One Paragraph Reviews: Xbox Live Arcade

Here’s a fun new feature for the games that aren’t complex enough to warrant their own reviews and was not just thrown together because I have no other reviews in the hopper. Instead of a rating I’ll give a “buy”/”don’t buy” recommendation.

Missile Command

The annoying trend with XBLA is to take a moldy game from the early 80s, give it some whiz-bang 3d graphics and sell it for $10. You know, the reason we don’t play Atari anymore is their games weren’t very sophisticated. It might have been impressive during Reagan’s first term to simulate nuclear warfare with blocky four-color graphics, but we’re over that. Pac-man Championship Edition updated the simplistic gameplay; this one just updates the graphics. And it’s not worth playing for more than five minutes.

Verdict: Don’t Buy

Zuma

The great thing, from a publisher’s standpoint, about casual games is that they’re cheap to make and people love to play them. Zuma is case in point: you have balls rolling down a spirally track and you have to shoot balls in between the balls to match up three or more balls of the same color, and they disappear. Do this to get enough points to stop the balls before the balls fall into a hole in the middle of the screen (and then finish off the rest of the balls) and you win the level. It’s simple, but fun. It’s a little quirky to use the thumbstick to aim your little frog guy’s ball-shooting mouth, but it otherwise works well.

Verdict: Buy