As you probably already know, a BETA of Street Fighter HD has been made available today on Xbox Live Arcade. This is in the UK, I'm not sure about anywhere else. You will need to buy the Capcom published 'Wolf of the Battlefield - Commando 3' game for 800 points (about £6.20 I think), and then download the BETA through it's options.

I've heard Commando 3 isn't a very good game, and the Street Fighter HD BETA will run out after eight weeks. Also only Ryu, Ken, and one stage are available, so some might not like this purchase if they really don't give a monkeys about Commando 3. This BETA does have online play though, which is probably it's purpose for existing.

... I just bought it. There is no one player mode, you have to play against someone over the net, or use the two player "local" mode. I'm now in the process of continually doing searches for online matches, no one is coming up at all. Twice I've tried to create a game in Tournament Mode, both times my Xbox 360 totally froze. The first screen in the game asks us to send bug reports via the site, I normally can't be arsed, but I might actually do that this time, if these stupid problems continue.

Doing a quick search is like many other XBLA games, it only searches for about 10 seconds before it reports that no one else is playing. It can't be that hard to have an option in which it continually searches for another player until you decide to cancel, it would be similar to creating your own match, but quicker. Perhaps that would kill the servers or something, all I know right now is that I can't even see the damn game running, because I can't connect to anyone and I don't have a second joypad.

I only just found out that an 8 player Bomberman is available on the Xbox 360. I know, it's been out for ages, I'm slow. It's playable online... IT'S PLAYABLE ONLINE!!

This is frikin amazing, I think I really do need to get a 360 and actually keep it this time. I chickened out the first time, I bought one about 6 months ago and instantly got cold feet due to the thoughts of 2 much money being spent and the fact that I couldn't think of any games I wanted all that much. I sold it the next day. This was before Bio Shock and Pacman Championship Edition had come out, I've also found out that games like Sonic 2 and (I think) Streets Of Rage 2 have 2 player online as well. More and more reasons to get a 360, get some of those points things, pay the online fee, play Xbox Live Arcade games, but hardly ever actually play normal 360 games. There are some pretty good (normal disk based) games out for it now, but let's face it, the 360 is a FPS monster. There's really not much else for it, oh, and driving games too, there's loads of them. It's gradually becoming more and more like a PC, I guess that's to be expected considering who made it.

Another thing about Bomberman; I thought my Bomberman online fantasy's had been answered when I got it on the DS, but perhaps no one plays it because no one is found on an online worldwide search when I play it. I sit the DS there for 10 minutes and no one joins in, it's so lame! ONCE one person joined, it was laggy (with one person!?) and I think I recall the dude just dropped out after 5 minutes. CRAP! But I guess games like Bomberman are always going to have lag, the 360 probably will as well.

That little green guy and that guy with a black helmet from Star Wars will be in Soul Calibur IV, as you probably already know. Apparently the green one will be in the Xbox 360 version, and the black one will be in the PS3 one. You see how the colours match? Brilliant... kinda. I think this is pretty neat, even though I'm not a Star Wars fan. Having artists and animators who can actually make good 3D models is what will make this different from all the other Star Wars games, and the fact that they'll be in a game that has a decent fighting system.

The strange thing about this is that these characters are so massively popular that it kind of overshadows the rest of the game. The trailer even says something at the end about how perhaps the swords have met their match, and then shows Darth Vader and Yoda. Soul Calibur IV will probably sell a lot more because of these two dudes making an appearance... I just noticed, IV... Iv-y, the game should be centered around Ivy! That would be awesome.

All this brings to light how so many awesome characters/franchises are neglected in games, or are completely ignored. Bring on a new Back to the Future game, I want my time traveling flying cars dammit.