This Week on XBOX Live for WP7 (5/2/12)
By: Sean Mitchell
PAC-MAN Kart Rally slides onto the Windows Phone Marketplace for $4.99.
The race is on! Head for the finish line with PAC-MAN Kart Rally by Namco Bandai! The arcade icon takes to the open road against his famous Namco Bandai friends, including PAC-MAN! Master the drifting technique to fly around corners and cut off the competition! Watch out for power-ups, bonus items and speed boosts to gain the upper hand. Compete in a garage full of modes that will test your karting skills! See you in the winner's circle!
Take $2 off your purchase of The Harvest this week, dropping it to $4.99.
The Harvest is a science fiction themed Action RPG that takes place on future Earth, some years after the fallout of a destructive alien invasion. These aliens, who have been come to be known as The Harvesters, use humans and animals to create cyborgs: crude amalgamations of flesh and machinery. Mankind, in the form of the Global Defence Force is fighting a war against The Harvesters using human controlled mechanized infantry units.
The GDF army has been deployed to various parts of the world in order to fight back against The Harvesters in hope of restoring Earth to its rightful owners. You are part of a group that has been sent to investigate reported Harvester activity in the region of the ruins of an ancient city that was once used as military base for an organization that was a precursor to the GDF, which is where the game begins.
The game world of The Harvest has been designed to provide not only visceral combat, but opportunities for exploration, character customization, and story progression. As players make their way through each game area, they must not only fight off wave after wave of The Harvester horde, but find hidden upgrades, perform story actions, and defeat large and imposing enemy boss units in order to move on to the next area.
The Harvest has been designed from the ground up to be the best looking 3D mobile phone game to date, with innovative touch screen gameplay that brings Action RPG games on mobile devices out of the dark ages. Players are immediately immersed in an Action RPG game experience tailored to mobile phones, taking all the best from the genre, while removing the tedium and repetitiveness that is usually associated with games of this nature. At the same time, they are immersed into a deep and intriguing story that will leave them wanting to find out more.
There’s a huge difference this week on XBOX Live on Windows Phone. Last week, we got Wordament and Z0MB1ES for free and $1.99 respectively. This week we start off with PAC-MAN Kart Rally for $4.99, which looks like your typical mascot kart-style racer. Online multiplayer is present, but some people say the controls could use some work. I particularly like how the description says that the “arcade icon takes to the open road against his famous Namco Bandai friends, including PAC-MAN!” Apparently his famous friends includes himself?
This week’s Deal of the Week is The Harvest, one of the more consistently high rated games on the Marketplace, dropping down to $4.99. I had never tried the game, because the $6.99 price tag had me nervous for a phone-only game, but I may take a crack at $4.99. Lots of Marketplace reviews praise the controls and overall design, so it should be a relatively safe bet.
