There's a new interview up on K1lla’s Xbox Domain with Garth Chouteau, the PR Director at PopCap.

The good news?
Will support both four player battles as well as co-op play.

The bad?
Not out till fall '06

Check it out here

In quite a candid interview with advanced media network, Ben Herman, president of SNK Playmore USA goes on the offensive against Microsoft and there Memory Constraints. While showing love for the Wii's Virtual Console, stating "It's a tremendous idea. Even though there were no details.", he slams MS for the 50MB limit saying "They want us to compress it. Maybe we can't compress it. ".

Maybe it's just me, but if Naked Sky Entertainment, makers of Roboblitz can get the Unreal Engine 3 down to that size, I have a hard time believing that it's impossible to get Baseball Stars Professional down to that size.

Check out the whole interview here.

So it seems someone has found and posted a game play trailer for Roboblitz on YouTube. After seeing it, I must say that my excitement level has gone way up.

check it out here

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.

It seems the screenshots are starting to slowly stream in now and Ain't it cool news has a screenshot of the opening menu of Contra here (you'll have to scroll about halfway down the page to see it). Looking from the menu it looks like we will be seeing online co-op, as I can't see any other way that you could play multiplayer Contra!

Can't wait.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, by multiplayer, I mean a versus mode, by all means this will have local co-op

The folks over at Xbox 360 fanboy got a chance (however ill fated it was) to try out Freeverse's new XBLA title Totem Balls, a gesture based game where you have to

"control a little a totem pole-looking character by moving your arms up and down at your sides (a motion that resembles the funky chicken) as he collect balls that balance on his head"

sounds like it could be fun, and it's good to see that the camera will be used for things other than us all staring at each other.

According to this press release here, Konami has stated that Frogger will be the first of their titles to hit the market place scheduled for (everyone's favorite) early summer time frame. The other announced titles (including Contra, Time Pilot and Scramble) will be out of that.

One of the best parts of the press release was this line:

...with additional major franchises launching in 2006 and 2007

it sure does pour!!!

So we were all waiting hoping that with E3 we'd catch a glimpse or two of a couple of new XBLA games. Well did we ever... 10 games that were unannounced before today. They are:

Dig-Dug
Rally-X
Frogger
Contra
Super-Contra
Track & Field
Time Pilot
Scramble
Sonic The Hedgehog High Speed
Lumines Live

And this is just a start for Namco, Konami, and Sega, with more promised down the road.

As promised, Uno is now available for download on the marketplace. There's no official site for it yet on Xbox.com, but as long as it's available for everyone, who cares :)

BTW I'm sure there will be tonnes more info coming out of the MS press conference, so stay tuned.

As mentioned earlier, we will be finally getting to enjoy some card playing fun when Uno is released on Tuesday May 9th. The bad news is that this seems to be the only XBLA game that is coming out during E3. Let's hope that they release a couple surprises along the way.

Here is the enitre E3 List