At long last RPG “Masters of Belial” hits the XBOX 360 Live Indie marketplace raising the bar for all comers. This may be one of the best looking games ever released for the XNA crowd. Reminiscent of King’s Bounty or Might and Magic or of course Diablo, along with capture the flag and RTS elements, MoB offers 2 player co-op on a shared screen, an advanced character system, epic battles and advanced AI; this UK indie fills a much needed place in the indie RPG (or XBLA for that matter) catalog.

We will be posting our review shortly, but for now, make sure you don’t let this highly anticipated title pass you by. For only 400 Microsoft Points you can not go wrong!

To learn more, visit the official Masters of Belial website at http://www.mastersofbelial.com/

Matt Davis, developer of Easy Golf: Course Architect told Eurogamer:

“Microsoft’s changes mean that the most indie developers can charge for their games is 400 Microsoft Points (GBP 3.40/EUR 4.60), with 200 MSP (GBP 2.04/EUR 2.40) and 80 MSP (GBP 0.68/EUR 0.96) price points also available, although to qualify for the latter games must be less than 50MB in size. The changes go into force on October 22.”

Read the whole article at GamesIndustry.biz

Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.

Even as the dust begins to settle from the 2009 E3 conference in Los Angeles, new announcements are emerging from Microsoft that amaze and astound.  Beyond the hands-free motion capturing Natal technology and the news that Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm will all soon be integrated directly into the Xbox Live experience, independent game designers will now have some powerful new features that will allow them to remain competitive in developing new games for the Xbox Live Community games marketplace.

Some of the most exciting features of the new XNA Game Studio software include:

Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.

Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.

Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:

• Full screen video playback
• Video playback to simple textures in game
• Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
• Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
• Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
• Play back multiple video streams at the same time

To see the complete list of new features available in XNA Game Studio 3.1 visit the official announcement site.