[360] Official XBLA thread. Complain about the new price points but buy the garbage anyway!

The first Prince of Persia also only takes about an hour to complete when you know where you're going. I fail to see how the addition of "New moves" can make it any better.

How ya doing, buddy?

Speedball 2 and Sensible Soccer remain two of the greatest games ever made. The more old Amiga games come out on XBLA arcade the better really. Here's hoping they get hold of the Bitmap Brothers back catalogue or something similar.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Without online vs mode it'd be a pretty pointless release, surely? I don't think the lure of achievement points would be enough to make up for having to pay for it again and the slightly dubious d-pad on the 360 controller.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Mo0

I can see there being a lot of people who have a 360 who didn't have a Dreamcast for a number of reasons, and having a way to legitimately play the game would be a good sell for people who, say, grew up playing SCIII.

In which case why not release the original Soul Blade? The single player Edge Master mode of that was far more fun than Soul Calibur's equivalent and if you own either SC 2 or 3, I don't really see why you'd want to play single player mode of the first one.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Metal Arms is an awesome game and one I never quite got round to finishing on the PS2 (I've no idea why, I was on the last level and not finding it particularly tough going, I imagine something new and shiny came along and distracted me). Does the originals version include online multiplayer?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Why they don't just sort their lives out and release Powerstone 2 and Chu-chu Rocket I will never know. If I had those on XBLA I might never buy another game again (Therefore possibly answering my own question).

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Yeah, the excuse sounds like bullshit to me. The only network issues I've ever experienced personally with Live is getting people with funny NAT settings in the same Halo party but even that's incredibly rare. If a game like Frontlines can cope with 50 players at once, all with different network architecture and settings in a full on FPS with the need to minimise lag so sniper rifles are still a viable option, I find it hard to believe Behemoth couldn't manage to make a stable game for four people.

Although thinking about it, do you connect to a dedicated server in Castle Crashers or are you essentially reliant on a direct connection to the other people because that might explain the piss-poor connectivity. This might put off smaller developers from including too much online stuff if they're going to need to shell out for a bunch of servers to ensure people can play the damn thing.

FELIPE NO

No, Kaos have dedicated servers. It's that and only allowing you to talk to four people at once that lets you have 25 a side with very little lag. You can host your own games but the lag is crippling. I assumed most games worked like that.

How ya doing, buddy?

Xbox Originals rather than XBLA but Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is now available for 1,200 points. Personally I think it's a better game than GTA:IV but I'm not sure it's so good I'd want to pay for it again.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Tritoch

I'm considering getting Scrabble if anyone else here is. That one's an NA-only release for some reason, so I guess that counts out PAL people.

That's probably to avoid the problems caused by your country's failure at basic spelling. Given how bitchy some kids get online when you pull off what they consider a cheap kill in games like Halo, I can only imagine the tirade of "OMG YOU FAG NIGGER" you'd get if you beat them at Scrabble using the word "Flavour".

How ya doing, buddy?

Having read a few things abouit Flock, most notably in Edge about a month ago I might well pick that up. It looks suitably silly and fun.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

There's lots of online stores that sell MSPoints and just email you the code though. Could he not buy some from there and email you the code?

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by GB

Another question is whether or not you'd be able trust these people with your credit card information.

There's some fairly reputable retailers offering them and all the ones I've ever used took payment through PayPal so never had my credit card information.

Internet shopping is statistically safer than using your credit card in a high street store these days you know.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I dunno, I'm sure I managed a good 70 odd hit combo once or twice and I'm far from being an expert at the game. Anyway, it's nice to have some achievements once in a while which are actually, you know, an achievement, needing some skill to get rather than just a lot of free time.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

If they're Zune ones, it's probably due to MS dropping the Zune recently and needing to shift out anything with the logo on it.

FELIPE NO

Ha ha ha, what a bunch of fucking idiots. The Zune team were disbanded in February and pretty much every commentator suggested that their pathetic 4% market share meant they were getting out of the market. I'm still not convinced there'll be another after the latest launch, I imagine they're simply chucking it out as they'd already nearly finished building it. They can't really give them away at the moment.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

It probably helps that they know you by name now though Skills.

"Thank you for calling Microsoft. For technical support, press 1, for sales enquiries, please press 2, if this is Skills asking for a refund, please press 3".

Jam it back in, in the dark.

In other XBLA news, Worms 2 is fab. Good points are it's pretty well balanced and actually encourages using bazookas and grenades rather than all the sillier stuff that wipes out the screen, the petrol bomb is a viable weapon, online runs pretty quick and there's a ton of people playing although ranked matches are harder to find and annoying since there are a few achievements that rely on them. The single player is fun enough too. Bad points are the scenery editor is pretty weak and I don't think there's a herd of cows weapon any more. Worth the £8 or so they're asking for it though I reckon.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

The petrol bomb is handy if someone is backed up in a crater I find as if you land it in front of them, the splash of fire tends to just hit underneath them meaning they slide up and down on it for the full five seconds and end up in the pit burned out by the flames afterwards. It's a shame they made the clusters from cluster bombs come out randomly, rather than with the momentum of the original shot as I'm sure they used to, as it makes chucking them with a short fuse for maximum spread of clusters (Like in a crates match when you want to blow up a shit load of stuff at once) a bit more risky and reliant on luck. The last Worms game I bought was the first 3D one and I'm sure the Buffalo thing was still a mad cow in that. It's more the herd I miss though, three of those off a ninja rope swing was my trademark attack...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I think they have tried to tone down all the bigger weapons, certainly since the first Armageddon game but then the maps are relatively much smaller. An old style Concrete Donkey would pretty much kill everything on one of the new vertical maps, although I can see it being one of those that gets me the 6 worms with one shot achievement. It's a real shame you can't specify the number of bridges and scenery items like you used to as we'd pretty much always play with two tiny bits of land at either side of the map and one or two huge bridges across the middle with the unwritten rule that whoever went first had to use a kamikaze across the bridge.

One upshot of the trend towards grenades and bazookas being more useful is that I'm winning quite a few matches as there seems to be a lot of kids who can't hit shit with either and don't know basic skills like curling a bazooka shot using the wind.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Tritoch

Several other weapon-based achievements count there too, like the one for using 10 Armageddons.

Really? Because I used an Armageddon in the firing range when I was going through when I first got it to see how each weapon worked now and it didn't count it on the Achievement page that tracks how many times you did each thing.

Apart from the obviously annoying "Do this in a ranked match" ones, the achievements are all pretty decent in this and the kind of things likely to crop up in general play after a while anyway. I damn near won a match with the Prod yesterday without realising that was an achievement but the guy got stuck on a tiny pixel of land and didn't fall in the water.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I will gladly spend most of my go pissing about with ninja ropes trying to reach someone to prod them into the water rather than simply shoot something at them to knock them in. Best Worms weapon ever frankly.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I played a few rounds of 1 vs 100 last night and it's pretty good fun. The questions are tough enough towards the end of the round to make getting epic scores tantalisingly tricky and I like the way it matches you against three other people so you feel like you're competing, rather than just answering questions for half an hour. My best score was 111,000 odd, fairly short of the 140,000 you need to get on the high score table but certainly above average. I might have a go at one of the live ones if I happen to be in on Friday or Saturday evening.

FELIPE NO

Surely if you mash the buttons though you just get a lot wrong and get no streak bonus? There were some people playing in the beta games I played the other night with an average answer time of like 0.46 seconds and they managed a grand total of fuck all points and one would imagine, got really fucking bored just sitting there for half an hour mashing a button mindlessly.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

New Shoot 'em up from Squeenix is out today, 0 Day Attack on Earth. It's a dual stick effort set over some real life cities apparently. The trailer looks fun enough and I was going to download the trial version but for some reason my 360 won't download it at the moment. At 1,200 points though it'll have to be pretty special for me to buy the full version.

Jam it back in, in the dark.