Waiting for me this morning on XBLive were two tasty little demos. Space Invaders Extreme and Arkanoid Live.
For a Retrohead like myself this is a wonderful thing to wake up to on a Wednesday morning when I should be doing coursework. I suppose I could write a review of one of them and use it for my games journalism portfolio.
Everyone knows Space Invaders so I wont really bore anyone to death with an explination, However I would recommend everyone with an Xbox live acount to try out Space Invaders Extreme. The way the designers have tinkered with the basic formula of Space Invaders to produce something similar but also bang up to date is fantastic. It is similar in concept to Pacman CE and that was fantastic! Add to that the extra visuals by none other than epileptic fit inducing game designer Jeff Minter and you have a wonderful Xbox Live game.
Now Arkanoid is another of those earlyclassic arcade games, based on Breakout, it added power ups and a fantasic variety of levels to this simple concept of a game. It may not be as famous as Space invaders or Pacman but it's still a game worthy of a tinker under the hood for a 2009 remix.
However the execution of the update doesnt seem to have been done as well as that of Space Invaders Extreme. Instead of the fantastic psycadelic visuals one expects from such an update (helped in no small part by the success of Geometry Wars), we seem instead to have been given a mid 90's PC version of Arkanoid. I doubt this game will be heading onto my "Things to buy when I get some MS points" list despite my love for the original.
Both games add the almost standard Xbox Live play.
