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.

So as is a well known fact now there are two achievements that cannot be reached in both Outpost Kaloki X and Hardwood Hearts. The Achievements are:
Outpost Kaloki X

• Eight-Port Master
• Adventure Story Gold

Hardwood Hearts

• The Prankster
• Black Widow Exterminator

Both games have cause gamers to flock to the developers board demanding that things be set right, this is where things differ…
Let me pause it here and state for the record that I do own both games and while I do enjoy Hearts, Kaloki is one of my favorite games available for the 360.
The developer for Kaloki is NinjaBee. The have been very tight lipped about a fix (to the point of never even saying that there would be one) and have gone on to paint the picture that the reason they aren’t saying anything is that Microsoft won’t let them. This is exactly what you would expect from a developer and what you would expect from Microsoft.
Until…
Silver Creek Entertainment is the company that has put out Hearts, and they have been, in stark contrast, extremely open about a fix, stating a couple times a day what the status is and what exactly it will contain.
All in all you have to hand it to Silver Creek for being so open about it. My guess, based on the way ninjabee is going about this, is that there will never be a fix for Kaloki, mostly due to the game not being set up to allow it.
More info as it comes in…

It sure seems that this is the case after one of the Moderators at Team 17 posted the following in there forms:
Actually, MS did contact us about this last year and there have been forward moving discussions.
We do see it as a pivotal and perhaps ideal place for the series to land, a view shared by various XB360 Live Arcade planning folks.
However, for one reason and another (to be honest, mainly our obligations with PSP/DS) the development didn’t happen (actually we were on the XBLA dev list around E3 time) but now that we’ve experienced just how awesome XB Live is on 360, we’ve resurrected the conversations. I wouldn’t expect it anytime shortly (and it won’t be a quick port of Armageddon etc) but it is on the agenda.
Also, if it did make it, it’d be a 2d version with a lot of downloadable content - which is something Live Arcade is very cool about.
As usual,
More info as it comes in…

Add another one to the list of games that have been quietly anounced for release in Spring 2006. This time it’s a bunch of ex-UBI employees (the company name is load inc.) and the game is Mad Tracks.
Go Here for more info
More Info as it comes in…