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Small shots of Small Arms
Gastronaut Studios has seen fit to release a handful of shots for their upcoming Live Arcade multiplayer title, Small Arms. The shots look nice, though something is lost when the game is not in motion. Still, in comparison to other Arcade titles, Small Arms stacks up pretty well (and performed well in our recent poll). Hopefully, Gastronaut will give us a release date soon.
The unofficial Xbox Live Arcade sales chart, and other useless facts
C4Lukins, a member of the NeoGAF forums, has posted the results of his unofficial Xbox Live Arcade survey. C4 figured he could generate a rough estimate of XBLA game sales by recording the number of the last position on each game's leaderboard. To avoid scrolling through tens of thousands of positions on each leaderboard, C4 set out to land the lowest possible score on as many XBLA titles as he had access to. In his own words: "It can actually be quite challenging to suck worse then everyone else..."While it's nearly impossible to determine if his final numbers* are even close to accurate, C4 has made some other quirky discoveries that are certainly worth a mention: "Over 20,000 Uno players have not managed to win a single single-player game" "Somehow people are managing to get a lower score then 200 on Joust, despite the fact that you get 4 lives and 50 points each time you die" "The worst finishing time on the first level of Marble Blast Ultra is over an hour" *Hexic HD has the highest count because it comes pre-installed on the Xbox 360 HDD (Premium Bundle).
Joystiq interviews XBLA's Ross Erickson
Hate your job? You're about to hate it a whole lot more. We discovered why Ross Erickson, as the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Xbox Live Arcade, has one of the greatest jobs on the planet. We chatted for a couple (untranscribed) minutes about his time at the Salt Lake Games Group (his boss was actually Tex Murphy) before getting into questions about the merits of the portfolio strategy, the value of the indie game scene, his game collection and, of course, what he actually does for a living.Your title is Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager, which is a big way of saying what? It's a big way of saying finding and picking and identifying the games we want to put on Arcade and then working with all the publishers and developers around the world. Both on an inbound basis, when those guys are interested in getting a title on Arcade, original ideas come through me first and I vet out the ideas and justify the choices and sort of pick out which ones fit in the portfolio best, which ones magnify the goals and objectives of Arcade, and also really assess the risks of working with said developers to determine if this is great in the idea stage or is this something that can make it all the way to the finish line and be a real productive game and a game that people are going to love.The other side of it is going outbound, which is to go and find the kinds of games that we're looking for, evangelize the goals and ideals of the platform both on a 360 macro level and on the Arcade level, the kinds of features and things that we want and the kind the kind of game experiences we want to get into the hands of customers at various stages in the lifecycle of the whole console. Clearly right now we're in the early adopter stage still, the first twelve months of people really enthusiastic about the console, primarily male, hardcore gamers. But they have significant others and spouses and wives and girlfriends and whatever in their lives as well and many of them are having kids and Arcade's sort of becoming this thing where, as an entire portfolio, we sort of want it to look like there's eventually something there. There's many choices in Arcade and there's something there for everybody in the Xbox household.
360's financial future looking rosy
Xbox 360's latest financial numbers have been flying about for a few days now, like so many winged monkeys. As you can imagine, winged monkeys are sort of dangerous, difficult to understand. Thankfully, Robert Summa broke down the numbers (monkeys, remember) into easily understandable bits (like removing the monkey's wings). Now the numbers are safe for everyone (though somewhat disappointed, having lost the gift of flight). Things of note:
