Article:
Game Room on XBLA and the Joy of Spending Money...

Eighties gaming has hit the Xbox live arcade in a big way with the new Game Room brought to you by Microsoft, and to cut a long story short, I’m really beginning to hate it.

See, when you first download it, which you can do for free, you’re immediately thrown into a virtual arcade with your and your friends' avatars wandering around playing in a multi-level arcade, all decorated and jammed full of machines.

The first problem is that you don’t actively control your own avatar. You swoop around through the three-level arcade from room to room and cabinet to cabinet like a poltergeist with attention deficit disorder while your avatar merrily breezes around physically playing a game that seemingly you’re not invited to play or watch. Selfish bastard.

You’re given a small pile of arcade coins and shoved into the arcade with no explanation, no guides, no hints nor any clue as to what you’re doing. It’s not even explained to you that this is really the demo section and the real meat of the game room comes later.

So you start scanning around looking for games that you might have heard of and that you might possibly want to play for the retro feel of it. And trust me, this is where the joy is, so enjoy it fully while you can.

Let’s say you pick a machine to look at, and now suddenly you’re drowning again in options. Would you like to know the history of the game, where it came from, who made it, how old it is and the numerous sequels that came after it? How about its affect on gaming history and so on? Well no, the info page on far too many of the games goes no further than the name of the game and what year it was created.

So let’s ignore that and give it a play for real, but again it’s not so simple as that, you’re now given the option of playing a demo, playing the game, buying the game or buying the game across all platforms. Hang on a minute. You can buy the game for one price or buy it for nearly double that same price with no explanation except for ‘across all platforms’. I finally broke down and searched tinterwebs for an explanation. For those of you similarly confused, you can get Game Room for Windows too, and paying the expensive price means you have it on both PC and Xbox.