About John Laster

Please excuse the irony of the title, but at XBLA Fans, we love Monday Night Combat. The only problem is that we have more free time on Wednesday.

We …
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Klei Entertainment has released a new trailer showcasing the depth of the combos in the combat for their upcoming game Shank. Where else can you …
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It’s a rare day for us to make a post about a non-xbla game. It’s an even rarer day for a Playstation 3 game to …
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The Summer of Arcade lineup is full of great titles.  We were very impressed with Limbo when it hit the marketplace last week, and while we haven’t …
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The team behind Shank has sent word that the game will release on August 25th for Xbox Live Arcade. While that news is exciting enough to warrant …
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So DeathSpank is coming to Xbox Live Arcade this Wednesday the 14th. And while we haven’t yet had a chance to play the final build, we were …
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Winners have been chosen and will be emailed later today. Congrats to PlayingMantis (comment) and XFactoRe8 (Twitter)

In case you were not yet aware, the Xbox Live …
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While Shank may still be referred to in some circles as an indie darling, the game packs a whole lot of production value. What may have started as a homemade knife, has been proven to be one gracefully elegant weapon. The title’s story is penned by Marianne Krawczyk, author of God of War. The game itself is presented in 9 layers of HD parallax taking art direction cues from Jeff Agala, creative director on the project and creator of Cartoon Network Original Series Atomic Betty. The game is being published by EA Partners, who is responsible for EA’s dealings with People Can Fly (Bulletstorm), Valve (Orange Box), Harmonix (Rock Band Franchise), and more. To call all of that indie, just doesn’t cut it.

That isn’t to say Shank has lost its indie roots. Klei CEO Jamie Cheng and Jeff Agala set out to make an adrenaline filled action fest that would also push the boundaries on how digitally distributed games are made. The game mixes and blends genres, as it feels part spaghetti western, part grind house film. Jamie Cheng described the plot to us as a “pulp fiction revenge story through and through.” The main character feels like a total badass combination of Stallone from Rambo and Brock Sampson from Venture Brothers. All in all, it’s a thrilling concoction of just epic ingredients you can only expect to see with the complete freedom of an indie studio.
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Monday Night Combat is a true fusion of genres. The title is a third person shooter tower defense hybrid very much in line with DoTA. This should be no surprise considering the lineage of the Uber team: many of the developers worked on the DoTA game Demigod. The hybrid concept alone creates a very addicting blend, but the developers kept building on the idea. They created a humorous, quirky design that draws clear parallels with Team Fortress 2. They developed six highly varied character classes, each with their own unique style, moves and weaponry, as well as a create-a-class option. They then pushed the limits for an Xbox Live Arcade game with in-depth persistent career through single player, co-op and online multiplayer modes. In the end, it becomes increasingly hard to classify this game, as it breaks many typical molds; however the game is easy to describe: it is flat out awesome.

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The following article is based around an email interview conducted by our team with Jamie Cheng, CEO of Klei Entertainment. For the uninitiated, Klei Entertainment is currently developing Shank for Xbox Live Arcade for summer release.

Redefining digitally distributed games

About five years ago, a young video game developer with some big ideas on how small game companies should work walked away from a position with an established developer in the hopes of completely redefining how digitally distributed games were made. Jamie Cheng sold his shares of THQ and went out on a limb to accomplish his dreams. This is where the story of Klei Entertainment begins.

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