Defense Grid: The Awakening’s unique spin on tower defense gameplay is a perfect fit for the Xbox LIVE Arcade audience, as it appeals to gamers of all skill levels, features beautiful environments, spectacular effects, and a dynamic, engaging soundtrack. The controls are intuitive and the gameplay is deep - the special attacks and properties of each tower work together to provide many ways to succeed.

New for the Xbox 360 is the included Borderlands mission pack which has four new advanced levels and 12 challenge modes, providing more bases to protect and more challenges to undertake than ever.

Defense Grid: The Awakening on Xbox Live Arcade features 10 different tower types that can each be upgraded twice. These towers all have unique tradeoffs that affect ideal placement, such as line-of-sight attack or ballistic trajectory fire; a large area of effect or damage over time; and minimum and maximum ranges. Over the course of the game’s 10 hours of story play, players battle 15 different types of enemies, each with unique capabilities and strategies, across 24 unique environments. To ramp up the challenge even more, Defense Grid: The Awakening now includes an additional 100 unlockable challenge modes.

Issues Fixed:

• A game hang on start-up that affected some users has been fixed. If a user profile was stored on an MU, there was a chance of the game locking up with a solid white screen as it communicated with Xbox LIVE to verify the profile. This has been fixed such that there should no longer be a hang, and workarounds are no longer needed to start the game for those users. The Xbox LIVE Arcade logo screen of the updated game now has a black background rather than a white background in order to make it easy to visually identify that the game has been updated to the new version.
• Surround sound audio drop-outs have been fixed. The audio stream from the game would pause for milliseconds at certain times over optical or HDMI connections, causing some models of Audio/Video surround systems to stutter when playing back surround audio. This has been fixed.
• Cannon tower firing rates during fast forward have been fixed. Previously cannon towers would fire at twice their intended rate during fast forward. This made them twice as powerful as they should have been when fast forward was held down.
• Several Leaderboard fixes. Games played, damage done, and aliens destroyed leaderboards would at times not update when the user played a game. They now will. Mission specific leaderboards would also update the number of towers and power cores even if a new high score was not attained and this has been fixed. Borderlands modes beyond campaign or campaign challenge modes did not write to the leaderboards and now do as well.
• Some voice commentary could still be heard in the game even if the voice volume was set to zero. This has been fixed.
• The resource counter in the mission summary screen now displays more than 6 digits.

Game Changes & Updates:

• Game scoring has been changed. Because the current leaderboard entries are affected by the cannon fast forward bug, the scoring system has been updated and scores going forward will be calculated giving 2000 points per saved core rather than the previous value of 1000. For many leaderboards this will significantly change the value of the highest scores.
• Game scoring has also been updated for practice and fixed resource challenge modes so that more efficient play is rewarded. Previously those modes did not reward spending fewer resources.
• Level unlocks changed. The second mission is unlocked to the first time user allowing them to skip the first tutorial mission if they desire. The Borderlands maps also now start unlocked rather than waiting for the user to complete the 16th Awakening map in story mode.
• Support for downloadable content is now exposed to the user. In-game DLC is planned and coming soon.

Built on Emergent’s Gamebryo engine (Oblivion, Warhammer Online, Civilization IV), Defense Grid: The Awakening has been repeatedly lauded by the critics for excellent game balance, pace and progression. With each level, players encounter different placement of roads, tower build locations, and open areas to plan a strategy around. Each map, whether open plan or fixed route, encourages a different strategy, such as trying to find an optimal path to redirect enemies, making the best use of limited space, and breaking up individual enemy waves to avoid being overwhelmed, all while planning ahead for future waves.

Currently available on PC, Defense Grid: The Awakening, rated E10+, will be available on Xbox Live Arcade at a special price of 800 MS points ($10) beginning September 2, 2009.