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Categories: Rant
Tags: arcade, atari, atari 2600, game room, microsoft, Pac-Man, xbla, xbox 360, yar's revenge
Last week Microsoft released Game Room (PC/Xbox 360), an Avatar-based arcade experience which lets you customize your own arcade (including buying and playing classic games) and visit your friends’ rooms. Microsoft fumbled this pretty well — even outside of the launch issues.
Proof the Moon Landing was faked.
It gets arcades wrong.
Microsoft’s arcades are multistory, multiroom extravaganzas. The arcades I remember were just single rooms stretching back into shadowy depths concealing a sad Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man cabinet near a broken air hockey table.
The Game Room is significantly loud, but lacks the true cacophony of an arcade.
And it’s too well-lit. Arcades were dark places – and smoky. This was good, because they contained people you didn’t really want to see. They were managed by retired carnies and populated by a mixture of mean big kids who hogged the good games and little assholes who begged for quarters.
The essence of an arcade was that it was an unsavory place – not a safe, sanitary Game Room.
The games suck.
So how’s this for convoluted: you download a bundle of games, sight unseen, for free. Then, once they’re on your hard drive, you can decide which ones you really want to own. And you don’t really want to own any of them – unless they meant something to your childhood.
Planet IV decimated!
Microsoft already has a good arcade system in place – it’s called Xbox Live Arcade – and over the years I’ve purchased many classic arcade games and great new titles. These should plug into Game Room, but they don’t. So instead of playing Pac-Man, Frogger, Paper Boy or Gauntlet, I’m pretending that I understand whatever the hell’s going on in Crystal Castles.
It’s antisocial.
Visiting someone’s arcade should be like going over to Ricky Stratton’s house, but it’s the sad episode of Silver Spoons where his grandfather takes him hunting and shoots a deer. I can go to Next Jen’s arcade and look at her Millipede cabinet, but if I want to play it I have to shell out 50 cents or buy it. And it’s not like the money’s going back to her to ease the pain of buying a shitty Centipede knock off.
But why do I even want to go to her arcade? There’s no social environment. No lobby or chatroom. And we’re pulling from the same limited pool of wallpapers, games and assorted props, so it’s she’s created an environment that screams Next Jen. And why would she want to come to mine? I picked the same graveyard background everyone else did.
The only thing vaguely social are the challenges you can send to other players – which basically tell your friends to buy Red Baron and prove that they can stay in the air longer than you. So that’s your social interaction: you’re telling people you’re an asshole.
Aramis:
“So that’s your social interaction: you’re telling people you’re an asshole.”
LOL. How Microsoft. This is what happens when nerds without friends try to engineer “friendship experiences”. You’re lucky the Xbox didn’t become a robot and try to hug you, inevitably killing you in it’s chilly metal embrace.
Silvercube:
Lol. In internet language, EPIC FAIL.
Nice article. I’m a oldie gamer as well, but the Game Room.. bleh.
Most of the old arcade games I already own on various consoles… just need that Simpsons beat’em up game from the early 90′s and I’m all good I think :)