Presenting the remaining 4 Launch Contest Winners!

Hi folks, we’re pleased to present the 4 remaining launch contest winners!

Avis Veritas, aka Darren Bird, hails from Ontario Canada.

Arc Angel Rex, from South Australia, Australia!

Sludgely, from the great city of Glencoe, a suburb of Chicago, located in the fine state of Illinois. His brother, who guys by Pepper, was a serious Babo Violent 2 addict, and he was the one that got him hooked on the game.

Gafgariowned, a former BV2 player (from parts unknown )

1. How long did it take you?

[Avis Veritas] - About 8-9 hours to get to Lieutenant.

[Arc Angel Rex] - Took me ages to figure out that you can go left and right on the unlockables page at which point I realised that I still needed the character unlocks, all up it took me 2-3 hours because I got stuck playing the terracorra defence level on hard!

[Sludgely] - I think I got to the lieutenant rank in two days, but I’m not sure because I only realized that this contest was available a couple days after I achieved the rank.

[Gafgariowned] - It took me over 5 hours, but under 10 hours.

2. What characters and weapons do you like playing?

[Avis Veritas] - I really enjoy playing with Daemonak, throw on the Crackler and its Reign of Fire all over again! Robo is a big favourite too, I love using his disarm abilities. Aescu is a lifesaver in the last battle, use her vile bile inside the healing sphere of the beacons and you’re nigh invincible for the duration - take that Mercs! Other favourite weapons? The Stormer and Butcher.

[Arc Angel Rex] - I like Boba because he has a higher jump ability then demonak and I can get to all sorts of funny places with flight chars, gotta love the butcher.

[Sludgely] - I love playing Oculus using the stitcher. Although the combination isn’t very popular, it’s unbeatable.

[Gafgariowned] - I like the flyer’s abilities in Invasion mode. The dual machine gun and rifler are really fun.

3. How long have you been gaming, and what games do you play?

[Avis Veritas] I think I was born with a controller in my hand. Secretly.. I’m Captain N’s twin. Seriously though, I remember sitting side by side with my father tossing the controller back and forth as we battled through Final Fantasy 1. Definately one of my fondest childhood memories.

[Arc Angel Rex] - I’ve been on xbox live about two years now but the main part of my gaming has been since the original xbox came out, for my liked games it
would be easier to compare games with me - but I’ll say this now: “Fallout 3 rocks and I’ve racked up 6 chars with 70+ hours each!”

[Sludgely] - I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 or 6, I think. I’ve always been pretty casual about it, however. I’m really a fan of the first person shooters, strategy games, and role playing games. Among my favorites of all time include the games of the Halo series, Sid Miers’ Civilization games, and Baldur’s Gate II.

[Gafgariowned] - I’ve been gaming since Mario Bros. The other games I’m playing right now are Street Fighter 4, and BlazBlue (If anyone wants to lose at either of these games, feel free to send me a PM.) I played Baboviolent 2 under the alias “Onslaught” before picking up Babo: Invasion.

4. Are you going to go through the campaign again to move up the ranks? More multiplayer as well?

[Avis Veritas] - Both! Actually, I’ve already reached Legend!

[Arc Angel Rex] - HaHa I liked invasion mode so no worries there but yeah I could run through a few more times - I still do play campaign as it is.

[Sludgely] - I actually spent very little time in the single player. I’ve always preferred competitive, online play… After all, the game is clearly heavily modeled after its multiplayer-based predecessor, Babo Violent 2 (which is awesome… highly recommend it to anyone). I definitely intend to buy the PC version of the game, whose competitive gameplay will be on par with that of Babo Violent 2, as well as most other popular shooters.

[Gafgariowned] - I probably will do it again for the achievement and the flashy icon. I’ve been playing the multiplayer and look forward to some league/ladder play when the PC version is released. I may even be coding up some PHP as we speak.

5. How do you like the game so far?

[Avis Veritas] Fantastic overall play, I like the use of the four types of damage and the vulnerabilities/resistances. The character voices are great, there’s a fantastic range of weapons to choose from and the increasing skill/difficulty of the enemies really keeps the full playthrough interesting! A top notch Arcade game that lays waste to anything else I’ve played in its genre. Multi-player matches are a hilarious non-stop killfest, really keeps you on your toes! Avatar Attack Mode is a brilliant use of the Xbox Live’s newer interface overhaul I really hope more developers pick up on the fun opportunities that this kind of inclusive mechanic provides. Inventive, creative, and loving hearts went into making this game, you can tell.

[Arc Angel Rex] - awesome fun original concept, more tactical then you’d expect from an arcade game, large diversity of factions and classes and weapons, 4 player drop in drop out co-op play (awesomeness!!!). One major problem………..not enough levels (and not on a disc you can install it to your mates consoles for lan parties either). [Okay, we get it - you want more! ]

[Sludgely] - The game is quite impressive. One of the best modern arcade games to date. Fantastic multiplayer - some of the best that exists in any console game to date. I’m not just saying that either. It is far more entertaining than something like Call of Duty 4.

[Gafgariowned] - The game is great. Much more depth and metagame than BV2. I thought the elemental weaknesses would be clunky when I was first told about them but they work pretty well. The graphics are sweet and the controls are much tighter than I expected.

7. What’s your one-line review of the game so far?

[Avis Veritas] 9/10 from the heart of a stalwart gamer! Thanks Playbrains!

[Arc Angel Rex] - It’s better then Halo 3

[Sludgely] - Not much else to say other than buy this game. Thank you for a truly fantastic game, Babo team.

[Gafgariowned] - Congratulations to Marc and Daivuk (ed: the two developers of Babo Violent 2, and core members of the MiBI team) for actually making the 360 release happen. When Marc first told me years ago about BV3 I didn’t believe him at all. I didn’t think Babo could be done on a console and he proved me wrong. I hope the old BV2 players will come and enjoy the game and represent the old guard especially Vamp, Vesuvius, Yellow and the rest of the (z) crew. 34-1!

Thanks a lot guys, we’ll contact you next week to get your mailing addresses to send the prize packages to!

Visual stuttering issue affecting ~5% of Madballs in…Babo:Invasion players

[Update] - We have a work-around that will work for some players with this issue - scroll to the bottom of this post…

A minority (we estimate approximately 5%) of Xbox 360 owners may experience some visual stuttering when playing Madballs in…Babo:Invasion. This stuttering can range from a minor annoyance to gameplay affecting (i.e. it can affect combat, cause to you fail at platforming portions of the game, etc.) For the few folks experiencing this, the stuttering seems to be most prevelant in the Campaign portion of the game, and occurs most often when new enemies are spawning.

This is *not* a normal part of the Madballs in…Babo:Invasion experience. The trademark of our game is silky smooth movement/platforming combined with kinetic combat - and there are thousands of people enjoying that experience on Xbox LIVE Arcade every day.

We apologize that this issue was not caught during development and testing — it appears to only happen on Xboxes with hard-drives that are older, failing and/or are highly fragmented (an issue that Microsoft doesn’t officially recognize). The game went through extensive testing at Playbrains, VMC and Microsft before being released - and if this issue had been observed, it would have been fixed before release. [Note - we're not pointing fingers on this - it just goes to show how small the percentage of Xbox hardware are candidates for this issue.]

The fix for this issue has been prepared and is going through internal testing at Playbrains as we speak. We will send it to Microsoft as soon as we’ve confirmed it’s ready (the next day or two), and they’ll certify it before propping it to their servers (that will take likely 2 weeks).

The fans of our game are very important to us - and we want to ensure that everyone playing the game has the best possible experience playing it.

And for those looking to try the game, don’t be afraid. This issue only affects a very minor subset of our player base — if you *are* going to be affected, you should notice it right away in the trial (and heck, the fix is coming ASAP). For those few who maybe tried the game and passed because of these issues, we of course understand, but we hope that you’ll give us another shot in a couple of weeks — thousands of players, and reviewers, agree that Madballs is an experience that shouldn’t be missed.

Thanks folks,

Paul Winterhalder (Executive Producer, Madballs in…Babo:Invasion)

—

Additional background info for those that are curious

How could this go uncaught through development? Don’t you guys test?

Actually, a ton of testing went into MiBI. We practice Agile/Iterative development at Playbrains, and thus we’ve had a test team assigned to testing every aspect of MiBI since January 2008. In addition to that, we hired an external test firm, VMC, the same one that Microsoft’s Xbox team uses, to assist us with a lot of the Xbox-specific testing (since there are thousands of technical requirements, console specifics, known gotchas to account for). And finally, there are the Microsoft MAT and CERT testers - who are responsible for final approvals on any games being released on the platform. In all of those tests (across dozens and dozens of developer kits), not once did we have a report of this issue - if we had, rest assured we would have addressed it (and, in fact, Microsoft would have insisted upon it!)

To be clear, we had tested this across dozens and dozens of Xbox 360 developer kits - at Playbrains, VMC, and Microsoft - and this issue never presented itself… We had *not*, however, tested it upon any retail kits, because to the best of our knowledge that is impossible - the first time that we’re able to play our game on a retail Xbox is the first time that you’re able to play the game on a retail Xbox.

So, when did you become aware of the problem?

We first identified a potential problem last Thursday (July 16th, the day after our retail release). On that day I (Paul Winterhalder, Exec Prod) bought a second retail 360 box to bring to put in office (all our xboxes at the office (except the one in our theatre) are devkits. I had decided to save a few bucks, and bought an Arcade machine - figuring I’d use an old 20 GB hard-drive from my original 360 (which had died a red-ringed death, and been recently been replaced by a 120 GB Elite).

Anyway, I was quite surprised to find that when I loaded our game upon it, that the game stopped and stuttered quite badly while playing the game — it certainly wasn’t the silky-smooth experience that defines the gameplay in our game. I began to vaguely remember having some issues with the system before I’d replaced it - of course, I’d always pointed the finger at the Xbox itself (since it red-ringed shortly afterwards). Upon a bit more investigation into the hard drive though, I realized that my 20 GB drive was reporting that the total drive size was only 13.9 GB — clearly, there were hardware issues with this drive…

So why didn’t you guys report the problem right then?

Well, from what we could see, the heart of the problem was the faulty hard-drive… it was causing disk access to be a ton slower than the Xbox specification, and it was causing our issue — and certainly, if your system hardware is failing, you need to expect that your games aren’t going to run well. Reporting the issue then would be like saying “Our game might be difficult to control if your joystick is broken” - basically, a notice like that is worthless.

That said, we did start looking deeper into the problem — examining our code to see what routines might be aggravating the problem, and combing our forums / facebook group / and twitter looking for any signs that others were having the problem as well. On Monday we found another retail box (that an employee has at home) that has some minor stuttering (same problem, just much lesser degree) - and there was a post in one of our BV2 forums…

What was the problem?

The problem turns out to be quite simple. There are simply some places in our code where we are re-reading data from the disk that we don’t need to be. In some cases the information is already cached, and in some places it was straightforward to put a cache into place. The majority of the fixes have been ready (in our dev environments) since Friday - but we’ve still been talking with Microsoft about *when* we can put the update through certification to make it available to people… They didn’t want us to rush (in case other problems get reported) - after all, Microsoft hasn’t had anybody reporting the issue at all - are we sure that there’s a problem?

What percentage of Xbox 360 users does the problem affect?

It’s pretty hard for us to say. Given that the issue hasn’t been widely reported though, we’re guessing that it is approximately 5% of 360 owners might experience some visual stutter playing MiBI. Our best guess is that it affects people with highly fragmented Xbox 360 drives (a condition that Microsoft doesn’t officially recognize - they say the drives don’t fragment, though same magazine reviewer staff assure us they believe that it does) - or possibly drives that are experiencing minor hard drive failures…

When will the fix be ready?

We are testing the fix internally right now, and talking to Microsoft about getting it into Cert. I hope to deliver it to them this week, and then assuming the Cert process is similar for updates as it is for the main title release, I would expect it to be available in a few weeks.

- - -

Update - A short-term work-around for some players with this problem

Players experiencing the Visual Stuttering problem in MiBI may be able to resolve the issue by moving the game to a Memory Unit (MU) and playing it from there. This solution has been tested on the one box that we have with the problem, and works very well.

To do this, go to My Xbox -> System (far right) -> choose Memory, then perform the steps to *move* the game and the game save files to the MU.

Note - we are still looking to fix this for our Players ASAP - but this is a good short-term solution for those who need it (and have access to an MU).

On a regular basis, we’re gonna have our lead Level Designer Adam post some hints and secrets and tips and general discussion about the levels in the campaign. He’ll also take you through some design decisions and maybe tell you why the level is the way it is….First up is probably going to be the most, uhh, “challenging” of the campaign levels, Snowblind.

Ok, so there are probably some people out there who won’t like Snowblind. I can live wth that.

Let me explain. I had this crazy idea of stranding the player in the middle of an open wasteland, left to fend for himself and navigate his way through a white maze of wonder and excitement. This level would not hold you by the hand; you’re on your own, buddy. “The core players will love it!” I said to myself, “This’ll allude to the desert in King’s Quest V! The white wasteland of Final Fantasy VII! The sprawling mazes of dungeon crawlers of yore!” It was one level out of the campaign, so why not?

(continue reading…)

Hi folks,

We thought it would be good to talk a bit about the lag that some of you may have experienced in multiplayer MiBI games. As you know, MiBI has been highly optimized for smooth network performance - but there are physical limitations that can affect lag, and there’s nothing we can do about them (i.e. the latency of traffic on the internet, especially for games with players from across the world - and the network capabilities of the hosting XBox).

Read on for a better multiplayer experience…

(continue reading…)

Hi folks,

We’re pleased to announce the first winner of our Launch Contest - introducing Ben Barrer, the first MiBI player to make it to Lieutenant !

Ben wins a package of MiBI schwag, including a collection of authentic Madballs… The contents are being finalized as we complete our arrangements for Comic-Con - we’ll be sure to post the details of the prize in the next week or so.

We asked Ben (Gamertag: XBeNnY420XMN) a few questions about his experience with the contest, and MiBi in general.

1. How long did it take you?

Around 8 - 10 hours.

2. What characters, weapons and abilities did you most like playing?

For the B*D*I characters I mostly used Oculus Orbus. And on the Scorched faction I liked using Daemonak, Pett and Hornhead. I’d have to say the weapons I used the most were prolly the Stitcher, Plasma Beam [Beamer], Crackler and the Riffer.

3. How long have you been gaming, and what other games do you like to play?

I’ve been playing videogames for a pretty long time, back since Goldeneye [ed: Great game!] I usually like to play games that I can just pick up and play quick for some good fun with my buddies, like Worms, N+, Castle Crashers, Skate 2, and Guitar Hero.

4. Are you going to do it again to move up the next ranks? Squeeze in some multiplayer this time maybe?

Yeah I will keep playing - I might take a break for a while before I prestige to the next rank. Yeah, I have been playing some multiplayer, thats where I have had the most fun playing. Hit me up on LIVE sometime if you want to.

5. How do you like the game so far?

I’m really digging it so far. There’s really no other games out there to compare it to. The ranking up and unlocking features and characters is really cool. And the gameplay is awesome, very fast, fun and frantic. It seems like a breath of fresh air compared to any other multiplayer shooters. The game also has good humor and can be pretty damn funny playing it at times. Also the use of the avatars is awesome, being able to blow up your buddies avatar and have confetti fly everywhere justifies the price alone. I can already tell I will be enjoying this game for quite some time and would recommend it to anyone looking for a different kind of multiplayer experience thats loads of fun.

6. What’s your one-line review of the game so far?

“Madballs in…Babo:Invasion is like Marble Blast on steroids!”

7. Anything you’d like to add?

Thanks for making this badass game, and having this contest. It’s been a long time since I’ve won anything. Keep up the good work, it be cool if you guys could put out some DLC sometime soon. [Ed: It's coming ]

Thank-you Ben - MiBI is about building a community of players who like to uh, well, kill each other in fun and funny ways. And you’re our first celebrity!

Good news for budget-conscious gamers and those with stereotypical Scottish ancestry: we’re not going to be 1200 points after all.

We just got off the phone with Microsoft Game Studios and they have consulted the oracle, had their epiphany and they have decided that we should indeed go out into the world at 800 points. Despite having features unseen in other 1200 point games (and even some retail games), we’re a multiplayer-centric title, so the more people that play, the more fun the game will be for everyone.

So all that means is that you can now spend that extra $5 on the Dr. Scholl’s…we’re dropping at 800 points in…8 hours or so!

Update: Picked up at IGN and Destructoid, among others. I link the Destructoid one especially because they linked to this blog entry and I think if I include their link here, the infinite cross-referencing will somehow break the internets and we all get candy.

Hi folks,

We are pleased to announce the MiBI XBLA Launch Contest. This is hopefully the first of many contests that will encourage the MiBI community to adopt a regular habit of carnage and mayhem.

Without further ado, here are the details:

MiBI XBLA Launch Contest

Officer Babo Achieve-ment

Contest goal:

Be one of the first 5 Babo players (Babonauts?) to reach the rank of Lieutenant.

What you win:

A Madballs Mega Prize-pack, which includes a collection of authentic Madballs toys (including Oculus Orbis and HornHead) as well as a bunch more MiBI-related schwag !!!

(continue reading…)

…and, yeah, we’re pretty awesome.

The guys at TeamXbox and IGN have reviewed a pre-release version of the game, and they do indeed have some great things to say about the game (but really, how could they not?).

Tom from TeamXbox gives us a manly 8/10 and says stuff like:

• “an impressive title for the XBLA system“
• “very robust multiplayer mode that includes a couple of things that you