Not even as fun as it looks..



5 or 6 minutes that I will never see again were spent last night playing the trial version of Tron. Not a huge amount of time or anything, but still enough of an irritant to inspire this post. While moving my little pixel ship or whatever it is around the board I realized something...I am not having fun. AT ALL. And it got me to wondering why these games were even put on Xbox Live Arcarde in the first place. I mean we are in the so-called "next-generation" of gaming now right? So when does the time come that we finally leave the past behind us?

My main point of contention with these games is that the controls are terrible. When I was playing Tron I got to the level where you get to control a little man and move him around the map and shoot ONE bullet at a time at swarming enemies. ONE BULLET, people. You know why you only get to shoot one bullet at a time? Not to make the game challenging, which I am sure they intended to do, but because that's all the fuck you could do in a game back then. Like we're talking 25 years ago. These days, when it comes to gaming, my idea of fun has matured past the point of pew-pewing little pixels that I can barely see and that look like deep fried shit. I understand missing the good old days of one's youth, but on the other hand, I don't want to go back to the days when I ran from girls because I thought they had cooties. I like my current attitude towards girls. Its the same with my videogames.


Whee!!

Instead of porting over the exact replicas of these antiquated titles, I think XBLA should be populated with new games that have an old school arcade feel. Some games accomplish this feeling, the best instance of which in my opinion is Geometry Wars. G-wars feels like it could have been an old school arcade classic, with its simple shooter gameplay and high-score leaderboard chasing, but what I like about it is that it's graphics and style are right at home in the current generation of gaming. I also got to play some Omega Five for the first time last night as well, and this could be used as another example, current gen gaming with an old school feel. Games like these one can pick up and play casually while being treated to nice graphics, and nice controls. Not piss-poor visuals (if you can call them that) and overwhelming difficulty.

Some of the old games I am glad they didn't fuck with..Street Fighter II turbo, Sonic, Pac-man, Tetris, Contra. But these games stand the test of time because of their timelessness. And possibly they were released sometime AFTER 1985. Anything older than that is simply not fun or executed well enough to grace this generation of console gaming. The best games on XBLA (Geometry Wars, Lumines Live, Small Arms) are the one's that are brand new but take some aspect of classic gaming that we love, and tweak it, turn it on its head and smack it around until it feels both old and new. Games like that are only what this generation of systems should have the audacity to charge for.