Films franchises like Batman and Star Trek have undergone the reboot process and rumours abound that the Tomb Raider game franchise is due for a reboot to. Now Strawdog Studios are rebooting an entire genre... the classic 80s arcade game, with their latest title Space Ark for Xbox 360 Live Arcade. If arcade games such as Rainbow Island, Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid were being invented for the first time today, what would they be like? Obviously they would run on modern hardware (Xbox 360 Live Arcade), have High Definition 3D graphics and 5.1 surround sound but the core of what made those games great would remain.

Space Ark is a fun arcade game featuring cute characters (the Arkonauts), wacky bonuses and fruit (every good arcade game must have fruit) plus bonus levels, more fruit, power-ups, extra lives and yet more fruit. Players must help the Arkonauts repair damaged planets by bouncing them into the air and bagging the DNA combos, power-ups and all the fruit you can catch in order to repair planets that have been damaged by a wandering black hole.

Dan Marchant (Business development director) said “During the production of our previous title “Geon” we built a great relationship with the guys at Microsoft.  As a result of this we decided to pitch “Space Ark” as a potential XBLA title and were really very pleased (in a restrained British manner) when they approved the concept for publishing on XBLA. The game has been in development for 5 months and is due for release later this year.”

The game features:

• Single or Multi-player (split screen)
• 180 levels of cuddly ‘Arkonaut’ bouncing entertainment (split across 5 worlds)
• 5 fun mini games to unlock
• 24 selectable cute Arkonauts to play with
• Bounteous Bonus levels to discover
• A pile of fruity power-ups big enough to make a jumbo fruit salad.
• Secre… woops almost