Xbox Live's Game Room Review

Xbox Live's Game Room

It was nice idea, poorly executed.

Written by Steven Williamson, 25 March 2010

Finally, it's arrived! After all these months of waiting and all the hype, Xbox 360-owning, retro enthusiasts have the chance to experience gaming like it used to be with the launch of the Game Room. I was excited as anybody to finally get to download the Game Room, but to say I'm disappointed is a gross understatement.

I guess I was expecting to be transported back to a moment in time that I remember with great fondness; all of those great games that laid down the foundations for the games that we play today. I was certainly expecting some kind of social hub, buzzing with activity and perhaps a cool place to hang out full of retro goodness to pimp up and show off to my mates. It turns out, however, that the Game Room is a fairly poorly designed and pricey mess.
Here are five reasons, though there were more, why I think the Game Room is bad.


1)There are no free games in the free game packs.

When you download the Game Room you get the option to download two game packs. You'll probably, like me, assume that you'll be able to play some of these games for free; the ideal introduction to the other retro games on offer. You'd be wrong. The game packs merely give you access to a trial of the 30 games currently available in the arcade. And you can only get to trial each game once! I loaded up a demo of Outlaw and expected to be play against the CPU in this 1 vs 1 cowboy fight. No, I needed someone else to plug in their Xbox 360 controller. As no-one was around I spent a few seconds shooting the static cowboy a few times before quitting, while uttering a few swear words under my breath. When someone was eventually around to test it out with me, I couldn't trial it again. I was ordered to pay 40 MS Points for the privilege of buying a play session. I politely declined.


2)How much for a game?

The price per game is 240 Microsoft points. In order to ever build up a decent collection that's a fair amount of dosh in the long run for games that are 20 years old and more. There's also an option to buy the game both for your Xbox 360 and PC. The price of the game then goes up to 400 MS Points. There should be special deals a special price for buying, say, 10 games. Anything to make buying these games a little more attractive. I'd be tempted to pay 100 MS Points to play a game I haven't played before, even if I play it once it's not too much of a loss. But the price point here has been set to high.


3)No Lobby, no wandering around the arcade and no social interaction.

I was thinking something along the lines of PlayStation Home on a smaller scale when I imagined the Game Room. We know that MS can do lobby systems brilliantly, but there's just nothing here. It's such a shame; we could have all got together and moaned collectively about our disappointment. You can't even walk around the arcade. The User Interface is only retro by the fact that it is so basic and feels so empty and uninspired. You just control a camera and zoom around rooms that you can customize by placing what amounts to a 'load of old tat' in your virtual arcade - a chainsaw? What the is that about?


4)The games don't cut it, yet.

There's still plenty of time, of course, so the games are going to get better but the launch line-up is pretty poor. If you can choose a dozen games out of these 30 titles that you want to download I'd be surprised. I found half-a-dozen games that I thought about , but then I decided against and bought an 8 slice Hot 'n Spicy pizza with breaded chicken strips, garlic bread and a liter bottle of Coke with the money I'd saved.
Here's the line-up:
Adventure
Armor Battle
Asteroids Deluxe
Astrosmash
Centipede
Battlantis
Crystal Castles
Gravitar
Lunar Lander
Red Baron
Combat
Finalizer
Football
Tempest
Jungler
Millipede
Outlaw
Road Fighter
Realsports Tennis
Sea Battle
Scramble
Skiing, Mountain Madness/Super Pro
Space Armada
Space Hawk
Shao-lin's Road (Kicker)
Star Raiders
Super Cobra
Sub Hunt
Tutankham
Yar's Revenge


5)Some games haven't been ported efficiently

Why am I experiencing some lag and having to wait for more than a couple of seconds for a game to load? When playing Millipede there seems to be a delay from when I press the fire button to the action being translated on screen. Generally, the games just feel wrong with the Xbox 360 control pad and awkward to control. So I wacked out the Mad Katz arcade stick, which I bought specifically to play Frogger on the Xbox Live Arcade. It made no difference. Either some of these games are poor ports, or the original games were much worse than I remember.
There's still plenty of hope for Game Room and there are some cool features, such as being able to save in-game and rewind play - and you do get 5 gamerscore points just for downloading it - but it's not a great start. It doesn't even feel finished.

As reported by GamerZines.