Casual Play on 360 Live Arcade

twoallbeefpatties writes "Columnist Chris Suellentrop writes an article for Slate describing how his desire for casual gaming is fulfilled more by the 360 than the Wii due to the presence of simpler games available over Live Arcade. The availability of oldschool Nintendo games on the Wii network fulfills his nostalgic hardcore gaming side, but when he really wants to just relax, he'd rather be trying to top his Live high score on Root Beer Tapper. Says Suellentrop: 'The Nintendo Wii will transform the way we play games at home. But the Xbox 360, through its Xbox Live service, is building something equally compelling: a celestial arcade, where casual and hard-core gamers alike can connect over the Internet and find like-minded souls. For an old-timer like me, the celestial arcade also lets me feel like I still have some of my old gaming mojo.'"

for the record

[User 956]

Geometry Wars is the best game ever for fans of old-school shooters like centipede, asteroids, & galaga

Re:XBLA - Good, But Lacking...

[Preeminence]

XBLA is actually about to get a number of classic boardgames. No Monopoly or Scrabble (the licensing fees would probably be astronomical so as to not outstrip sales of the real thing), but games like Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne and Alhambra, all very involving strategy board games, should be here in the spring. There's a pretty nice interview with the lead developer of Settlers at http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/22/off-the-grid-int erviews-brian-reynolds-of-big-huge-games/ [joystiq.com]

Re:Playing Catch Up

[stubear]

Microsof actually has about 10 years of prior experience in this field, not just the one year head start for the XBOX360. Microsoft purchased a company with a single product, The Internet Game Zone, and turned it into a web-based game site. Initially there were a few card games (hearts, spades, bridge), backgammon, chess and checkers, or something like that. They started adding games like Luxor, Zuma, and Bejewelled not long after that. zone.msn.com now has hundreds of games, some flash based, some java based. A number of these are ripe for inclusion on XBOX Live Arcade and hopefully Zune 2.0.

Re:Playing Catch Up

[Kalriath]

I think they will be. In case you didn't know, the Microsoft Games Division just this week sent out invitations to join the Games for Windows Live (Xbox Live for Windows) beta to some people who registered interest, which will essentially merge their Windows online gaming division with their Xbox gaming division and have one platform - also allowing things like Halo PC players playing against Xbox Halo players in one environment. I presume we'll see the inclusion of all the arcade style Zone games into the XBLA library.