According to a news release on TeamXBox, Naked Sky Entertainment has selected Allegorithmic’s ProFX procedural texture authoring and rendering system for there upcoming XBLA Title RoboBlitz. What this means is that instead of shipping all of the textures for the game with the title (making it upwards of 1 gig of space) they will create the textures on the fly.
This is a major step in getting the game to be under the 50mb limit for XBLA, something that many people scoffed at when it was announced that RoboBlitz would be using the Unreal 3 Engine.
More info as it comes in…

XBox 360 Poker has a great roundup on the information given in Major Nelson’s blog #159 about the Texas Hold’em XBLA game sponsered by River Belle. While the info is relatively old (it dates to late January, it is all the info we’ve been given so far.
More info as it comes in…

For those of you out there trying to squeeze every little bit of score out of Geometry Wars, IGN has just done you a favor by posting their new guide
Enjoy!

According to Major Nelson in this blog post, there have been many updates to XBox 360 titles, including both Hardwood Hearts and SmashTV.
While it has been reported that the Hearts update does fix the achievements issue, we’re still looking into what the SmashTV update solves.
More info as it comes in…

According to a member of Silver Creek Entertainment, the patch for Hardwood Hearts is:…its basically right there next in the que for launch, and that it could be anytime here.So hopefully it will be out sometime this weekend so that we can all start working on those last achievements.More info as it comes in…

GamesIndustry.biz just posted this article today about Dr. Jens Uwe Intat, EA’s European VP of sales, comments on the future of downloadable media and games. While no details were given about what or when EA products would be available through downloads, it has been announced that EA is one of the companies looking at making titles available for XBLA.
More info as it comes in…

Yesterday Midway announced that 5 more classics would be coming to XBLA they include the NES hit Paper Boy, the arcade classics Cyberball, Defender, and Root Beer Tapper as well as the game hinted to last here last Friday, Ultimate Mortal Combat 3 .
While all five of these games are expected in 2006, no specific dates have been announced. Also, no expected feature sets have been announced, but with Street Fighter having online play, it would be sales suicide to not include it in MKIII.
You can read more about it at GameSpot
More info as it comes in…

Reading through the forums it has become apparent that not only are Silver Creek planning an update to fix some of the many bugs in hearts, but there are also planning an update to add some of the features that people have been asking for. So far it looks like at minimum we will see:

• An Icon to see who is speaking in XBox Live games.
• Better distinction in suit colors so that hearts and diamonds don’t look the same

While it is good to see these things being added, one must wonder why they weren’t in the game to start with.

According to this article on Gamasutra Midway is looking at moving some more of there properties to xbla at some point this year. While it’s unknown at this point whether or not this means we’ll be seeing Mortal Kombat hit the arcade, one can bet that if Street fighter does well, that MK will be soon behind it.
Let’s just hope that they take the time to do things right!
More info as it comes in…

It’s a couple of weeks old news now, but it seems that Pat Willson, one of the developers for Marble Blast Ultra has had enough of IGN’s constant jabs at his game and has decided to let off a little steam on his Blog
Personally if the copy of the game they reviewed wasn’t the final copy then good on him for telling them off.