you leave or beat the level. As I battled it out with my enemies, I began to feel a disappointment with the gameplay. It took me a few battles to realize that I was missing the competition of Puzzle Quest. In Puzzle Quest you make a move and then your opponent moves. Not so in Gyromancer. You make your moves and try and build up the levels for your monster to cast spells automatically (yes, you don’t select what happens) to place ability gems. Opponents will spew out their own bombs to screw with your attack. They do not make moves, attacks are just placed based on your moves. Once their attack gem has been placed you have to get rid of them within so many turns or they will do damage to your creature.

While in battle you have the option to cast spells that you collect in your travels. There are only four spells in this game. All of the spells effects last for one turn and they will allow you to do things such as change the direction in which you rotate your gems, place your ability gems immediately, and unlock locked gems. The bad thing about this is, once you are out of whatever spells, you have the option to buy them from the marketplace for a mere 40 Microsoft Points each. Microtransactions indeed.

You level up after winning so many battles. Your creatures level up with you, even if they weren’t used in the battle. Your creatures will eventually reach their level caps and you will need to summon new creatures in the Summoner’s Den to continue on successfully. You find new creatures on the map in the form of gyro codes. Your found codes can be used in the Summoner’s Den. You must pay to summon the new creature and you must get rid of one of your three to make room for your new warrior. Each creature has an affinity color or a color from which they gain power. Ideally, you want to have a variety of colors in your array of warriors.

This is where the grinding comes in because somewhere near the middle of the game, you must do some serious leveling up to continue. It was in this grinding that I became bored with the game. I wanted every battle to feel like it meant something. However, it seems like every battle was a vicious little reminder that there was another game out there. A better game.

All in all there are plenty of worse games out there. In fact, Gyromancer isn’t a bad game at all. Only a few moments of grinding were tedious for me. The battles were addictive and challenging. The creatures were interesting and fun to unlock. I think it’s the fact that I wanted so much more. I wanted a good story. I wanted less randomness in the battles. I wanted a game that I would want to come back to.

Title: Gyromancer Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Square Enix and PopCap Games Platform(s): XBLA (Reviewed), PC Release Date: November 18, 2009

Doin It RIGHT: -Addictive and Challenging Gameplay -Interesting Creatures -Graphics and Music Create an Awesome Atmosphere	Doin It RONG: - Paper Thin Story - Unnecessary Grinding to Advance - No Real Enemy to Strategize Against in Battle
FINAL SCORE: 7.5 / 10

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The NFL Arcade genre has pretty much been dead for a while now. Just a couple of years ago we had some really great titles in Blitz and NFL Street, but the NFL wanted to clean up their image thanks to the Bengals and Adam “Pac Man” Jones. Even the famous Blitz games went away from their standard Arcade style in favor of a more “realistic” game. EA Tiburon had a nice run with NFL Street each title receiving critical acclaim but then they stopped making them because the game was too gritty for the NFL. In 2008 they put out a much tamer title in NFL Tour but the game was terrible to put it lightly. After almost two years EA Tiburon is once again trying their hand at an arcade title, this time with the downloadable title Madden NFL Arcade. Although it is very apparent that they are trying their hardest to get back to what made NFL Street so good, the game lacks depth and customization even for a downloadable game. The title can only be enjoyed in small intervals and for that price tag I feel like I should be getting more.

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Madden NFL Arcade is a brand new way to experience the Madden NFL franchise. Brought to us by the same Madden NFL team from EA Tiburon, the 5-on-5 football game features a new arcade style game with easy pick up and plays controls. The game also featuers a unique art style and gameplay that reminds me a lot of the popular NFL Street titles.  Not much has been released about the game but EA Sports recently announced that the download only game will be available on Xbox Live Arcade on November 24^th and November 25^th on the PlayStation Store for $14.99. Along with announcing the release date, they also released the complete listing of each teams ten-man roster. Click here to download the excel file to see check out the roster and on the second page of the file you will find the players available through the “Entourage” Game Changer during gameplay.

[Source: Madden EA Sports Blog]

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