Xbox Live Arcade Games – Faith Somewhat Restored

In principle I think Xbox Live Arcade Games are a great idea

Games that you can download quickly and easily and get playing with the minimum of fuss. Decent demos so you can try before you buy at a “reasonable” price point

The thing is recently I’ve found some of them to be a bit….crap

Maybe crap is a bit of a strong word but the point is I haven’t really gotten all that excited an upcoming XBLA game in the same way I would about a regular game

On the few occasions that I did it didn’t always live up to the expectations I’d had

A couple of examples

Sensible Word of Soccer, Speedball 2, Worms

There is a slight pattern with these examples. They are all “classics”. Games I’ve played to death in my youth on varying other formats

When I found out they were coming to my XBox i eagerly downloaded them and fired up the demo. I had 10 minutes of fun but wasn’t all that eager to hand over my cash

Don’t get me wrong they are still amazing games and even with the updated graphics they still stand up in their own right but I’d seen it all before

It was the same when i downloaded Prince of Persia. I actually paid for this one. I enjoyed it for a couple of days. Marvelled over how pretty it looked and I haven’t been back to it since.

Then there were some that I refused to even download the demo for. Frogger being a prime example – do i really want to spend 800 points on that? A classic game in it’s time but it’s still just trying to get a frog across the road – i can play flash based versions online for free. Taking an old game and jazzing the graphics up doesn’t always vastly improve the game. A lot of the classics relied on great game play because they couldn’t do anything about the graphics

While I understand my argument above is a little weak (as you’ll see in a second!) I’ve I had stopped looking at new arcade games whereas in the past I used to check out every new game that became available

However, my faith has been restored a little lately by three games

Trials HD

Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

Shadow Complex

While none of these three games are exactly original (especially Monkey Island!) they all have that “just 5 more minutes” factor. I was playing Trails HD till 1am on the day I downloaded it

I’ve handed over my cash for Trials and Monkey Island and Shadow Complex will follow in the next couple of days (my birthday is coming up and I always get ordered to not buy anything – fingers crossed for some Microsoft Points!)

Hopefully games like Shadow Complex and Trails will set the bar for forthcoming releases

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to queue up Turtles in Time Re-shelled