Xbox Live Arcade Loses Lost Cities

The News: For just the second time since the Xbox Live Arcade was launched, a game has been removed from the service. Lost Cities joins Yaris , the utterly abysmal excuse for a game that featured Toyota's Yaris car, which made history by being the very first title to get yanked off XBLA. This latest victim was by all accounts not a bad game; in fact, Lost Cities was among the nominees for Best Family Game of 2008 in the official Xbox Live Arcade Community Awards. The news was confirmed to Joystiq by Major Nelson and is unrelated to the delisting policy Microsoft revealed in 2008. Our Take: It's unclear why exactly LC -- based on a board game of the same name -- was yanked. Joystiq's theory that this is related to licensing issues following the merger of Activision and Vivendi is the only plausible possibility. The biggest losers here are the existing LC owners who now are faced with a closed community of ... (link)