Two games have been announced for Xbox Live Arcade, according to Game Informer. Xbox' successful indie game Alien Hominid is to make it's way onto the Arcade later this year, while Castle Crashers will be early 2007.

Why not make Alien Hominid backwards compatible? .. For those who do not own the game on the Xbox, it wouldn't be a problem. But for those who do have the original, would you throw down 800 - 1200 Microsoft Points for a game you already own - for achievements, HD Support, etc..?

Thanks to Hexx and Audie for this information.

Microsoft Representatives have stated that they can't make any guarantee that we will see a new title every Wednesday after Pac-Man on August 9th. However, it was said at the "Xbox Live Summer of Arcade" event, that they apologize for the lull of in Xbox Live Arcade, but they are stepping it up - Aiming for a total of 50 Xbox Live Arcade games by the end of the year, with each game to be released on a Wednesday at 12:01 Pacific Time.

Sources: PixelGamers , Jason Cross

Ah yes, the lack of Xbox Live Arcade games.. There is no supply, but there sure is demand. They're being promised, but not delivered. Sure, we have some great titles available to download from the Marketplace at the moment, but why in the past 3 months have we only seen one Arcade release (Uno)?

Peter Moore explains to Next Generation why our Arcade games blade is so empty, and he seems to have a credible 'excuse'.

"Here's what happened - people didn't believe that Arcade was going to fly. So we went round a year and a half ago as we were doing the final plans for launching 360, and told our publishing friends that here's what we think is really cool idea, where you could make games for hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions, and at very low risk, but people didn't believe it. And we released it and it blew the doors down. Now all of a sudden we're in this phase where Sega, Namco, Konami, Midway... they want some of that. But we do have an important quality bar in place - we could probably throw 300 games up there quickly, and we are trying to get the independent guys going as well. It's almost going to be like Pop Idol, where someone will pop out suddenly - Geometry Wars is a great example. But I love this forum, whether it's profitable or not, this platform for indie developers, for four or five guys to put $100,000 into it, and we'll publish it and see what happens."

I understand that the releases have to be consistent, but.. Wii are waiting too long.

In their podcast this morning, VGM Daily had the first portion of there interview with Shayne Guiliano of Autonomous Productions. The first part didn't get into too much, but did reveal that he has be given permission to develop and release a game on both XBLA and Nintendo's Virtual Console. The game he is developing is titled "Butterfly Garden" and looks like it will be released on both consoles. It strikes me as odd, but I would have thought that Nintendo would have avoided having the same game on both as the XBLA version will have Achievement Points and HD graphics where as the Wii version will not.

Since it sounds like the game is still in early development (and were talking about a very, very small team), don't expect this game to show up any time soon.

You can check out the podcast here, and make sure to check back throughout the week as they publish more parts of the interview.

According to Finance Asia, Microsoft will be holding a developers contest this year for Korean developers to try their hand at developing some XBLA games. In an effort to "provide more localised contents to customers", MS will be selecting up to 5 winners who will receive development kits.

Could you image the number of entries they would get if they tried that in North America?

You can check out the Finance Asia post here.

Denis Bourdain, VP Business Dev at Load Inc, see picture bellow, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few quesitons about the upcoming Mad Tracks. He answers questions about pricing, DLC, and a release time frame (just an estimate of course, this is XBLA after all :) )

Read it all after the break

Late last week IGN posted a round of previews. They are only a couple of sentences each, but it's better than nothing.

Here's the first one.

And the second.

An interesting part is that according to these articles, IGN thinks that Robo Blitz will be out first with it's "early summer" release date.

Name
Developer
Price
Release Date

Astropop
PopCap Games

3/22/2006

Bankshot Billiards 2
PixelStorm

11/22/2005

Bejeweled 2
PopCap Games

11/22/2005

Crystal Quest
Stainless Games

2/7/2006

Feeding Frenzy
Sprout Games

3/15/2006

Gauntlet
Digital Eclipse

11/22/2005

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved
Bizarre Creations

11/22/2005

Hardwood Backgammon
Silver Creek Entertainment

12/8/2005

Hardwood Hearts
Silver Creek Entertainment

12/8/2005

Hardwood Spades
Silver Creek Entertainment

12/8/2005

Hexic HD
Microsoft Game Studios

11/22/2005

Jewel Quest
iWin, Inc.

3/8/2006

Joust
Digital Eclipse

3/8/2006

Marble Blast Ultra
Garage Games

1/25/2006

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Trent82 - News & Achievements

Klutch86 - News/Owner

Tomacco - News/Owner

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