Saturday, April 26, 2008

Told you so #2, #3, and #4 - Gin Rummy, Sea Life Safari and Zombie Wranglers announced!

Team Xbox seems to be all nice and snug with Sierra lately - Sierra's online branch has exclusively announced Gin Rummy, Sea Life Safari - which XBLAH did some digging about some months ago - and Zombie Wranglers which we discussed just four days ago are all coming to the Xbox Live Arcade.

Gin Rummy is a classic card game, which is being brought to the XBLA supposedly by Sierra Shanghai - who just last week brought us Lost Cities, another card based game.

Gin Rummy for XBLA will feature the original game for playing over Xbox Live, along with many variations including Oklahoma Gin, Hollywood Gin, Three-hand Gin, as well as your own Custom Gin game. It will also support 4-player multiplayer with some Gin variants - which you can read up about in this page.

Secondly, Sea Life Safari is a photography game similar in design to the Nintendo classic - Pokemon Snap. As the player, you must go through different environments trying to get sea wildlife to 'show their best side' for the camera.

As mentioned in XBLAH's previous article, Wanako Studios are behind SLS (just like.. well, almost everything else for Sierra) and is already available for the PC, and had an achievement system set up inside it. Probably not too big of a job to port - certainly helps the casual demographic Microsoft wants!

And Lastly, Zombie Wranglers. This game allows the player to run around as one of 4 characters as you... well, Wrangle Zombies. It actually looks a little like Monster Madness that came out as a retail title last year (which really should have been XBLA material). It looks okay - it needs to be seen in action before any real comments can be made, at the moment they've just shown off the equivalent of a Ghost Buster Proton Pack or Luigi's Vacuum which turns Zombies into energy.

We can now confirm that this game IS being made by Frozen Codebase - the people behind Screwjumper last year and the upcoming Elements of Destruction sometime this year. Both their previous games were published by THQ - it's a little odd that this has now been picked up by Sierra. I may have stepped on a few toes with the last post too, since the blog and websites were taken down. Apologies to those involved! It'll be interesting to see how it holds up against Wiiware's Animales de la Muerte, which also seems like a lot of fun. Hopefully Sierra will spill some beans soon.

Check out Team Xbox for all the new images and previews for each game. Each of these games is currently slated for a Summer release.

Source: Team Xbox Sierra’s Summer ’08 XBLA Lineup Hands-On Preview

Edit: Fixed some information regarding Zombie Wranglers.

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