Some of you may have noticed this ‘Summer of Arcade’ thing that’s going on at the moment. Five of the bigger XBLA titles are being released one after another (including things like Galaga Legions and Castle Crashers) and it started this Wednesday with Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.
It costs 800M$P (£6.80) as opposed to the 400M$P price point of the original but you do get a lot of extra modes including the ‘Waves’ mode featured in Project Gotham Racing 4 and the three-minute ‘Deadline’ mode which is featured in the demo and is the source of the overall leaderboard.
Fans of the original will feel right at home with it. Personally all that screen clutter combined with this being the seventieth twin-stick shooter on XBLA means I won’t be investing but it certainly doesn’t lack any polish.
Surprisingly, Microsoft haven’t bundled out another shitty puzzle game with it under the radar so we’re onto this week’s demos.
First up is Madden NFL 09 from EA (if you didn’t already know). Quite what they’ll have added since the last one I don’t know, but if you like stupidly-named sports that don’t really exist outside of American then this is for you.
More interesting is Facebreaker which is by EA Canada who made the sublimely good Fight Night 3. It uses a similar cartoony look to the classic Ready 2 Rumble games but early impressions are that it’s more PJ and Duncan than it is Dreamcast. A limited move-set (high punch, low punch, facebreaker) is a surprise, given the Fight Night pedigree but a demo is there if you fancy finding this out for yourself.
DLC is limited to some more Rock Band tedium. That’s never going to stop is it?
That’s about it for this week, except to say that Halo3 has finally reclaimed top spot in the Xbox Live rankings, ousting COD4 thanks to some recent free content. GTA4 is still in third place despite being well… not all that.
No new full price releases next week but I’ll be briefly looking at Braid on XBLA which may or may not be an annoying 1200M$P and probably a bunch of costumes, levels and characters for Soul Calibur 4. Oh joy.
Richie Harkness – www.peoww.co.uk
