Xbox Game Room

[Jack McSlay]

As some of you may know, thit is MS's answer to Wii's Virtual Console and PS3 home.
Basically you buy classic arcade games and you build your own virtual arcade shop, which you can use to organize your games to your liking, as well as invite your friends for a challenge or just to see your collection

The good:

• It also gives you historical info about the game industry and the games. It's very few so for, but I guess they'll keep adding more later on.
• Arcade cabinets  you'll see in it are replicas of the original cabinets. Intellivision and atari games are represented by an arcade cabinet with a console where the arcade controls would be.
• There's a pretty good ammount of customization. You can choose the theme of each room separately and there's a number of decorative items you can put rather than just fill the room with arcade cabinets.
• It awards players with ACTUAL unlockables rather than just giving you an achievement for stuff you do.

The bad:

• Single play is Too. Damn. Expensize! Seriously, 40 points for a single play? I can go out and play King of Fighters 97 on a REAL arcade for about that much. Arcade games have historically costed 1/50th of the price of the full console game or less in arcade times (and the arcade version usually beaten the turd out of the console versions back then), doing it for 1/6th-1/10th is ridiculous. On arcades, those 10-year old games are usually the ones you spend 1 quarter to get 2,3 credits, let alone 30-year old games, 2 quarters for 1 credit are typically for relatively new machines.
• MS promises to launch over 1000 games for it over the next 3 years, but the launch lineup is just terrible. Excluded the games on it games which you can find fully legit clones around, most games range from bad to nearly unplayable. Out of 30, there's probably 3 at best actually worth spending money on.
• Button configuration in made by presets, there's no manual mapping of buttons. This means playing those ARCADE games with an ARCADE stick is likely going to be very awkward.
• It's a GUI, not a hub. You cannot walk around and take a close look at the arcade cabinets just to look at the artwork like you'd probably do in a real-life arcade.
• The image is going to look ugly and pixelated no matter what you do. Capcom did a great job making a good-looking arcade feeling with Final Fight Double Impact, but this one was obviously not done with as much loving.

The ugly:

• It act as a game. That means you need to enter the game menu to access it, which ins't very intuitive when they could instead put it as a whole new menu, or even replace the game selection completely with it.
• There's a limit of 3 floors with 4 rooms each, and each room can have 8-10 games. This gives a maximum of 120 games, and while unlikely, it ins't impossible to fill these completely (this doesn't stop you from buying more, but you can't put more on your game room, you'll need to access the guy for that.
• It plays only games specifically made for it. I know you can't just take the classic games that were launched previously on XBLA itself and put there, but it shouldn't be so hard to talk to the companies that previously launched classic games through it to include them on launch


• I couldn't test any of the social features because none of my friends seem to have downloaded it yet.
• Some(all?) of the decorative items have a maximum ammount you can use. I guess they wanted the players to put variety on it, but it would have been neat to fill all the remaining spaces with the WIP arcade cabint there is.
• Looks like they rushed the thing and forget to fix the text strings. For example, when you look at the control scheme, instead of "jump" and "fire", you get something like "GAME_BUTTON1" and "GAME_BUTTON2". And not just on one or two games. It applies to ALL of them.

The dubious:

• Some of the games available for it have previously been made available already via regular XBLA, such as Centipede. Wether that's good or bad depends on if people who bought the XBLA will need to pay for the same game again to playin via game room
• There's two versions you can buy: one than can be played only on a single system for $3 and one that can be played on any system the service is available to for $5. I don't know if you can just pay the remaining $2 to get the multiplatform version after paying the $3 one or you need to pay the whole $5 if you want it.