Official Xbox Live Arcade Thread
- Thread starter Jesiatha
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AstroPop is coming in february.
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/a/astropoplivearcadexbox360/default.htm
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/a/astropoplivearcadexbox360/default.htm
shpankey
not an idiot
Billiards came free with XBL kit. I bought Backgammon, but I have no idea why I did. I don't know how to play. :lolLakeEarth said:
I don't remember the names of the two games I haven't bought, but one of them is a Tempest like game and is really fucking cool (the one I will buy soon) the other is some wierd game that's kind of like a RTS where you have to build windmills and lemonade stands or some shit. Didn't have the patience to figure it out, though it looked like it could be cool if one did.
nextgeneration
Member
I am SO happy that Live Arcade is taking off. From the start, I always thought that this would have soo much potential and was the 360's killer app for me. So far, it's living up to my hopes, and I can't wait to see what announcements they have in store for E3.
Come on Microsoft, bring over some of Sega's classic arcade games to Live, pretty please, namely one of the greatest games ever made, Shinobi.
Bring over a bunch of their model 2 and model 3 games, while you're at it, too.
Come on Microsoft, bring over some of Sega's classic arcade games to Live, pretty please, namely one of the greatest games ever made, Shinobi.
Bring over a bunch of their model 2 and model 3 games, while you're at it, too.
shpankey
not an idiot
p.s. i wish the would add a super nice chess (and checkers) game with online ranking, tournaments and such. with some really nice (and large) 2d chessboards (i don't care for 3d sets).
also some other classic games, like maybe: miles borne, uno, monopoly, life, mahjongg, clue, etc. etc.
also some other classic games, like maybe: miles borne, uno, monopoly, life, mahjongg, clue, etc. etc.
Gotta say that Arcade is shaping up NICELY. I honestly couldn't care less what comes of Nintendo's virtual console crap. Sure, there're some ancient games on Live Arcade, but they're coming back with new features and achievements. What really sets it apart, though, is the new content. As long as they keep that coming, I'd take that any day over a backlog of old Nintendo games that I've already played so many times over.
Kung Foo Kid
Member
4 new games up on the Xbox Live Arcade website. Can't be that far away from being avaliable now.
http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2006/01/23/4-new-xbla-games-coming-soon/
During his CES speech, Peter Moore announced there were more games coming to the XBLA by March, dropping a couple names like Street Fighter II, Texas Hold 'Em, and Marble Blast Ultra. Well, don't look now, but the official Xbox Live Arcade website has now added 4 new titles, including the aforementioned marbley one. Newcomers include:
*Crystal Quest : The 1987 classic is back. This updated and enhanced version allows you to pilot your ship through 60 waves, collect crystals, and evade baddies.
*Marble Blast Ultra : ...navigate your marbles through moving platforms and dangerous hazards, or go head-to-head in ultra blast multiplayer mode, racing to collect gems to see who ultimately wins all the marbles.
*Feeding Frenzy : Eat anything that's smaller than you and swim clear of everything else. The more you eat, the bigger you get, and the bigger you get, the closer you come to taking on the fearsome Shark King.
*Astro Pop : Match four bricks, use combos and powerups to score big points! Two different gameplay modes, coupled with 33 challenging bonus rounds, offers hours of extraordinary replay value for players of all ages.
http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2006/01/23/4-new-xbla-games-coming-soon/
During his CES speech, Peter Moore announced there were more games coming to the XBLA by March, dropping a couple names like Street Fighter II, Texas Hold 'Em, and Marble Blast Ultra. Well, don't look now, but the official Xbox Live Arcade website has now added 4 new titles, including the aforementioned marbley one. Newcomers include:
*Crystal Quest : The 1987 classic is back. This updated and enhanced version allows you to pilot your ship through 60 waves, collect crystals, and evade baddies.
*Marble Blast Ultra : ...navigate your marbles through moving platforms and dangerous hazards, or go head-to-head in ultra blast multiplayer mode, racing to collect gems to see who ultimately wins all the marbles.
*Feeding Frenzy : Eat anything that's smaller than you and swim clear of everything else. The more you eat, the bigger you get, and the bigger you get, the closer you come to taking on the fearsome Shark King.
*Astro Pop : Match four bricks, use combos and powerups to score big points! Two different gameplay modes, coupled with 33 challenging bonus rounds, offers hours of extraordinary replay value for players of all ages.
Kung Foo Kid
Member
jedimike said:
Cool, just passing on what I read. Astro pop does look really interesting.
Howlin' Mad
Member
If you want to try either Astropop or Feeding Frenzy, you can right here, as they've been online for ages.
Astropop
http://zone.msn.com/en/astropop/default
Feeding Frenzy
http://zone.msn.com/en/feedingfrenzy/default.htm
Astropop
http://zone.msn.com/en/astropop/default
Feeding Frenzy
http://zone.msn.com/en/feedingfrenzy/default.htm
Hitler Stole My Potato
Banned
I hope they'll be putting out some board games like Monopoly, Risk, or Clue sometime soon. Should be fun online.
Kung Foo Kid
Member
Howlin' Mad said:
I'm on a Mac so I have never got a chance to try Astropop before. Anyone have a quick impression of whether it is any good.
Howlin' Mad
Member
IMO, these games aren't too hot. Almost too simplistic. Astropop - grab blocks and shoot them back up to make combinations that vanish. This game is not addicting in a Meteos or Lumines kind of way and after about 10 levels with nary a change in difficulty, you'll move on to play something else. Feeding Frenzy - eat smaller fish, grow, eat bigger fish, probably a good game for the smaller crowd.
Mr. Lemming
Member
Well Wik came out on a Tuesday in the evening...
TekunoRobby
Tag of Excellence
That's the best news all week, thanks Jedimike!jedimike said:
Here's a Hoopworld thread with a recent interview:
http://www.ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=82270
Howlin' Mad
Member
I love Wik, GW:E, Mutant Storm, Outpost Kaloki, but the one genre that I'd love to see is the RTS. Give me a RTS with single player campaigns and good multiplayer, there's a ton of good old school titles that would be great to port.
Baron Aloha
A Shining Example
Kung Foo Kid said:
Have you ever played any of the Magical Drop games? Its essentially the same thing.
krypt0nian
Banned
jedimike said:
oh hellz yeah!
Pedigree Chum
Banned
Jesiatha said:
Please port over Puzzle Fighter and Lumines.
krypt0nian
Banned
Jesiatha said:
Jesiatha, man you guys deserve all this and more. And I have to say, you freaking live on LIVE. Everytime I log in you are there. What are you playing multi? We need to have a GAF night with you sometime!
BenjaminBirdie
Banned
Norse said:
After hearing about Publishers' reactions to Arcade and the Marketplace on the latest Major Nelson (with some proposing up to 25 titles) I think it's safe to say by the end of the year there won't be any genre of game that hasn't had a representative announced our actually on our hard drives. (Except maybe an RPG)
But that's just speculation. I too would love some Shooter action. Let's get Square to the table to drop a little Einhander on our asses.
BenjaminBirdie said:
Maybe we'll even see some RPGs come out on the Arcade? There's no need to update the games or add multiplayer, but a straight port would be enough IMO if they're only 400-800 points. Some RPGs from the 16 bit era would be a perfect complement for all the 2D shooters and arcade games
krypt0nian said:
Thanks! I actually am not on Live much right now (too busy at work), but we leave the Xbox on most of the time. I probably show up as in the dashboard or media center 99% of the time. That means we're watching some TV or my wife has music on for our kid.
Right now I'm trying to finally get through Chaos Theory, and also playing the occasional round of Geo Wars. If someone wants to schedule an Arcade multiplayer night, I'll try to show up for that. Maybe it would be good to do one after Marble Blast comes out.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
XBLA games are downloaded from MS web servers IIRC (correct me if I am wrong) and with the micro-transactions idea (which can expand to buy a group of XBLA games for a "bundle" price) should encourage more and more publishers (big and small ones) to push XBLA a lot (especially those who already have Xbox 360 SDK's already and have some experience using the development tools for the console, even some basic experience... not all titles need to use all three cores and long shader programs 
).
No risks over-producing or under-producing game discs, not to worry about retailers' cut on your games and managing shipment quotas to retailers, being able to target customers accustomed to Yahoo/MSN Messenger style downloadable/online playable games and not just hard-core gamers that worry about anisotropic filtering or correct dynamic shadow casting by objects illuminated by lights in the level, etc...
Games like Geometry Wars, Joust, Robotron, but even newer games like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy could work (you could compress or eliminate all videos with MPEG4 and leave them in 480p and compress well the audio and compress heavily all other art assets to make the game fit the < 64 MB current constraint) online... there is tons of space and with the online distribution model and the openness of the platform (well, if you are a licensed Xbox 360 developer, XBLA is almost a free aside opportunity given to you to create yourself a new cash stream).
People want content, people like low cost games, people like not moving outside their house to get new games, people like to be able to try demo's before they buy a game, people like quick downloads... XBLA provides them all this.
With good compression of video and audio data even many games from the PSOne era could efficiently come to XBLA (hopefully they allow 480p video for FMV for XBLA games): think about it many PSOne games used M-JPEG for videos not MPEG4 AVC (you could decode via software on the XeCPU) and Redbook Audio or compressed audio with probably much less efficiency in terms of quality:file size ratio compared to WMA.
N64, SNES, NES, MD/Genesis/Sega-CD/32X, Master System, a large percentage of various arcade platforms, etc... games should have NO problem being prepared for and sold on XBLA and people would buy them... and if the Virtual Console idea pulls more and more people in the "retro" mood the more this will benefit XBLA (unless Nintendo binds developers that release games on the Virtual Console service to exclusivity which would SUCK!!!!).
XBOX 360 has more than enough raw processing power to very easily allow the use of multi-platform oriented engines dedicated to provide resources as IF you were developing with 2D focused platforms avoiding a lot of work (I think there is a market for light weight multi-purpose 2D and 3D engines specifically for the requirements of the XBLA delivery method... hey, we will see XBLA titles based on UE 3, so I do not think I should say more about it).
If developers are smart they will find a way to enable user-created content, for a price... think about an XBLA specific version of the AGS http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ engine: like what they are trying to do with that PSP game and associated game creation tool, but with much added power(which can be used to abstract in inefficient, you are not programming DOOM IV, yet easy to use wrapper functions doing lots of work for you) and most of all backed by the XBOX LIVE platform.
I hope for gamers' sake that most of all Xbox 360 licensed developers and MS itself realize the potential gold-mine they are sitting on and that Sony and Nintendo understand and implement an online system that is at worst equally robust and well featured, but aims at beating it (this way LIVE too would try to evolve and beat their competitors, etc... and we gamers would benefit too
).
).No risks over-producing or under-producing game discs, not to worry about retailers' cut on your games and managing shipment quotas to retailers, being able to target customers accustomed to Yahoo/MSN Messenger style downloadable/online playable games and not just hard-core gamers that worry about anisotropic filtering or correct dynamic shadow casting by objects illuminated by lights in the level, etc...
Games like Geometry Wars, Joust, Robotron, but even newer games like Gauntlet: Dark Legacy could work (you could compress or eliminate all videos with MPEG4 and leave them in 480p and compress well the audio and compress heavily all other art assets to make the game fit the < 64 MB current constraint) online... there is tons of space and with the online distribution model and the openness of the platform (well, if you are a licensed Xbox 360 developer, XBLA is almost a free aside opportunity given to you to create yourself a new cash stream).
People want content, people like low cost games, people like not moving outside their house to get new games, people like to be able to try demo's before they buy a game, people like quick downloads... XBLA provides them all this.
With good compression of video and audio data even many games from the PSOne era could efficiently come to XBLA (hopefully they allow 480p video for FMV for XBLA games): think about it many PSOne games used M-JPEG for videos not MPEG4 AVC (you could decode via software on the XeCPU) and Redbook Audio or compressed audio with probably much less efficiency in terms of quality:file size ratio compared to WMA.
N64, SNES, NES, MD/Genesis/Sega-CD/32X, Master System, a large percentage of various arcade platforms, etc... games should have NO problem being prepared for and sold on XBLA and people would buy them... and if the Virtual Console idea pulls more and more people in the "retro" mood the more this will benefit XBLA (unless Nintendo binds developers that release games on the Virtual Console service to exclusivity which would SUCK!!!!).
XBOX 360 has more than enough raw processing power to very easily allow the use of multi-platform oriented engines dedicated to provide resources as IF you were developing with 2D focused platforms avoiding a lot of work (I think there is a market for light weight multi-purpose 2D and 3D engines specifically for the requirements of the XBLA delivery method... hey, we will see XBLA titles based on UE 3, so I do not think I should say more about it
).If developers are smart they will find a way to enable user-created content, for a price... think about an XBLA specific version of the AGS http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ engine: like what they are trying to do with that PSP game and associated game creation tool, but with much added power(which can be used to abstract in inefficient, you are not programming DOOM IV
, yet easy to use wrapper functions doing lots of work for you) and most of all backed by the XBOX LIVE platform.I hope for gamers' sake that most of all Xbox 360 licensed developers and MS itself realize the potential gold-mine they are sitting on and that Sony and Nintendo understand and implement an online system that is at worst equally robust and well featured, but aims at beating it (this way LIVE too would try to evolve and beat their competitors, etc... and we gamers would benefit too
).Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Well, the last lines came after the technological enthusiastic part of me was a bit calmer having blown off some steam .
.Musashi Wins!
FLAWLESS VICTOLY!
Karg said:
There's going to be a Full Auto demo!?! Wonderful.
RE: Nintendo exclusivity on the Virtual Console... there's nothing stopping Microsoft from doing the same if a war over classic gaming breaks out in this new sales space. I think there's probably some legal precedents to be set here though with regard to NES/SNES/Genesis/Saturn/etc. games and how closely those games are tied to the platform they appeared upon, especially since Nintendo are offering a service and also sold the NES and SNES. Sega is probably a little different situation.
Either way, there will be "exclusives" on both of them if only because some developers are going to pick one over the other, you know?
Either way, there will be "exclusives" on both of them if only because some developers are going to pick one over the other, you know?
Beer Monkey
Member
Dave Long said:
Old third party games can be ported to any system in a pixel-perfect manner. The only way somebody is going to get into trouble is if they do something like write an N64 emulator that infringes on Nintendo IP. Atari 2600 and NES seem to be in the clear as far as emulation goes, but other old systems are more proprietary.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Dave Long said:
Even if Nintendo decided to be stubborn about it and threatened legal action (things like hoping to win the cause, having a legal ground ar enot even the point sometimes
) they can do nothing to stop Master System, Genesis and Saturn games from coming (running directly from an emulator).For a lot of games, the high profile ones that could sell more some more marketplace points
, the possibility of re-coding and removing mentions/references to Nintendo is also possible: do you think art assets/story/music are less important than recoding the game-code (removing calls to Nintendo libraries and replacing with newer ones) ?As long as the idea is not simply porting ZSNES to XBOX 360 and selling directly the ROM's over internet there should be plenty of ways to get the game on the platform. Tons of games were ported to other platforms (including PC and arcade machines) and for the others you can assign a small team and port the games over (nothing Square, Capcom, Namco or Konami should have problems with).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Blimblim said:
10 year old games... man that means 1996
. I sure hope companies like Square-Enix, Capcom, Konami, Tecmo, EA, etc... have not all lost code they had before that date man .Still, some games can be re-coded (if they really wanted they could get people starting the groundwork for them for free
).Art assets (graphics, music and sound effects, etc...) are VERY important, much more than the source code that manipulated them: either that or the Castlevania series would have been screwed long time ago
.You hear from developers so often that old source code is VERY hard to come by for these games. They just don't keep this stuff around. It's typical of the mentality of the entire industry. Next big thing is always coming tomorrow and no one's got time for what's here today and what was around yesterday isn't worth crap.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Well, hopefully hard to come by does not mean completely lost .
This increases the cost for XBLA ports of older classics, but if those older classics are requested... well, they will not release for 400 Marketplace Points either.
It encourages new games in a way, or at least sequels that can take advantage of the art assets and add new elements of freshness justifying a bit more the re-programming efforts.
.This increases the cost for XBLA ports of older classics, but if those older classics are requested... well, they will not release for 400 Marketplace Points either
.It encourages new games in a way, or at least sequels that can take advantage of the art assets and add new elements of freshness justifying a bit more the re-programming efforts.
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