About Nick Santangelo

Max is your typical late-80s/early-90s video game or cartoon hero. He’s an adventurous young boy, colorfully drawn to life with a an oversized golden mane and a t-shirt that bearing a prominent reminder of the letter his first name begins with. He lives in a picturesque home in a neighborhood that is presumably full of residents who don’t know the meaning of the words “overcast” and “precipitation.” At the start of his adventure, a monster arm that’s more adorable than scary reaches out of his closet and nabs the little brother whom Max had just been fighting with. This event signals the beginning of an adventure that will see Max running through bright and varied environments and jumping over obstacles in his path.

But this isn’t the late ’80s. Nor is it the early ’90s. This is 2013. And in 2013, game and cartoon characters have guns. Usually big guns. Take, for example, one of XBLA’s most recent releases, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Ubisoft’s ’80s love letter sealed with the blood of the titular dragons went so far as to give the player a minigun. Max: The Curse of the Brotherhood, however, does nothing of the sort.

“One of the things that is very appealing about this game is that Max isn’t armed with a minigun or a samurai sword, but he has this ability to control different kinds of materials that are in themselves not very dangerous,” says Mikkel Thorsted, studio director of Press Play, the developer behind Curse of the Brotherhood. “Basically he is armed with his imagination and wit, so basically when you encounter danger you have to outsmart the villainous henchmen. You have to outsmart them and lure them away, and stuff like that.”

Read More

The long-delayed Skullgirls patch that originally arrived on the PlayStation Network way back on November 20 of last year should finally be available on Xbox Live Arcade within the next two weeks, Lab Zero Games has informed XBLAFans. Lab Zero has been working on getting the “Slightly Different” patch onto XBLA for months, but its enormous original size (590 MB) thwarted the developer’s previous efforts to release it.

“So, if all goes well, the Skullgirls Xbox 360 patch should finally be out soon,” Lab Zero CEO Peter Bartholow said via email. “We won’t know exactly when it goes out – [Microsoft says] it’ll take two weeks, but [Microsoft] actually estimated that it would likely only take one.”

The patch is currently going through Microsoft’s certification process and cannot release unless it successfully passes. “But we don’t expect it to fail,” said Bartholow in response to a follow-up email from XBLA Fans. XBLA gamers’ prolonged wait for the patch should be over once it is finally certified. “As soon as it passes certification it will be pushed out,” Bartholow asserted.

Read More

“So, you guys wanna…play my game?” Mark of the Ninja Lead Designer Nels Anderson asks in a playful voice, his brow raising inquisitively and his hips swinging side to side in rhythm with the last three words of his question. It makes for a silly little dance that the XBLAFans crew gathered around him can’t help but laugh at. We’re about to play a stealth game tucked inside the walls of the Indie Megabooth here at PAX East, but Anderson, with his improv dance move, doesn’t exactly come off as sly.

No, Anderson can’t or won’t bring himself to be sneaky about Mark of the Ninja: Special Edition. His excitement over having us play his latest creation is such that he’s not going to follow in the silent footsteps of the game’s titular ninja. So he doesn’t lurk back in Klei’s personal Indie Megabooth crevice; he’s energetic, and it’s not long before he puts a controller in my hands. Now our attention turns to the screen where all of the requisite sneaking will be performed.

Whereas its contemporaries have tended to make the ninja into an action hero who’s so far over the top that he’d likely make the cast of The Expendables blush, Mark of the Ninja has always emphasized the ninja as a virtually unseen agent of death and/or stealthy sabotage. Whether approaching levels as a killer who isn’t detected until its too late or an infiltrator who isn’t detected at all, players had to stick to the shadows and remain as invisible as possible in order to achieve any kind of measure of success. It was a great system, but one that meant enemies presented but two choices: players could kill them or avoid them. Mark of the Ninja: Special Edition adds another option to the mix.

Read More

It beckons, and you respond. What else would you do? It’s not as if an abundance of other options manifest themselves, really. Your surroundings tell you it will be dangerous to go alone without it, and “it” even goes so far as to articulate its desire to become your traveling companion.

You seem to have just missed some sort of a skirmish, and at least one person ended up dead during the fighting. Someone, presumably the killer, has conveniently left the enormous techno-sword that felled the recently deceased implanted firmly in the poor fellow’s torso. The transistor speaks; it beckons, and you respond. What else would you do?

You relieve its most recent victim of the burden of bearing it any longer, and Supergiant Games’ Transistor begins proper. Red — the beautiful, slender former songstress who was introduced a moment ago in a cut-scene colored as much by her fiery hair as by her heavenly singing — seems a strange choice to wield something so powerful, so…cumbersome. If appearances are to be trusted, Red’s but a delicate thing, not suited to wield such a large weapon. But wield it she does. She hefts the blade with two hands, letting its considerable girth drag behind her as if she were auditioning for the role of leading man in a JRPG from a bygone era.

Swinging the thing reveals that its weight matches its size. Red arcs the chatty transistor over her head and brings it crashing down in front of her with considerable effort. You feel its weight as she does so. It slows Red, restricting her to trotting at only a moderate pace around this futuristic world that is somehow simultaneously flooded with artificial light and dark and foreboding. Her attacks feel deliberate and powerful as they smash the robotic aggressors that spawn before her to bits.

The robots are part of something known as “the Process,” and they want it back. They want the transistor that was so negligently left behind earlier. The transistor has much to say, but its (his?) words are cryptic, leaving you with many questions. What is the Process? What is the transistor? Who is Red, for that matter? Do she and the transistor know each other?

Read More

It’s out now. For 1200 MSP, you can buy it and start playing it right away if you’d like. Funny thing about that, though — that should be old news. And it would be if The Behemoth had followed through with its plan to release BattleBlock Theater on XBLA back in 2010. Obviously, things didn’t quite work out that way, with the beat-em-up platformer having only just released yesterday. What happened? How could the developer have been so confident about 2010 that it was ready to tell the world that was the year and then ultimately be unable to finish BattleBlock Theater until three more calendar years passed it by?

Level Designer Ryan Horn has an explanation: the game wasn’t as fun as the team thought it was going to be. “I think we were hopeful about where the game was gonna be when we [planned] to release it,” he tells XBLAFans while sitting down for an interview at last month’s PAX East. “And then in between the time when we announced [the release window] and when we planned to release it at the time, we saw the game going in a direction that was fun, but we realized that we could take it in a slightly different direction that was going to be a lot more fun.”

With Horn having said his piece, studio President and co-founder John Baez expounds upon why The Behemoth felt its game could reach a state in 2010 that was up to The Behemoth’s considerably high standards of fun. Instead of going back to 2010, though, he looks a little deeper into his past. “The other component of [the delay] is that in our previous experience — I mean, Alien Hominid? Fifteen months, two consoles. Done out the door with an Xbox [version] following three months after that,” he begins. “And then Castle, it’s like, ‘OK, bigger game, three years.’” The prevailing feeling around The Behemoth’s San Diego office during the earlier development phase of Game #3, as BattleBlock was codenamed back then, was that it would not be as an ambitious of an undertaking as Castle Crashers.

Read More

It’s for The Behemoth’s booth at PAX East and Prime conventions to draw large crowds of gamers willing to wait in line for the chance to step up and play BattleBlock Theater. At each PAX for the past few years there’s always seemed to be an an amorphous throng of bodies awaiting their turn. As with anyone waiting in line, they could work together in groups of friends to navigate closer to a machine, or they could get a little more sassy and exploit someone else’s momentary pause or inattentiveness to edge their way ever closer to playing a game that also lets you work with or take advantage of others.

Last month, 10,000 more gamers were presented with the option of cooperating with or causing trouble for fellow players in the BattleBlock Theater beta. It wasn’t meant to be a free-for-all, however. Invitees received daily emails asking them to play certain game types on certain days. The Behemoth didn’t just want to let more gamers play its game early; it wanted gamers to help it make a better BattleBlock Theater. So when XBLAFans caught up with The Behemoth President and co-founder John Baez and Level Designer Ryan Horn in Boston two weekends ago, I had to know: did gamers follow instructions? Or did they give in to a desire to have fun their own way at the expense of helping to better the experience for the masses who will play the game for the first time tomorrow?

“They were really good,” said Horn of the beta testers’ willingness to follow instructions. “I mean, we didn’t expect 100 percent compliance — everybody’s busy. For the most part, all of the beta participants, they wanted to help us make the game better, and that’s what we got from them.”

Read More

Somewhere in San Diego there exists a couple of buildings. They’re buildings with glass windows and a soft feeling, or so I’ve been told. They’re buildings that are “not too intimidating” when compared to other species in their particular building genus. At least, that’s how The Behemoth President John Baez described them to me at the tail end of a roughly 32-minute interview that took place in Boston last weekend during PAX East. Baez and Level Designer Ryan Horn shared their thoughts on several topics: BattleBlock Theater, what the studio would like to see from the next-gen version of Xbox Live Arcade and the developer’s thoughts on working with Microsoft.

Yes, we managed to cover a lot of ground. This despite the fact that we were sitting comfortably in folding chairs set up in a largely unoccupied space behind the booth over which hung a large arrow bearing a single word: “Behold.” What precisely the attention of PAX attendees was being called to may not have been initially palpable to the first-timers among them, but then again, nor was it to the XBLAFans crew when Horn and Baez — the latter fielding an increasing percentage of the questions we asked the two men — began talking about video game prototypes.

Our attention, as it turned out, was being directed towards those two buildings. Or rather, what goes on inside their walls.

They’re not buildings in which the developer makes games, mind you. They are buildings in which the developer tests games to see if they work. Interestingly, one of the games that has been analyzed there isn’t property of The Behemoth — it’s property of fellow successful indie studio Supergiant Games. And at some point this summer, the iOS version of Bastion will lose the distinction of being the only game from another developer to be put through its paces by The Behemoth. The studio will begin using its pair of non-development buildings to investigate whether or not all manner of foreign games work in the manner that their designers intended them to, and whether or not that’s the way they should work.

The Behemoth will task those working inside the friendlier-than-most-of-their-kind buildings with providing quality assurance (QA) and usability lab services to fellow independent game developers. One indie should help another indie. This type of help, however, will come with a price tag — and not a discounted one.

Read More

Speaking with XBLA Fans at PAX East, Wolf Lang, co-founder of German developer Threaks, stated that the studio would create a sequel to the as-yet-unreleased Beatbuddy. After Lang, unprompted, …
Read More

Lab Zero Games, the caretakers of XBLA and PSN fighting game Skullgirls, last week reached a couple more stretch goals in its Indiegogo DLC crowdfunding campaign. Newly pledged funds will go towards the creation of the game’s first male character, Big Band, along with a stage and story mode for the saxophone lung-implanted veteran of the “Grand War.”

The man with the musical respiratory system’s story mode will focus on “a grizzled veteran tackling a new threat.” His stage will come complete with a new track from Michiru Yamane.

As of this writing, $449,504 have been pledged by Skullgirls fans. That number puts the campaign on pace to eclipse what was originally the final stretch goal of $625,000, which would mean Lab Zero would create a level and story mode for a fan-voted mystery character. The mystery character will be bankrolled at the $600,000 mark.

That mystery stage and story mode is no longer the final stretch goal, however. Polygon reports that, in an interesting move, Lab Zero is now offering to donate usage of the game engine it created for Skullgirls to developer Mane6 for use in its Fighting Is Magic game. Magic was originally a My Little Pony-themed game until IP owner Hasbro stepped in and put the kibosh on Mane6’s usage of the license.

Read More

The next Xbox, despite what public statements made by Microsoft over the last couple of years might lead the uninformed to believe, is coming. We don’t know exactly when, but common sense places its release at some point during the fall of this year. We don’t know exactly when it will be announced, but rumors are pointing to an April event. We don’t know exactly what the machine will be capable of, but an Australian hacker claims to know what’s inside the box.

The Wii U is out. Sony has shown its hand with its PlayStation 4 event last month. Valve spent January telling the world about what the press and public have not-so-cleverly dubbed the Steam Box, which may or may not be competition for the Xbox brand.

Still, Microsoft has issued nothing but denials or no comments each time it has been questioned about a next-generation rumor. But Microsoft is discussing the Xbox — not necessarily the next one — right this very moment.

As this article was being written, the company was busy holding an internal meeting with select partners at its Redmond, Washington headquarters. The invite-only session is titled “Xbox Platform Deep Dive” and is part of a series of meetings that make up the 2014 fiscal year version of a conference Microsoft holds annually.

Read More