Microsoft Studios

Update: We now have a section on general tips & tricks sent to us by the QA team at 5th cell as well as level guides coming soon.

Welcome to our Hybrid build guide! This guide will provide builds to use throughout each of Hybrid‘s modes and are designed to account, collectively, for a good 90% of the game. Hybrid is designed with a lot of variety, in fact it’s one of the things we liked in our review, so ultimately you and your team mates will deviate from builds, even the ones we have made for you here. However, it’s important to have a starting point, especially if you’re not familiar with Hybrid regarding what actually matters and what doesn’t. For instance, most shooters don’t subscribe to the idea of “suppression”, it’s usually not very effective, but it works in Hybrid and it works well.

Do enjoy the builds we’ve provided for you here, but keep in mind that these are starting points! Add your own flare or personal preference to really do well with them. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment on the guide and in a few weeks we’ll add good ones to a community section at the bottom of the guide. While the builds we’ve created for you here are more general, feel free to get ridiculously specific- all the way down to map and mode.

Enjoy the guide, and enjoy the game!

P.S. Variants represent clan tag [XF] Read More

Humble Hearts’ Dust: An Elysian Tail wrapped up this year’s Summer of Arcade yesterday, and in just over 24 of your standard Earth hours the leaderboards have jumped to …
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Dust: An Elysian Tail was developed by Humble Hearts and published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on August 15, 2012 for 1200 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Dust: An Elysian Tail opens with a lone figure awakening in a forest with no memory of his past. The mystical, obviously powerful blade he comes into possession of assumes the dual roles of death-dealer and imparter of wisdom; its cagey words imply that it knows more about the main character and the quest he is destined to embark upon than it is willing to reveal just yet. A cutesy and somewhat annoying sidekick flies alongside, providing help and occasionally pointing out the obvious. Once the opening scene closes, players move left to right and merrily hammer away at face buttons to dispatch beasties marching towards them on a 2D plane, all of it accomplished in stunning effect thanks to gorgeous hand-drawn art. There are peaceful villages besieged by overpowering forces and inhabited by locals in need of a hero to carry out various quests, and it’s not long before the environment betrays the fact that the completionist player will be revisiting areas later on to accumulate all of the hidden goodies once more skills have been unlocked.

It all sounds fun, right? Of course it does, but it’s probably also sounding a bit familiar at this point. Here’s the good news: there is much more to Humble Hearts’ Dust: An Elysian Tail than can be summed up in a handful of broad sentences about its action-adventure game tropes. Yes, it shares much with other throwback side-scrollers, and the sole member of the game’s development studio, Dean Dodrill, is unlikely to hear any complaints about that fact. But his studio’s debut effort also establishes an excellent identity all its own. Dust is a joy to play and the star of Microsoft’s 2012 Summer of Arcade lineup. There are some issues with pacing, voice work and the framerate hiccup, but wonderfully charming artwork, a wealth of content and a combat system that just feels right will allow gamers to look past the issues and enjoy Dust for many hours.

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Action game Ascend: New Gods will be ported over to the PC, developer Signal Studios has informed Co-Optimus. The PC version’s content is said to mirror that of …
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Deadlight was developed by Tequila Works and published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on August 1, 2012 for 1200 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Deadlight is a 2D platformer with a survival horror bent, at least in theory, but we’ll get to that shortly. You play as Randall Wayne, a survivor of some kind of apocalyptic event, which has caused the dead to rise. Though they act like zombies, these particular undead have been branded “Shadows”, represented in-game as silhouettes with glowing red or white eyes.

Randall is searching Seattle for his wife and daughter, who he’s been seperated from since the start of the disaster. When the game begins, Randall is with a group of survivors, but they quickly go their seperate ways as Randall begins the search for his family.
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The hack-n-slash adventure Dungeon Fighter Live: Fall Of Hendon Myre was released this morning. Priced at 800 MSP it features on- and offline cooperative gameplay for up to four …
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The Minecraft skin parade — no, not that kind of skin parade, get your mind out of the gutter! — continued today with Major Nelson announcing that the …
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Call in sick to work, because the 1.7.3 update for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition lands tomorrow. The title update will go live at 2AM UTC. Among the new features and fixes are the inclusion of Pistons, a character skin selector, and precautions to keep unwanted players out of your game. Also detailed recently were a number of new skins for the upcoming Skin Pack 1 downloadable content. Banjo is joined by additional characters from the Banjo-Kazooie universe, and more variants of the Trials riders have been revealed. These skins join a growing list of characters including Master Chief, ‘Splosion Man, and Jack of Blades. Priced at a cool 160 MSP the pack will include 40 skins for players to choose from.

Hit the jump for a full list of features and updates included in 1.7.3 along with a glimpse of the new Trials rider skins.

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We’ve got more Trials HD remakes, two of which were custom tracks, one that shipped with the game. We also go back to 1992 with a Jezzball remake, visit a construction site, and a cave, and start seeing red. To download these tracks by entering Track Central, selecting Get Tracks, then pressing X to search. Enter the gamertag below to find the track. Be aware that the search is case sensitive. A big thanks to the Trials Evolution community for the borrowed videos. Hit the jump to see this week’s picks.

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After launching on the original Xbox back in 2004, Xbox Live Arcade matured when it made the leap to the 360 and became home to an impressive stable of downloadable titles from small and independent developers. More recently, however, scores of indies have retreated from XBLA in favor of platforms such as Steam, iOS and Android. Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Studios Phil Spencer, speaking with Games Industry International, addressed the current role indie developers play in the Xbox Live Arcade landscape.

“The term indie does not necessarily mean ‘small.’ Some of the most independent studios I’ve ever met are some of the largest studios I’ve ever met,” said Spencer. “I think if what we’re saying is if there is content available for Xbox at multiple price points, both from what it costs to build the content and buy the content, or does everything have to compete at $60 and beyond? I’m really happy with the different price points that we see on Xbox; we just put out Minecraft last month and sold 2 million units. Trials came out and did incredibly well. Further down on price point, I’m playing The Walking Dead, which is an episodic game for $5 or so [Editor’s Note: The two episodes currently sell for 400 Microsoft Points each], forgot the exact price. We have price points for content across the 360.

“The nice thing is we have successes at these different prices; there are real businesses that can be made at the different levels that are available. That’s a strength of the Live marketplace.”

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