November/December Awards

We here at TalkXbox were quite busy over the holidays and slacked off a little. Well, more than a little; December was a slow month for production and we are here to pick up the pace.

Bear with us, all of the games receiving awards today do not have reviews, but we are working on that with haste. Also, it should be noted that there wasn’t a wide selection of games from December for award material, so in some cases, a second game from November was provided the chance to pick up the award.

Biggest News Article: Atari Classics and More Coming to Xbox Live Arcade
“Today, as part of the Xbox 360 showcase event, Microsoft provided a preview of some of its holiday and early 2007 line-up for Xbox Live Arcade, the premiere destination for downloadable games. Centipedes, Asteroids and Missiles will be among the many gaming icons to visit gamers’ homes next year, as Microsoft and Atari, Inc. announced the future arrival of some of the most beloved classic coin-op games on Xbox Live Arcade.”
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The six games Atari is bringing to the Xbox Live Arcade are Centipede/Millipede, Battlezone, Asteroids/Asteroids Deluxe, Missile Command, Tempest, and Warlords. I am all for publishers bolstering Microsoft’s line-up on the Xbox Live Arcade. Now if Microsoft could somehow provide us with a bigger hard drive to store all these games, I would be even more elated.

Xbox Live Arcade Game of Month: Small Arms and Assault Heroes
It was a tough choice between several games throughout November and December for the Xbox Live Arcade award. There was Contra, Defender, and even Roboblitz to pick out of. Small Arms and Assault Heroes both offer something that is in dire need on the Xbox Live Arcade – originality. Small Arms falls in line as a game that takes several Super Smash Brothers’ traits and modifies them for the Xbox crowd. What the developers did was add in guns and bombs to go along with the cute characters to blow each other to smithereens.

Assault Heroes, on the other hand, is a top-down action game that is one of the best additions to Xbox Live since… well since Geometry Wars Evolved. This is one game I recommend everyone use their Microsoft points on. It will impress you on all levels.

Xbox 360 Game of the Month: Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Las Vegas
These two choices are no-brainers. We were split on selecting Viva Pinata, but Rainbow Six: Las Vegas is such a popular game that it would be difficult not to choose it. With face-mapping capabilities, the online experience for Rainbow Six so far has been exquisite.

Gears of War on the other hand, well there’s not much else to say about it that you haven’t heard already. This is potentially the biggest series in the past two years to debut on the consoles. Gears of War is a brilliant video game on both the single-player and multiplayer front. If you aren’t among the three million people worldwide to have bought this game, you should hurry to your local game store and pick it up.

User of Month: Player 1 and DylanH
The last two months into our yearly competition for “User of the Year” here at TalkXbox, we are ready to hand over the final two awards, one for November and one for December. The two selected this time around are the users Player 1 and Dylan, both of which who have been extremely active on the forums while we had a slowdown in production. We’d like to thank you two for keeping the forums so busy.

For those who weren’t paying attention, the users that win this award are entered into our contest to win prizes when we complete our Game of the Year Awards editorial. Now that all the nominees have been selected, look forward to our announcement of the prize and how the rest of the competition plays out.



If you're a returning reader, we’d like to take this time to welcome you back to TalkXbox. We pledge that 2007 will be a year to remember. Stay tuned for more coverage on games we missed out on from 2006 as we continue to update the site daily.