XBLA on The Court of Count Stex

Arcade is where the heart is

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0200

After the disappointment of the lack split screen in Dead Island, we found ourselves without a new co-op game to play. So as we have started to do more and more recently we turned to the XBOX Live Arcade for help, in between grabbing levels of Gears of War 2 😉

After trying a few demos which show promise for future purchases, namely Toy Soldiers Cold War and Space Marine Kill Team, we decided on the dungeon crawler Crimson Alliance. The pay structure is a little odd, the game itself is free and then you pay for character packs, which are even more oddly done in that a single character is a rather hefty 800 MSP whilst the all 3 character pack is just the usual Arcade game price of 1200 MSP. Given there is an achievement to completing the game once with each character type I’d advise most people to go for the full pack. Another oddity is there are three characters but the game is set up for four player teams, perhaps a sign for future character types to be released?

UnderGarden Complete. DLC? Yes please!

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

We completed UnderGarden last night, and in the 100% all achievements way. The last level proved to have some frustrating sections, made frustrating by the one screen co-op during the current sections where strong currents hurtle you along at great speed leading the the secondary player to be constantly disappearing and re-spawning. However it wasn’t so frustrating as to spoil our fun of the game and we immediately plunged into the DLC levels which cost a stupidly low 140 MSP. These additional levels are frankly, HUGE. Massive areas with special flowers and musicians. However for some reason these collectables were not required to get the achievement. You just had to get to the end which seemed a little odd. Still we need to unlock the last two crystals in each level and we are yet to work out how to do so for the final achievement, so we’ll be puzzling away on those tonight.

Lazy days in the Undergarden

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0200

The past few days and nights we’ve found ourselves continuing to return to The UnderGarden. A delightful download game from Vitamin G Studios available on both XBLA and the PSN. We purchased for a measly 400MSP on Saturday afternoon, Linda took control and played through the first zone before we realised there was local co-op play. Immediately I jumped on the second controller and so began the first of many hours of wonderfully engaging game-play taken at a relaxed pace. At first play we immediately felt this was not unlike Flower, the acclaimed PSN game, with the pollination game mechanic in play, however it soon transpired there was more to be done than just lighting up the landscape with organic life. Crystals need to be found, and some rather funky musicians need to be picked up along the way, with each level requiring you to pollinate all flowers, find the gem and pick up all the musicians at least once before it can be regarded as complete, although to unlock the next level you only need to make it to the end.