Online Gaming Updates

Roundtable #151: Live Arcade Invades

How many body parts would you sell for achievement points?

by IGN Staff

February 10, 2006 - Until BLACK and Fight Night Round 3 are released many of us have had gaming time to kill. A quick look at the Xbox Live leader boards indicates that for many editors the void has been filled by floating squares and rolling marbles. What makes Geometry Wars and other Live arcade titles so appealing? Is the game itself worth the $400 dollar console? Do you like other gamers looking up the smallest details of your gaming accomplishments? Can we all agree that the achievement point system was a brilliant move by Microsoft?

Take for example my idea for a 360 game. It would be called One Thousand Achievement Points. You buy the disc, get one thousand points added to your gamercard and throw it out. Sort of like King Kong. The game would cost 60 dollars and would absolutely rake in the dough.

Craig Harris, IGN Nintendo: I don't have a hell of a lot of spare time to put into a full-fledged experience nowadays, which is why the whole Xbox Live Arcade thing appeals to me. Sure, the company's nickel-and-diming a bit too much for some games -- the equivalent five bucks for Joust, for example, seems a bit pricey in today's market when Midway throws 20 or so of these games for 20 bucks on a compilation disk. But the whole Achievement element (as well as the ability to play the co-op/competitive multiplayer option online) really spices things up a bit. A handful of points added to my score for knocking out three pterodactyls in one game? I gotta try that.

Of course, quick-shot gaming experiences really appeal to me. Probably the reason why I'm comfortable running the GBA and DS channels... and probably the reason for my clinically short attention span. So I can't wait for when the Xbox Live Arcade's beefed up with more titles to download. I really need to find a way to finagle some free points out of Microsoft. It's... research! Yeah!

Peer Schneider, IGN Final Boss: Personally, I just sometimes feel like playing a simple game that's all about quick reflexes and doesn't require me to follow a storyline or fulfill objectives. That's the attraction of games like Zuma or Geometry Wars for me. I've got a few minutes to burn and every other game feels like it'd require a much bigger investment in (load) time and attention, so I just start up Zuma and play a few rounds. Of course, once you start with these deceptively simple games, you're probably playing for a while

Douglass C. Perry, IGN Xbox, Xbox 360: The appeal to Xbox Live Arcade is exactly the same as real arcade games. They're simple instant fun. US arcades have lost traction over the last 20 years not because the games were terrible -- arcade games always have been a mixed bag -- but because consoles have caught up in technology and our culture has changed to become home-centered. Take the increasing size of your TV for another example, the increase in sales of DVDs, etc. But the floundering of arcades as a business doesn't mean people have stopped loving puzzle games, 2D fighters, top-down shooters or side-scrollers. Microsoft took the arcade idea and stuck it on your Xbox 360.

The concept is a little like Grand Theft Auto in a way. You get tired of following the main story branch and you just want to **** around, so you grab a taxi, police car or fire truck, or you maul a bunch of innocent civilians, and there it is: You haven't switched to another game or leisure activity. The extraneous mini-games and other fun things around you have provided a reason not to leave the game or the system. Xbox Live Arcade, or XBLA (pronounced X-BLAH!) keeps you around in the same way.

The reason we wrote the article Xbox 360: What Now is because our interest in Geometry Wars was fully renewed. True, this interest originated from boredom, but we had somewhere to go, the "arcades."

Just like old times.

And yes, The Achievement point system is brilliant.

AMY CHEN
Vivendi Universal Games
(310) 431–4347 (office)
(310) 529-9879 (cell)
Amy.Chen@VUGames.com