We Tour The Xbox Live Game Room

When the Xbox Live Game Room was first announced, I’ll admit that I was skeptical. The idea of wandering around a virtual arcade as my avatar and buying a handful of arcade games that are already available on XBLA didn’t sound very appealing. After getting my feet wet with some retro goodness in the Game Room at X10, however, and I’m thinking this might be a cool idea after all.

If you were to start up your Xbox with the intention of checking out the Game Room, you’d go about it much like you access Netflix. No big download necessary, you simply click on the Game Room and enter. Within, you’ll find your personal arcade space that’s initially populated with 30 games to try out. You get 5 free credits to demo the games, and after that you’ll be dropped into the store.

In the Game Room store, you have several options. You can play any given arcade game for a single credit of 40 Microsoft Points ($0.50), unlock the game to play on your 360 for 240 MS Points ($3), or buy a play-anywhere version that allows you to play on the 360 or PC for 460 MS Points ($5). If you buy the 360-only version and later decide that you want the option to play on PC, you don’t have to repurchase the game, you only have to upgrade for $2.



Navigating the Game Room itself is a breeze. The area is divided like a multi-leveled arcade, segmented into rooms that can be populated with purchased arcade games. These arcade games are dropped into their designated rooms in the form of classic game cabinets. You can even visit your friends’ arcades to check out their games and invite them to yours. This will even help you unlock some of the (as of now) 60 achievements in order to earn some of Game Room’s 1,000 available gamerscore.

When you find a game you want to play, all you have to do is click on it and you’re ready to go. If it’s a co-op game like Combat for the Atari 2600, you’re welcome to engage in local co-op or battle a friend online. Picking up and playing old head-to-head favorites like Outlaw was a blast. If you’re a nostalgic gamer with a high definition setup like me, the option to play these relics of gaming’s past without fumbling with old, barely-working consoles and RF-adapters, then the Game Room might be for you.



If you decide to saddle up to an old classic like Centipede, you can relish in the cabinet’s meticulously detailed recreation. Even the options screens on Atari 2600 games emulate the console’s old school switchboard set-up of the ancient system. Each game has been left in its raw form, with the only noticeable upgrade to any given game being the rewind ability. If you fudge a shot in Asteroids or get smeared by a spider in Millipede, you’re free to jam a button and rewind time and undo your mistake. Remember the feeling of turning back time in Braid to give it another go? This is exactly what that feels like, but you can do it with all the games you sucked at as a kid. It feels good.

Overall, retro-minded gamers should not overlook this new Xbox Live service. If you’ve thought of this as a silly Home-like virtual world where you putz around as your avatar, you’re been mistaken. This is a clean glimpse into gaming’s past, with 7 new games rolling out every week after the initial 30-game launch next month. You’d be a fool to miss peeking behind the door of your very own arcade when the time comes.

Stay tuned to Game Informer for more news on the Xbox Live Game Room.