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Hands-On With Microsoft's Game Room Launch Titles
While on the CES show floor, we got a chance to get some hands-on time with Microsoft's Game Room for the Xbox 360 and PC. Announced earlier in the show (link), Game Room is an interactive digital arcade that users can customize and share with friends. The company is launching with 30 classic titles, and plans to have over 1,000 arcade originals in a few years. According to Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg, the company will release seven new titles each week.
Unlike retro Live Arcade titles, which are often given audio and graphical makeovers to make them look and sound better, the Game Room titles will remain true to the original cabinets. Greenberg told us that the team is obsessed with delivering perfect replications of the original titles to the point that the games run as if on original hardware. "It's like going back at listening to a classic Beatles album on LP – it's just as we remember it," he said. "Not digitally remastered, not up-res, not modified with new modes – it's exactly as it was."
We scrolled through the list of available games and tried out classics like Pitfall, RealSports Tennis, and Red Baron. We also played around with the room customization options and found kitschy items to place around your arcade, like trap doors, wanted posters, boom boxes, and more. This is the full list of games we saw in the Game Room, with their original platform:
Adventure- Intellivision
Armor Battle- Intellivision
Asteroids Deluxe- Arcade
Astrosmash- Intellivision
Batlantis- Arcade
Centipede- Arcade
Combat- Atari 2600
Crystal Castles- Arcade
Finalizer- Arcade
Football- Intellivision
Gravitar- Arcade
Jungler- Arcade
Lunar Lander- Arcade
Millipede- Arcade
Outlaw- Arcade
Pitfall- Atari 2600
RealSports Tennis- Atari 2600
Red Baron- Arcade
River Raid- Atari 2600
Road Fighter- Arcade
Scramble- Arcade
Sea Battle- Intellivision
Skiing- Intellivision
Space Armada- Intellivision
Space Hawk- Intellivision
Spider Fighter- Atari 2600
Star Raiders- Atari 2600
Sub Hunt- Intellivision
Tempest- Arcade
Tutankham- Arcade
Yars' Revenge- Atari 2600
Game Room will hit PCs and Xbox 360s this spring.
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