I brief message in the middle of the hiatus… Don’t forget to download Undertow, it’s free from Live Arcade until Sunday, as a “sorry, we screwed up during the Holidays” from Microsoft. I’m nabbing it now.

EA announced the development of a new Wing Commander title built exclusively for XBLA.  Wing Commander Arena will sport up to 16 players in ranked online play, as well as a single player campaign we hope you’ll just use for practice.  The game boasts upgradeable ships and a bevy of multiplayer maps.

Voodoo Extreme even has some early screens up!

OK, so that’s a ridiculous title, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Announced yesterday, Vivendi completed the purchase of the Assault Heroes developer Wanako, stating that the Latin American developer will be rolled into the Sierra Online division. Give us Assault Heroes II and nobody gets hurt!

Major Nelson point out that there is nothing scheduled for release on XBLA this Wednesday. Bummer, no? Look at the bright side, now you’ll be able to spend a little more time unlocking the Paperboy achievements!

DaKing240 breaks the news about these six games being on PartnerNet:

Centipede

Milipede

Jetpac

Pinball FX

Alien Hominid

Ikaruga

While I feel I’ve had enough of both Centipede and Millipede, the other games are pretty interesting. We wrote about Ikaruga previously so that’s known. Alien Hominid should be great and I can’t wait to play Pinball FX, which we covered previously. Also, Jetpac being up there more or less confirms that it’s the game that Rare are working on.

Being sick sucks. That means Live Arcade Review missed out on some heavy duty coverage. Bummer. Luckily, the community does the work for us!

• EGM’s March issue confirms Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for release this month, as in March then? I’m not sure. EGM have been wrong before though…
• Operate your Xbox 360 with the Zune Remote. Yay? Nah…
• Apparently there where some issues with the Achievement Rewards program. More here.
• Sierra Online will release a Battlestar Galactica Live Arcade game this fall. Fans of the serious should scream with joy. I for one thought Serenity sucked… Whatever that has to do with anything.
• Catan will hit Live Arcade Q1, according to IGN who spoke with Big Huge Games.
• Bizarre Creations have a post on Boom Boom Rocket up, with screenshots and info. Check it out!
• Galactrix announced! (Via XBLAddict)

Oh, and don’t forget that Paperboy is out now. A review is in the works.

This one is a bit late due to my illness. Sorry about that.

Top Arcade Titles (Full Versions)
1 Root Beer Tapper
2 UNO
3 Heavy Weapon
4 Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
5 LUMINES LIVE!
6 Street Fighter II’ Hyper Fighting
7 Contra
8 Texas Hold ‘em
9 Assault Heroes
10 Geometry Wars Evolved

Root Beer Tapper scoring the top position, not so surprisingly since new releases usually end up there. Be sure to check back later today for our review. More lists over at Major Nelson’s as usual.

That questionmark is a bit dubious, right? Well, it would appear that the Dreamcast classic Japanese shooter Ikaruga is bound for Xbox Live Arcade, after appearing on PartnerNet.

We fired up our Xbox 360 debug machine to get our hands on Ikaruga, but upon firing it up all we recieved was a Treasure logo before the gane decided to crash - and not much more has happened since.

Confirmed? Well, no official word, but as close to it, right? We blogged about developer Treasure is considering Live Arcade previously.

Tomorrow’s Live Arcade game is the arcade classic Paperboy, brought to you by Midway (via Digital Eclipse). From the PR fluff:

Game Features

Seven stages (one for each day of the week) and 3 levels of difficulty – “Easy Street,” “Middle Road” or “Hard Way”

New Xbox Live multiplayer: The standard multiplayer mode involves two player co-op play which can take place on the same console or over Xbox Live

High scores are tracked on the Xbox Live Leaderboard

Earn up to 12 Achievements and 200 Gamerscore points

It’s 400 Microsoft points as usual for these classics.

Don’t miss Root Beer Tapper, it’s out today you know. Here’s some bits and pieces while we get our house in order.

• Age rating organization ESRB have approved Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts for Xbox 360, which most likely means that the 16-bit Capcom classic is due for Live Arcade pretty soon.
• Is Jetpac: Refueled the upcoming Rare release for Live Arcade? Xbox 360 Fanboy seems to think so.
• Worms developer on downloadable content and more, over at Gamertag Radio, or transcript at Xboxic.
• The digest for games magazine PTD 302 is available for download.

There might be some craziness here at Live Arcade Review the coming days. We’re gonna update Wordpress and try some stuff out. Once we’ve got that out of the way, we’ll get back to our regular pace of news, and a hightened one for reviewing the Live Arcade games. Thanks for bearing with us.