Developers, gamers, publishers, just about everybody has taken a shot at the crap offered on Xbox Live’s Arcade. There’s too much of it, you can’t find it, it sucks, whatever the issue, XBLA’s heard it. With Geometry Wars 2, Braid, 1942: Joint Strike, Bionic Commando and that have come out recently and with Castle Crashers and Galaga Legions set to debut in the coming weeks, I wonder, are we experiencing a Renaissance on Xbox Live?
Or, are we fooling ourselves? Check it out, after the jump.
The biggest problem with my hypothesis is that Microsoft doesn’t tease what’s coming out. Yes, they recently did tease their upcoming titles for August, but beyond that, I have no idea what’s coming out. So my question really can only speak on what’s coming out this month. Maybe a bunch of junk will come out in September and October, hey anything’s possible, but right now, I’m still not sure.
Sure Braid and Geometry Wars 2 are sure fire hits, both critically and by Xbox Live standards, and sure Bionic Commando has lit a fire under the old skoolers, but I’ve got to say that overall, recent XBLA titles have been a bunch of “non-factor” games.
By “non-factor” I mean games that you might play once or twice and forget them. Games like 1942, Go, Go Breaksteady!, Ticket To Ride, and Elements of Destruction. These games are throw away games. They’re games you’ll play once, even if you get convinced to buy them. That means if you bought all four of those games, you spent 40 bucks on games that occupied your time for, what… an hour combined? Is that good?
Sure, there are a number of great games on XBLA, don’t get me wrong, but overall, I’m not seeing the improvement or even the sustainability of these games. In my personal opinion, it’s the same old thing and that sucks. None of these games that I’ve mentioned above except for maybe Braid and Geo Wars 2 are worth purchasing.
Come back later for my way to fix this mess, where I’ll explore what direction I think XBLA should go that would give them a leg up over the competition and really change the Xbox Live Arcade, into an Arcade worth going to.
How I propose to fix XBLA can be found right here.
![[Post to Twitter]](http://sarcasticgamer.com/wp/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/tweet-this-small.png)
Tweet This| Related Posts:
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
1 response so far ↓
1 Destyn // Aug 18, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more, Lono (of course). At first the pull of XBLA games was instant gratification - the same thing which drove sales of the Xbox Classic downloads; but now consumers have gone past the initial “shock and awe” phase they’re going to expect a higher level of quality even from XBLA, scaled to the price paid. I guess it doesn’t help that the massive hits you mentioned have somewhat set the bar for other games, whose developers may have limited resources (but then on the flipside, tough, don’t join in if you can’t keep up).
XBLA certainly leads the field currently on download-and-play games but if it doesn’t step up on these important issues - finding decent titles, for example, even by user rating would be nice - they’ll start to slide behind PSN and even the Wii Channel. They have the advantage of allowing downloads to portable devices, which the 360 doesn’t; and even if we could play on Zunes who the hell has them anyway.
Will be interested to see your proposed fixes.
Leave a Comment