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The Xbox Live Arcade - One Year Later
Via Joystiq, an article at GamePro asking is Live Arcade worth it? One year after its launch, the service has been transformed by lots of retro classics, some brand new games, and the addition of the (now working) movie and television download service. What parts are good, what parts are bad, and ultimately, is it worth it? From the article: "Many of XBLA's original games draw their inspirations from classic video games, and the poster child for XBLA originals is Bizarre Creations' Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Released with the launch of Xbox 360, Geometry Wars showed a skeptical world just how cool original yet classically styled downloadable games could be. It plays like a crazed combination of all-time classics Asteroids and Robotron: 2084, with your lone, triangular spaceship pitted against literally endless hordes of nasty geometric shapes. The level of onscreen carnage is legendary; never has a game had more spectacular or over-the-top particle effects, showing that even simple games can be flashy."
Via Joystiq, an article at GamePro asking is Live Arcade worth it?
Worth what? The nothing extra you have to pay if you hve a 360 and a broadband connection? Acquiring a broadband connection if you don't already have one? Acquiring a 360 if you don't already have one? (The answers are yes, maybe, and no, incidentally).
I don't really know what question the article is trying to answer.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
... is what comes out when you put Space Duel, Tempest and Robotron 2084 in a blender and press the 'Puree' button. And there's still a (discontinued,banninated) Win32 version floating out there on the InterTubes
I do love the Live Arcade and I love many games on it, but for my taste the release of arcade games is too slow, MS struggle to hit their target of one a week, whilst Nintendo is throwing out 5 - 10 a week. Some may argue that Nintendo has a bigger library but I don't think that's the case - MS has a massive library of PC games as has been demonstrated by the release of Doom and the upcoming release of Worms and such, there's plenty more PC classics they could throw out there, I can't beleive getting the IP holders to allow and follow through with this is the bottleneck here.
The other issue regarding content is the fact they've tried to shove a patch for Texas hold 'em and a set of Kameo Uno card decks on us as the supposed weekly game, that really does sound like they're clutching at straws some weeks to get any content at all out (some weeks have missed any kind of release entirely). From what I've read and what I've gathered the bottleneck seems to be MS' certification process if anything, god only knows what it involves but the speed it takes almost makes me wonder if they do a full source code audit of every submission couple with rigorous beta testing - that's no bad thing if you have the resources on the task to get it done rapidly.
I'm hoping with XNA people will start churning out stuff that MS will see and say "Hey, we need to get this onto the arcade ASAP", but even XNA is bottlenecked right now in that the only distribution method is to zip up your XNA project source and assets and e-mail them or whatever to whoever you're distributing to so that they can compile them using their copy of VC# and deploy it to their 360 themselves but if I've got a game I want to sell on the arcade, I don't want to be handing out source so I'm not entirely sure how MS expects anyone to get a game to be popular enough whilst at the same time not handing out your source when that's the only distribution method. You could use XNA and deploy a commercial version of your project for Windows but that's hardly an option if you're designing around the 360 controller, the 360 controller does work on Windows but I doubt many people would buy one to play games on their Windows machine.
MS is getting there and they're well ahead of Sony, but only just up with Nintendo on the whole downloadable games thing - XNA has potential though so let's hope they can convince the MS execs that XNA is good so that the XNA team is given permission to make a proper process for game distribution as well as permission to add networking support to XNA - something that it sorely needs!
Right now, your xbox can access xbox live, a closed system whos content is controlled and regulated by Microsost. Everything on it can be verified to be safe, and to work on your xbox. Opening up this secure, closed network to the hostilities of the public internet can't be something they're in a hurry to do. A web browser, especially if its Internet Explorer (and it certainly would be on the xbox) opens up the possibility of arbitrary content and code to be viewed and downloaded. I imagine there are people on this very website who would love to be able to exploit a browser bug and attack a Microsoft console.
I'm guessing that Microsoft has enough web browser experience to know not to include one.