Skullgirls Slightly Different

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.

Lab Zero had to trim the patch down to size in order to get Microsoft’s approval to release it, but any fears that doing so would mean that some of the original patch’s content would end up on the cutting-room floor are unfounded. Slightly Different’s XBLA release will be identical to the PSN version. Bartholow explained that the XBLA adaptation is “the exact same patch that the PS3 version got last November – nothing was cut. The Title Update + Compatibility Pack method of patching we ended up employing doesn’t have any size limits.”

It’s been an interesting year for Lab Zero Games. The studio was formed last summer by the core Skullgirls team that was laid off post-release by Reverge Labs (the game’s original developer). Although funding has been extremely tight for the studio, it successfully raised $830,000 as part of an Indiegogo campaign to add new levels, characters and story modes to Skullgirls just last month.

Bartholow said some members of the team originally thought it would be impossible to raise just the $150,000 Lab Zero said it needed to create just a single extra character. Those funding goal, however, was reached in less than 24 hours.

The full list of changes that the Slightly Different patch will bring to the XBLA version of Skullgirls can be found here.