ACE details Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition for Xbox 360

ACE Team has revealed that its Zeno Clash port for Xbox 360 will get Ultimate Edition when it's released via XBLA in March.

Originally self-published for PC through Steam, the developers hooked up with Atlus back in October in order to get the game published on XBLA.

"We had already been discussing with Microsoft about a XBLA version and then we had the chance of teaming up with Atlus," an ACE representative told Siliconera.

"You cannot distribute games on XBLA without a publisher. But besides that, the obvious benefit is having someone who will push and promote your game in the market in a way that you as an independent game studio cannot.

"Even though the game is due for March, we are already working on producing marketing material and content with them, and this is great since they know this part of the business much better than we do. Atlus has also been very good at suggesting what features will help improve the game."

Changes made to the Ultimate Edition came directly from the PC community. The inclusion of co-op along with the addition of more attacks were highly requested features by many, and it looks as though ACE listened.

There are also enhanced graphics, new weapons, new enemies, and the addition of co-op for the Tower Challenges.

"The tower challenges are present in the PC game, but the Xbox 360 version will have co-op for this game mode," said the rep. "Now you will be able to beat up enemies with a buddy via Xbox Live or split screen which is twice as much fun.

Back in the summer, ACE co-founder Andres Bordeu said the team would like to release a sequel to the game on not only PC and 360, but PS3 as well. However, because of the porting capabilities with the Source Engine, it's not possible to release the original game via PSN.

"For a number of reasons we had to move from the Orange Box Source engine build to the Left 4 Dead version," he said.

"It was a bit scary at first since many things broke down and it almost felt like taking a step back, but the switch definitely paid off. The relative ease with which we were capable of integrating cooperative gameplay to the tower challenges was thanks to that decision.

"There are some tricky parts to working with a console, but fortunately we haven’t hit any brick walls.

"The Source engine is only ported to the Xbox 360, so there isn’t much we could have done about it. Porting the whole engine to another console is something that simply exceeds our possibilities as a smaller independent studio."

Thankfully, the developer plans to overcome that obstacle with Zeno Clash 2.