I had a conversation with my brother over Xbox Live a week or so ago. He was playing Hexic HD from the XBox Live Arcade while we chatted.
One of the neat things about the XBox 360, and the XBox for that matter, is that you can download games from their online service to play on your console. These games don’t require a disc, and you can activate them from a button in the Live interface.
He was remarking how he really wished that Live had a vertical-scrolling space shooter. One of our favorite games of this genre is Xenon2 by the Bitmap Brothers. That was among my favorite Amiga games.
I was thinking about this idea when I saw a commercial for Gametap.
Gametap is an interesting service that offers classic arcade and console games for play on your PC. I suppose they’ve written (or appropriated) an emulator, and have acquired the rights to all the ROMs in question. My grand idea would be to have Gametap partner with the XBox Live folks to provide all of those classic games via XBox Live Arcade.
Just think, you could play any of those classic games right through your XBox console. You’d hardly ever have to buy disc-based game at all, instead buy credits on Live and spend them on the classics. Play Pac Man, Burger Time, Galaga, etc. all without leaving your living room!
Of course, all of these games would need to be made to work in the XBox. Considering that the hardware is reasonably similar to a PC, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get an emulator running. They’ve already got the original Gauntlet in Live Arcade. (And you can play multiplayer over the internet!)
The trouble with this idea is Gametap’s subscription model compared to Live Arcade’s purchase system. Gametap only seems to offer a monthly subscription to all of their games. You pay a flat price per month and you can play any game they offer. With XBox’s Live Arcade, you have to pay for individual games, but you can keep them for as long as you have a Live account.
I don’t know whether I like the idea of the subscription service or the outright buy, but it would be nice to see this variety of games added to the XBox.
I broke down last night and used my remaining credits on this new game, Wik. The guy you control is like a frog, kind of. You can’t move him directly, you can only point in the direction you want him to jump, and then hop him there. He can also move by throwing and sticking his tongue to some surface and swinging from it. The whole premise of the game is to feed these grubs - scattered about the board, always being taken off by other manner of insects - to your donkey before your donkey walks off the bottom of the screen.
I use the words “donkey” and “frog” tentatively here, since neight really looks like one.
It’s an interseting game. A bit hard to control, which is part of the puzzle, I think. Still, I enjoyed it enough to see what would happen next.
Just think how many games I would sign up for if they were games I played as a kid. Maybe Microsoft shouldn’t partner with Gametap - I might become suddenly very poor.
