Empire Interactive, today announced that the eagerly awaited, classic combat sports game Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe, will be available via Xbox 360 LIVE Arcade from 17th October 2007.
Due to the collapse of Empire Interactive, Speedball 2 and Double Dragon have been removed from the Xbox Live Marketplace.
Dont worry if you have previously purchased the games but deleted them from your hard drive as they can be redownloaded using your download history, but are not otherwise available.
Until someone owns the rights to what they developed, the games can't be made free or placed back up for the same price.
If I had purchased these I would indeed worry if this would affect me as consumer. I'm sure this is only temporary until someone buys the rights.
Microsoft does not own the rights to the titles. In fact, right now nobody does, which is why they cannot be sold. This is why they've been taken off XBLA. Eventually, once the licensing rights have been sorted, they'll go back up.
...now I've taken a step back towards owning physical copies of games. I really LIKE digital distribution, but now new people cannot buy the game, is that correct?
I thought one of the benefits of DD was that it would always be available.
It's not available because the company that owns them has shut down. If these titles were sold in stores, they'd be taken off of shelves for the exact same reasons. This is a rare, rare occurrence and wont happen often.
you wouldnt want to the xbox arcade port was really bad...so was that speedball game
trust me losing these 2 titles is no big deal
UGO's review of Speedball 2, a futuristic football variant available via Xbox Live Arcade. The game received an overall grade of B.
The latest system to get the Brutal Deluxe treatment is the Xbox 360, on which an enhanced version of the original Commodore Amiga game has recently been made available for download via the Xbox Live Arcade service. Wonderwallweb have now run their eye over the game and you can read the review now.
Ha ha cool, I played this game to death on my old amiga.
Have to check this one out, hope its still fun