I don’t know. This is a Microsoft published title. I think they’re going to stick to their guns on this one. For now, it’s the “big”* Win 8 exclusive game.
*Har har at this being the best they could do. This is like the Halo 2 for PC debacle again.
Well, Eurogamer loves it.. The game sounds fun and unique. Count me in!
Skulls is the product of a small team who clearly care very deeply about getting the details right: it’s both homemade and precision-crafted. It’s a mini masterpiece.
It’s a lot of fun. My Friends lists is currently full, but if anyone wants to get into an async game, just send me a message (gamertag Editer) and I’ll shuffle some dormant friend off the list to make room.
Yes but this not made by an MS studio, I will even go further and say that in 6 months to an year you will be able to play this not only on Win7 but on IOs and even maybe on Android. As I understand it the game is made in C# but they used monogame so they can port the game to every platform easy.
If MS really wanted to make this a way to push the appstore in windows 8 they should have offered the win8 version to every one that bought the game on XBLA and vice versa, but that probably would cause some kind of implosion in Redmond, laywers and accounters from diferent divisions having a meltdown to figure out who gets the revenue from the different stores.
I’m kinda surprised nobody is talking about this game, even after everyone’s beloved RPS had such good things to say about it. It’s not the deepest strategy game in the world, but it has some good things going for it that puts it in a class above your average TBS. Particularly, the leveling system in conjunction with the limit of 5 actions per turn. To level up your units, you have to spend an action to consume defeated enemies, and consuming three defeated enemies gives you an extra attack per turn. This is an important bonus, as actions are very limited and you’ll get much more bang for your buck each turn with that unit. The limited actions you have really force you to carefully weigh your options each turn - do you spend your unit’s turn to eat a skull to try and level up (and will that leave your unit exposed to get killed before you ever get enough skulls to power up)? Should you attack? Or should you haunt a rice field for resources? Or should you build a new unit? The game is constantly throwing options at you, and you’ll never have enough time for all of them.
I also don’t think the demo sells the game well. The first bunch of levels are very basic and linear. I was honestly pretty bored until I got to the second world, where things quickly ramp up in difficulty and complexity.
I’m still not sure that the game is deep enough to hold my attention for a long time, but for now, I’m really enjoying the single player campaign (6-8 hours, reportedly, with some optional challenge conditions on each map to encourage replay). I haven’t done much with the multiplayer yet to say if the game is any good in that respect.
Xbox or Windows 8. That’s why there isn’t a lot of buzz here. If this were on Steam you’d see a lot more action in this thread.
I don’t buy it. There are probably hundreds of people on this board who have an Xbox.
To be fair, there’s likely a sizeable portion of those hundreds who refuse to provide M$ with their credit card information, lol.
At this point, the Xbox is in sunset mode. Owners are finishing off their backlog and waiting for info from Sony and MS to move on to the next console.
That’s fair. I suppose there hasn’t been much discussion about any XBLA games in quite a while around here.
All I can say is that this is a fun game worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.
in the past - they used to be part of the expat game dev get together group in Tokyo. Very cool guys and I’m glad that they were finally able get this game released!
I suspect the people who would be most interested in the game (like me) would prefer it on a portable platform (like me), especially for multiplayer. I’ll be all over it when it comes out for iOS.
Though seeing that some folks here have it for XBLA might weaken my resolve a little.
I tried the demo on the Xbox but being an older PC gamer - I just never really feel that I am close enough to the screen. Not sure why I feel like that but I would greatly prefer to play my strategy games on the PC or iPad.
My daughter received a laptop for Christmas and it is running Win 8. She is an Xbox girl and I have to say she likes Win 8. Not having a lot of experience on PCs in general did not deter her in finding her way in Win 8. So that part of the whole “Win 8 thing” is interesting to me when it comes to the younger generation versus the older.
Anyway, I may have to grab her laptop to play this game.
It does seem like a lot of fun.
I had just the same thought. This game is easy enough to understand that veteran gamers should have just been dumped into a skirmish with popup tips. The early levels should be hidden in a skippable tutorial. Its not a terribly long drawn out tutorial (like some AAA games), but so much effort has gone into making the game intuitive, so just let me get straight into the meat of the game.
I think this really is a factor. I’ve been looking forward to this game for ages, but even I had a feeling of temporarily renting the game as I pressed the buy button. If the next xbox is backwards compatible for xbla, they should announce that asap.
I also think the Win 8 exclusive changed the story of this game from “whoa! super polished indie game with personality” to “f*cking Microsoft”. I suspect we’re going to be feeling that way about both MS and Sony over the next couple of years as they start buying up exclusives for their next console.
Tony
Well, being exclusive didn’t do Shadowrun and Halo 2 any favours.
Also, Microsoft is intent on killing off the PC for good this time: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/147289-microsoft-kills-xbox-360pc-cross-platform-development-declares-directx-no-longer-evolving
Probably deserves its own thread.
Having no inside information, I’m betting that it was the plan all along to eventually bring this game to other platforms too. Microsoft hasn’t been shy about releasing games on Steam recently, and even tying non-Steam games to Steam with codes you can enter from Amazon.
In this case, it’s probably more of a technical prioritization influenced by publishing dollars rather than a normal exclusive deal. It’s relatively easy, but not instant, to convert a traditional Windows game to the WinRT platform for the store - including ARM, which requires additional optimization. Same thing for Windows Phone. Once that conversion and optimization was finished, it should be relatively easy to release it on Steam and such too. Its also the first cross platform game of this magnitude which probably took a while to get right.
Has anyone being playing this? I have been wondering if it not being on win 7 etc really hurt their sales so much - I want it to do well enough so it eventually gets ported to iOS or something.
I was curious too, so did some searching, according to this thread on neogaf, the post is from the guy that used to make XBLA sales analysis on Gamasutra, the game tanked really bad on XBLA, but that seems to be common thing on XBLA lot’s of reports that many games there are not making any sales, but in contrast there is handful of games doing really well, Minecraft surpassed 5M sales, so XBLA is mimicking the hit driven retail business or just people stopped buying these smaller games on console and prefer the PC and mobile platforms for that?
On Windows 8 I don’t see the game in top paid apps chart, but I can’t see the US chart maybe there it is.
On the phone it is on top of the charts http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/top-paid-games
So overall the game doesn’t seem to being so good. It got good reviews but don’t remember people talking about the game on podcasts, again a common thing these days for XBLA games. Let’s see if they can do better on Steam and IOS, assuming they have the resources to do those versions.
MS just announced new pricing for Skulls.
Just in time for the weekend, today we’re announcing that Skulls of the Shogun now has new pricing on Xbox Live Arcade, Windows 8 PC and Microsoft Surface. The Xbox Live Arcade version is now 800 Microsoft Points in the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface version is now $6.99 in the Microsoft Store. The Windows Phone version will remain $4.99 in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
This is not a temporary sale price. This will be the standard pricing for Skulls moving forward.
I assume the price reduction is an indicator of how “well” it’s been doing.
I don’t know exactly why the indies are struggling on XBLA, but it seems quite clear that right now PC/steam is the best platform for them… cutting the price won’t help much probably. also, being a strategy game, the bigger audience, again, should be on PC.