Be Excellent To Each Other

Microsoft's, er, answer to MAME is up and available for download. Here we can talk about it and ting.

List of games possibly available:

It won't let me buy any chuffing games. However, I have unlocked about 100GS just for changing themes and stuff. Where's Dimrill?

They seem to be having their share of teething problems, going by the angry sorts on the xbox forums. Not loading or being able to buy games being the two major ones.

74% now, come onnn. God I hate pre-bb internet speeds.

It's fairly pointless at the moment, barring the demo "go" of each game. Once you've had your demo go, you have to buy a play session with coins (which cost MS Points) or buy the cabinet itself. Unfortunately, you can't buy anything at the moment, so you're stuck using your demo goes.

Oh, and there are maybe half of the games in that list actually available as far as I can tell. Still a fair few to be getting on with. It seems you can challenge people to beat your scores and taunt them and stuff. Should be fun!

Hmm.. if that's the correct list of games, I'll make a quick list of the ones I'm interested in...

1. Er.. Nope, I'm done.

Combat (Atari 2600) is good. I imagine this doesn't let you actually play versus mode though right?

The chances are your getting some chievo's so the compulsives like Dimril or Blucey then need to buy 100 titles so they can max it.

Have we had confirmed costs for these yet ? , i remember something around 240 points (which if your getting 2100 points for 15 quid works out at £1.70 a game)

What would i pay £1.70 for here when i could play it in MAME or Stella ?

We've been told the main thing is going to be how they handle the community and challenges in the games which we wont really see until we try them.

Oh and and the emulation and control options *need* to be spot on - I'm interested in how they handle things like Tempest (spinner control in the arcade).

Also if you've never played it you should try Road Fighter out of the list - I could see some good challenges coming out of it - its also one of 's 'top racing games you've never played'

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.c ... racing.htm

I don't really see how they could handle Tempest in any particularly special way... I mean, could you using MAME? I already have the XBLA version and that just uses the analogue stick or D-pad, whichever you prefer. I haven't noticed any MADCATZ Spinny Controllers on Amazon.

How many games do you have to buy to earn the medal based cheevos, I wonder?

ALL OF THEM.

I have a Madcatz xbox stick which has a spinner (really!) which i'm hoping works for it

Looks like this and the spinner is around the short stick

However , what i meant was that i'm interested in what they do with games which do not have a standard digital joystick and button control set e.g. for the 2600 i remember star raiders had a seperate keypad you plugged into port 2 (with 12? buttons) or for someone using a joystick and tempest can they tweak the thresholds for moving from one 'thread' to the next as that was always the trick with the spinner - and being able to quickly flick between edges of the web / out of danger

But, I did notice that a message came up about a numerical keypad in some games, and you can get a cool little overlay up dependent on the machine you're emulating which depicts certain switches and stuff that would've been on the console. It really has all been done quite properly. Whether or not it's up to scratch, I don't know because I'm not really an expert (I started with an Amiga 500). You'll see when you give it a go.

Major Nelsons list looks slightly different but doesnt call out the different hardware

http://majornelson.com/Default.aspx




How at the MW2 generation going to cope with the attack of the killer ducks from Adventure ????

Oh and his twitter says that the issues with the launch have been fixed ........

http://twitter.com/majornelson/statuses/10982204524

Not very well, I'd guess. As my 'phew once said, he doesn't like "classic games".

Look its really simple



You already have the sword , just slay the DragonDuck by pressing the right trigger and grab the goblet while shouting racial slurs at everyone else on Xbox

The spinner seems to work fine with it.

Incidentally that's the stick I'm planning on ripping the guts out of for my DIY mega arcade stick of awesomeness

The games look shit and the achievements look shit. Insta no buy from me.

Tsk what games are you looking at !





Its in full HD remember so its *even better* than the originals !

My poor eyes!!!!

I'm fucking dogshit at that tennis game.

They haven't half launched this with a load of shit, it's like all the bad games we've all (NOT!) been playing in MAME since about 1996 and they've even thrown some fucking 2600 shite in there just for a laugh.

I really don't see who this is going to appeal to, anyone old enough to eke out any nostalgia value out of it will have done so years ago with MAME, and anyone not old enough to remember it will fall off their chair laughing.

At least start around the mid to late 80s when games got half some decent graphics and sound on them, and were playable as decent games in their own right rather than very brief nostalgia trips where the rose-tinteds mist over and crack in about 60 seconds flat.

Seriously, who would fucking play Centipede now?

Oh dear. Back to that old chestnut.

Quite a lot of people! Centipede is a bad example of a "too outdated to be fun" game, because it's still played fairly competetively. They might look a bit cack to thee, but games like Centipede, Galaga and Robotron remain very playable today. Personally, I still find fairly simple high-score games from any period a thousand times more rewarding than a lot of the big-budget mainstream titles of today, which have huge pretensions of literary and cinematic flair but are ultimately rather shallow, fleeting and forgettable experiences.

Perhaps you should read what came after it, as it made perfect sense.

True, but the people that enjoy playing Centipede and it's friends all the time already play Centipede and it's friends all the time, for free.
While some of them will no doubt buy the games on the 360 too, they might not be as good customers as Microsoft hoped.

I was really looking forward to this, but I have to say I'm disappointed. The games don't seem to play as smoothly as they should, but far worse, the controls seem to have lag, which just isn't good enough.

Edit: Oh, and the vector games look utter cack.

Oh aye, I wasn't really responding to that from a business standpoint; I probably won't buy many of these games myself.

By the way, some of these were already available on XBLAH anyway. Do you have to pay again if you want their 'cabinets'?

Hey, I'm just pointing out an Amiga Action reader when I see one.

It does seem that way.

Okay i've had a quick play around and some comments

Bad things :

Timed demo mode is limited (i didn't even finish some of my games)
Tries to do a 1:1 scale for the game and no good rescaling options (you can manually rescale but cant see the screen 'live' until you come out of that option)
Because of the demo nature you cant tell what options you can and cant see until you've purchased (i havent purchased any titles yet)
The initial selection of games is 'poor' they could have done with at least one 'stand out game' in there which i dont really think they have - it would have been good to have a wider range of people backing it (Capcom / Namco )
You have to re-purchase games you already have from XBLA (like Tempest / Asteroids / Centipede - i think allowing you to 'bring those over' or if they had gave out some 'free full games' you could have started the challenge stuff off with a bang)

Good things :

The fact that there is a demo for each game so if you are just in it for the nostalgia the demo time will do you just fine - no purchase necessary
Some of the concepts behind it - challenges and leader boards and other potential competitions
The fact that they have committed to pumping out games in batches instead of dribs and drabs (we'll see if they can keep it up)
That they are actually giving some background on the machines and their history (however i want more ! - flyers / videos of real machines in action / etc)
In the interview with Major Nelson one of the guys behind it explained how they were actually seeking out copywrite holders to purchase the rights for old and obscure titles

Brilliant things :

For each game leaderboard you can go in , look at the people on the leaderboard *AND WATCH A REPLAY OF THEIR GAME* with pause / rewind / etc etc

Is there any chance we'll get some 16 bit era shmups? That's what I use MAME for mainly.

On the interview one of the ideas behind it originally was Dreamcast emulation , however the idea then spread into an emulation for any system.

The 360 has enough horsepower to emulate the 16bit shoot em up era of games i guess it will just come down to getting the rights to release them.

After a bit of playing around, I'm still cautiously optimistic. I like the setup a lot, it just really really needs better, more modern games. The vast majority of this stuff is too retro even for the retro crowd. Basically get some late 80's-early 90's Sega and Data East coin-ops in there already.

I hope they're not taking the 'games of the 70s and 80s!' branding they're throwing around too strictly, as they're missing an awful lot of good stuff and games people will actually want to replay if they are.

I think their biggest limitation right now is they only have 3 publishers signed up

Intellivision who have a total of 125 games released (although i think there are some dupes) which they have purchased rights for *all* the games
Atari who they have purchased the rights for a number of older arcade games and the VCS stuff (in the interview they mention Activision VCS games but they don't seem to have made it this time)
and Konami , who have tons of great arcade classics but they have just picked out a few at random

After a bit more play - i like the rewind time function and that you can go back to *any* point in the game (even right back to the very start) - and i'd really like to know if (after inviting someone to your arcade) you can play some of the 2p games with them (e.g. Combat?)

Absolutely.

Get After Burner and Space Harrier on there, get Flying Shark on there, get Vapor Trail on there, anything from the mid to late 80s onwards when the 68000 based games became commonplace and games really started to look and sound good and the gameplay of the basic 'originals' developed a bit. (Space Invaders or After Burner, like there's really a choice to be made there......)

This 'real' retro stuff just isn't going to cut it, it's of vintage value only and nothing else to 99% of folks, I grew up with the arcade games of the late 70s (just about) and more the 80s, but even I, in my most nostalgic mood, wouldn't want to really play any of it again in anger, MAME generally managed a couple of minutes of my time at most with most of the early 80s stuff, it was only from the mid-80s onwards that anything started to achieve any kind of replay value.

Get the Taito stuff on there, a GamesRoom version of Chase HQ with friends leaderboards, that'd get a couple of quid of my cash.

Centipede? Fuck off.

Gah, went a bit mad and bought Gravatar, Tempest and fancy Asteroids. I'm an idiot when it comes to "they're only a couple of quid!" purchases, doubly so when it's abstract moon money.

The ranked mode is kind of fun, I like the medal system and the way it gives some nice recognisable goals to aim for. That said, I've already got silver medals in Tempest and I am shite at it, so maybe they've aimed those too low. Medals are generally one for score, one for surviving x amount of time and one for overall time played, for the record.

Gravatar holds up reasonably well, easily my favourite of the bunch. I like the way Asteroids looks in 'cabinet' mode with the background/surrounding art and everything, sadly not all the games seem to do that. Though looks aside, I'm regretting Asteroids already. It's exactly the type of game that gets on my tits after the first level, which I really should've remembered. Enjoying Tempest more than I thought I would, but it's a bit fiddly on the 360 pad, I seem to be forever overshooting lanes.

played it on my US account so as not to leave a ghost on my gamercard.

it's hard to judge the whole thing when they've somehow managed to exclusively pick horrible games. Currently it's aimed at Americans who had awful consoles.

I'll leave this on the back burner until Bomb Jack or something comes out.

Opening up your arcade , adding some decorations , changing the wallpaper , and visiting another arcade are all free and all give you gamerscore (look free points!) - you can also issue a challenge and do a few other things without spending a point - in all i think its about 70 points you can whore off it for no additional cost.



Wonder who owns the rights to that (looking at Wikipedia now seems to be a part of Koei)

If they get some good games in here the whole system could be great - i think they have just picked a very poor set of games to begin with

nah, I've spent a lot of time recently deghosting the likes of DOA4 and COD3 - real dogshit games - so I'm not keen to have a 70/1000 on there.

that said, a few good roms would get me interested.

I can't see any decent 16bit shooters turning up because they could easily sell them for 400-800 on real XBLA.

I wonder if they've chosen some of the most simplest games just as a bit of test. I certainly hope some better games (well, some games that haven't already been done to death on compilations) come along though.

Lordy, just thinking about what that'd do to my completion percentage is giving me palpitations.

The Rev (not suprisingly) gives it a kicking...

http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2010/03/25/ ... dark-no-3/

Personally I downloaded it last night, faffed about with it for an hour or so and have since deleted it...it'll take something special to tempt me back.

His review is pretty much on the money - I think the frame rate stuff *may* be that its caching everything (for the rewind stuff) and the fact that the whole network behind it couldnt cope yesterday may be part of it.

All his other complaints are valid and on the positive side are all things which could be changed *if* they get their act together and do things right.

I think I'll try and download this later, if it works. I expect I shall simply enjoy having a virtual place for my avatar to walk around in, since I'm daft like that.

No you shan't.