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New Xbox Live Game Every Week
Eurogamer reports that, with Xbox Live Wednesdays already a hit, Microsoft intends to continue releasing a new XBLA title every week for the near future. The company has announced their intention to have 160 titles for their next-gen console available by the end of the year, and some 30 of those may be Xbox Live Arcade titles. From the article: "The idea is to allow Xbox 360 owners who do not own hard disks to store downloaded Live Arcade games on memory units, which allow for 64MB of data. However, with PlayStation 3 in particular likely to allow for much larger downloadable games, Microsoft runs the risk of losing out on bigger releases despite the impressive momentum Live Arcade has already built up. Erickson admits that the company is already considering the possibilities of larger memory units, but there's no word on hard-disk-only Live Arcade games or other digitally distributed titles - although it's important to note that the latter, which Microsoft is certainly considering, would fall outside his remit."
Other than the lack of playing games online, you have access to the XBL Arcade which has a bunch of games that you can buy and play. Some of these are classics (frogger, galaga, uno, etc) others are more independent (cloning clyde, outpost keoki X)...Also, you get the XBox live marketplace which has videos, music, demos, trailers, themes, background images, avatar images, etc.
So unless you like playing against others online, you can get by with just the free silver account.
The gold account is cheap anyway, less than $8 a month or less than $5 a month if you pay for the whole year. I used to pay more than that per day when I smoked cigarettes.
The only thing the free version cannot do is play on-line games against others. Live arcade, along with evertyhing else is available with the free version.
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