Summertime, and the Clubbin's Easy...

Well, it's so far been a sweltering summer here, but the team is back to bring you some relief. Stay inside and game, because we have a ton of new content for you!

First, we finally get to present to you an overhauled list of Staff Clubs. Most the Staff Clubs still contained ancient games from 360 and XBLA arcade, many of which were not available or not completable. It took a lot of work, but we were able to bring the Staff Clubs into the current generation of X1, XSX, and Windows games. There unfortunately are still some clubs where former staff members are lost to time, so their staff clubs are stuck as is, but we were able to overhaul the majority of them. You can check out them all using the links below. The Guide Links thread is the easiest way to browse through them all and see if you qualify for any new clubs. 

Staff Clubs

Staff Club Guide Links

Next up, we have a new Challenge Club for you. It's a bit of a ridiculous one, but I got inspired to make it during GSL when it felt like I was playing at least one new cat game every day. Even though I hate cats (by default, since I'm allergic to them), I present to you a new four tiered club: Feline Frenzy. I was surprised at how many different genres I was able to capture just from cat games, ranging from puzzle to shmup to ARPG to racing to Metroidvania.

That's the bulk of the new content, but we've also made some updates to a few other clubs, mainly because of problematic achievements. 

• Blasphemous has been replaced in both Where's My Map? and jeffy's Subscriber Club because its "platinum" achievement may decide to not unlock for you randomly, and you're completely screwed out of the completion if so. Jeffy has chosen to replace it with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (an excellent choice), and the Where's My Map? club has had some games shift around to accommodate. Castlevania Advance Collection has moved up to Tier 5 to take the place of Blasphemous, Axiom Verge was bumped up to Tier 4, and Tales of Kenzera: Zau was newly added to the club
• In Going Rogue, UnderMine in Tier 4 has similarly seen ongoing achievement issues that have not been resolved, so we've made the choice to replace it with the highly acclaimed Inscryption. 
• Also in Going Rogue, since Balatro has become one of the highest rated and most popular roguelikes out there, we have added it into Tier 5 in place of Atomicrops. I hope you like card games! 

Lastly, one other change we've made is in preparation for the 360 store closing in July. The Challenge/Franchise clubs are unaffected, and now that the Staff Clubs are overhauled they aren't affected either, but with Subscriber Clubs, we have pulled all non-BC XBLA games from them so that they are still mostly all completable until we overhaul them. Take this opportunity to potentially join some while their requirements are eased off a bit. Here is a list of the impacted clubs, along with what has been removed. 

• Bare Bum Cheeks' Sub Club - Bomberman Live has been removed
• Capn Doug's Sub Club - Minecraft (360) has been removed
• exit9500's Sub Club - Totemball and Trouble Witches Neo have been removed
• Floyd's Sub Club - Minecraft (360) and Bastion (XBLA) have been removed
• kaleido42's Sub Club - Gel: Set and Match and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes have been removed
• Puzzler's Sub Club - Rez HD has been removed

Hopefully you enjoy the new content. The next big undertaking will be to overhaul the Subscriber Clubs. Stay tuned for that later this year. Some other new clubs might also be on the docket. As always, if you have any ideas or suggestions for new clubs, we would love to hear about them!

 - XBA Staff

It’s good to see that these clubs have been modernized. Thanks @Necrophage33 for doing a lot of the legwork with contacting former and current staff and putting this together. 👍

Good job on all the hard work that went into changing the staff clubs. I saw the thread with Necro and co's notes and it looked about like this:

Love the new club, looks like I am 2 easy games and a Catlateral Damage replay away from Tiers 1 & 2! Good thing there's a new thorough guide on Catlateral Damage, maybe it will be quicker than my PS4 stack.