Arcade round-up (360)

Yeah yeah, I know almost all of my updates that are actually about games are for the 360. Look, when they start releasing a steady stream of things I want to play on other consoles, I'll write about those too, okay?

Anyway, quite a few new things have been plopping out onto Live Arcade recently, so I thought I'd do a quick round-up of what I think about them (if you don't care then I really don't really understand why you would still be reading this blog).

Worms: I can't believe that 13 years after they first released a Worms game, they still haven't fixed the AI. It basically picks between "fearsomely accurate, can fire against the wind across the whole map and still land the shot perfectly" and "completely ineffective, shooting off the edge of the screen". How about calculating the great shot, then messing it up a little? That at least would look more believable.

Alien Hominid: Punishingly difficult, but very nice looking, shoot 'em up. Personally I find the gameplay awful, but then I was never really in to the Metal Slug games either. I'm a wuss when it comes to hard games.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: It turns out that without the rose-tinted specs, this is a really plain, boring beat 'em up. I recently discovered the same thing about the Golden Axe games, but they at least had magic and things to ride in order to offer some variation. What's the point in having co-op in something if the players never have to interact?

Assault Heroes: A good shoot 'em up, but the levels go on for so long that I ended up getting bored and deliberately lost on the second level.

Castlevania: Not getting into console games until later in life (when I had the money to buy them, since they were far too expensive for my parents to let me buy, quite sensibly in retrospect) means that I'd never really come into contact with any of these games before. I'd read about them, but the combination of Metroid-ish platform exploration and RPG stat increases sounded a bit ... well shit, really (I'll also confess here that I'm not a big Metroid fan either. At some point I should start a list of games that I don't like, but I'm always a bit afraid of it coming across as trying too hard to be edgy and cool). Anyway, I played the demo of this, and it seemed quite nice, so I may well give it a go if I run out of other stuff to play. I mean, what other Arcade platform game could I play - Cloning Clyde? No.

Jetpac Refuelled: Played the demo, thought it was pretty boring.


So, to summarise - Hexic is still the best game on Live Arcade.