At Home with John and Debbie

A little over a week into Xbox 360 ownership, and I think it’s time to talk about Xbox Live Arcade or “XBLA”.

XBLA is a game download service for the Xbox 360. Microsoft has imposed a size limit on the downloads, and the games tend to be simpler (in various ways) than the kind of games you might buy on a disk. For example, there are lots of retro arcade games, several board games, enhanced versions of 16 bit console games, and so on.

All games have Achievements to, er, achieve. All games can be played in a free trial mode before you pay to unlock the full game. Most games can be played online against other people.
So far I have full versions of:

Bomberman Live HD

Pretty much exactly as it should be: classic Bomberman battle mode gameplay, fully customisable rules, in glorious hi-def-o-vision, online. Almost perfect. I have only a few grumbles. some of the weapons debalance the game. Of course you can turn them off, but not if you do the quickest thing and join a random Internet game. You can play with up to eight players, but it makes things very cramped. It would have been nice to have the larger map (more, smaller tiles) from the eight player mode on Saturn Bomberman, especially since the HD graphics would have made it easier to see. Speaking of Saturn Bomberman, I’d like to have seen its dinosaurs retained. Maybe an add-on is in order?

Hexic

This one comes bundled with the Premium Xbox 360. At first I thought it was a shoddy Tetris derivative, but in fact it’s rather different. You destroy hexagons by rotating clusters of three, to make clusters of matching colours. In standard mode there is no time limit for a move, and there’s an ultimate aim that will take some serious thinking to achieve. It eats time. It’s really quite good, for a freebie.

Carcassonne

A computerised version of the very good German board game. I’ve only played against the insultingly stupid “easy” CPU player, and I should really take it online. The game involves placing tiles to build cities, roads and fields. It’s rather cute that when you complete a city or a road, it transforms before your eyes from 2D tiles to a 3D version. The animated scoring makes the game easier to understand than on a board (farmer rules were always confusing for beginners).

I imagine that online, there will be some tedium waiting for other players to take their move. I suppose that’s what voice chat is for.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

For a while, this 2D abstract shooting game was XBLA’s jewel in the crown. It’s intense, it’s twitchy, it’s one of those games where you have to become one with the game. I think I have to get much better at it in order to make my investment worthwhile — and I will!

In the next month or so, we can expect Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe, and Capcom’s Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, both of which promise to be quite wonderful (Space Giraffe was the reason I finally bought a 360).

What’s my ideal XBLA game?

Well, there are a lot of classic arcade ports — Pac Man, Track and Field, Double Dragon, and so on. All of them have achievements and online hiscore charts. Many of them have online multiplayer options. There is a classic arcade game that’s playable by four players and would benefit from voice chat and the fact that not all players can see each others’ screens. That game is Cyberball. Cyberball has been ported to several modern platforms (for example, as part of the Midway Arcade Treasures compilation), but no commercial release has recreated the arcade two-on-two experience.

Imagine, you could join a two-person team; your team mate could be on the same console as you, or on the Internet — to take on another two-person team, just as you could in the arcade. Your opponent can’t see your screen. You could switch your voice chat from everyone (for taunting) to private (tactical stuff with your teammate).

Hasbro, please do it. Please!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 15:16 and is filed under Video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.