About Nick Santangelo

It started innocently enough, which is appropriate given the the innocent faces featured in Fable Heroes. Tim Timmins, who worked as a scripter on all of the previous Fable titles, and a handful of his co-workers said to each other “Let’s make a Fable game!” There was no Molyneux-esque bravado about crafting the greatest RPG of all time. Instead, Timmins and company were content with just making a game of some sort in the franchise they knew best. The next thing they knew, they were set up in their own offices with more than a dozen staff members working under them on Lionhead Studios’ first XBLA title.

“Every year at Lionhead we have a Creative Day where everyone gets together and can make whatever they like,” Timmins explained to Xbox 360 Achievements. “It can be a game, a new piece of tech, it can be a tool, it can be a PowerPoint presentation of the greatest thing ever made… We decided to make a game.”

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Exis Interactive has entered into a publishing deal with Reverb to bring its side-scrolling action title, Majestic-12, to “digital platforms” on Xbox 360 and PC. The co-op shooter will be on display throughout PAX East in Boston from April 6—8. Ted Lange, executive producer of Reverb Publishing, described Majestic-12 as a retro game “in the vein of old-school shooters like Contra.” Exis previously did some work on F.E.A.R. 3 and XCOM.

The game is a classic story of a friendship gone awry: man and alien were once the best of buds, but no longer. Mankind, being the slimy backstabbing race it is, decided they’d had enough of that whole buddy-buddy routine and cooked up some diabolical plot or another to cross the aliens. Trouble is, the aliens found out; and they’re not exactly taking it in stride. Players will be thrown into bullet hell scenarios that Reverb seems to be attempting to coin a new term to describe — “core-casual.” It essentially breaks down to the old easy to learn, hard to master approach to gameplay.

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An Australian Classification Board listing has betrayed the existence of Joy Ride Arcade, which is presumably an Xbox Live Arcade version of developer Big Park Studios’ Kinect Joy …
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According to the above launch trailer, 505 Games and Supersonic Software’s Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is all about finishing first. While that may initially sound like an extreme …
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Xbox 360 owners now more frequently use their consoles for viewing movies and TV shows and listening to music than they do for playing online games, Microsoft told the L.A. Times yesterday. All told, Xbox-equipped households are now devoting 84 hours monthly to all of those activities, with a smidgen over 50 percent of that time being spent taking in non-gaming media, said Xbox marketing and strategy boss, Yusuf Mehdi. The total usage figure represents a 30 percent jump from one year ago.

“What we’re seeing is that people are turning on the Xbox to play games and then keeping it on afterwards to get other types of entertainment,” Mehdi said. Entertainment features on the console falling under the broad “other” umbrella have increased drastically since the console’s November 2005 launch. Today alone Microsoft rolled out MLB.TV, Xfinity On Demand and HBO Go applications. As the Times noted, their inclusion brought the current tally of entertainment media services available on the platform up to 36.

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Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment returned from the money-filled vacuum of space today and used its massive gravitational pull to acquire Finnish developer Futuremark Games Studios. The studio is the gaming wing (terrible pun definitely intended) of 60-employee-strong Futuremark Corporation, which develops tools and services for PC and mobile applications.

“Futuremark will now focus on supporting gamers and industry with 3DMark, our professional grade benchmark which, in a new version to be released later this year, will allow unified gaming performance comparison across operating systems and form factors for the first time,” Jukka Mäkinen, Futuremark CEO, said of the move.

The developer is probably best known among gamers for its work on the tower-defense title Unstoppable Gorg, which is currently available on PC and iOS. An XBLA version port of the game was previously announced and is currently listed as “coming soon” on the game’s official website.

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Xbox owners who choose to stream Comcast Xfinity On Demand to their consoles once the service launches won’t have to worry about the data adding up towards their 250-gigabyte bandwidth caps, according to a Comcast FAQ. The reasoning is that “since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer’s bandwidth cap,” reads the FAQ.

Users will thus be able to stream all the on-demand national broadcasts, premium channel programming and free videos they please once the Xfinity service makes its way to Microsoft’s console. They will not, however, gain the ability to watch live TV on their 360s. Furthermore, Comcast currently has no plans “at this time” to offer live TV streaming at any future date. What Xbox 360 owners will be able to do is take advantage of Kinect and the dashboard’s search function when they’re looking to enjoy a little HBO Go or other compatible programming.

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Two is always better than one — except, of course, when it’s not. Whether it actually is or not in developer Demiurge’s Shoot Many Robots is a topic that is open to no small amount of debate. In fact, there is so much disagreement as to whether the game’s current single-stick controls or a more modernized dual analog scheme — which is not currently an option available to players — is best, that the Boston-based studio has decided to host what it’s dubbing the “Control Scheme Throwdown” at PAX East in April.

A special build of the XBLA title will be playable at the dev’s booth during the show (April 6—8) that is going to enable play with the power of not just one but two analog sticks. Attendees who wish to participate will be pitted against players using a single stick in a competition to help Demiurge decide whether or not to patch in support for the additional stick. Should the team reach the decision to do so , the control style employed by the PAX competition’s winner will become the standard once the option is added. The gauntlet — it has been thrown down.

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A compilation title called Sega Vintage Collection: Alex Kidd & Co. made a brief appearance on the Xbox marketplace earlier today before vanishing into thin air. Thankfully, the …
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The social media gaming czars over at Zynga might be moving into the console space, specifically the Xbox 360, at some future point. Though no official development announcement …
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