Xbox game room review

Unlimited play comes at a price of Microsoft points if you'd like to also play it on PC , and individual game sessions can be had for 40 points. When the issues are resolved, here is the launch lineup that will be available: Adventure Have you played Game Room?

YES NO. Was this article informative? In This Article. The Live Arcade Game Room lets players explore a 3D virtual arcade, playing a variety of real arcade classics such as Centipede, Super Cobra and Asteroids Deluxe without ever needing quarters!

Mild Violence. Release Date. Cobra Kai Season 4 on Netflix Review. There's a good chance you missed one of these. Quick and dirty, publishers dusted off their libraries, added a few achievements and some online leaderboards and called it a day. Recently, the Xbox Live Arcade library has exploded. Big budget and high quality new games are the norm and there isn't much room for the arcade games of old.

Rather than occasionally ship them off to die amidst such big competition, Microsoft has created Game Room. This is where everyone looking for their downloadable old-school arcade fix on Xbox will head from now on.

To download it, you'll have to head to the Games on Demand section normally reserved for fully priced retail games.

This one, however, is a free download but it still comes with a full 1, achievement points. To unlock most of those achievements you'll have to start dishing out some money. A dozen or so classic games are available see the full list here for purchase during this launch week with the promise of more coming. Arcade history buffs will know them all, though the casual gamer will probably only recognize a few. If you pay a couple dollars more, you can buy a license to play them on both Xbox and PC.

The avatar influence is a good idea, although you can't move your avatar, and that's something needed. I never had these difficulty switch thingy's or reset to start the game malarkey. This is fine if you were born with the console, but what about those who weren't, those who are your new audience, who mostly play your console. Both game packs come with 30 games, or 30 trials. To buy one game for life would cost at least MS Points. On ONE console.

C'mon Microsoft, it's cheaper probably to go on eBay buy myself all 3 consoles and games you're offering. There are 2 comments. Dracophile , 07 May 07 May Calling Game Room a game is a bit of a misnomer. It's actually an app for the Xbox Live Marketplace that happens to have achievements. The app itself is kind of cartoony, and has lots of advertisements thrown all over the place, though, so it kind of detracts from the overall atmosphere of the arcade when in between every arcade room is a television advertising something you haven't bought yet, especially because once you DO buy all the games you like these TV's will show nothing but, well, crap.

The cartoony look and feel of the arcade kind of detracts from the originality of the games themselves. The app comes with too many goofy settings like caves, pirate ships, and scary attics to really give you a bunch of good options to create actual arcade-ish environments.

Likewise, even if you wanted to make a scary arcade room many of the props are all dumbed down and goofy looking, so really all you get is a bunch of soft gimmicky decor to place around your arcade. If it weren't for the stark contrast between the decor and theme of the app and the content of the games themselves I'd have given this section a perfect score, but because of that detached kind of feeling you may get, especially considering some of the props are really weird and don't seem to fit in anywhere, the overall feel of the app's environment kind of suffers.

They are true ports of the originals for the most part, so that is to be expected, but for many gamers who are used to modern-day effects and such, they might be turned off by the bleeps and bloops if they don't have suitable respect for the old games.

Additionally wherever you go in the arcade you are surrounded by various "arcade sounds" such as music, explosions, bleeps, and whatever sounds your mascots emit more on them later. If you have a lot of stuff going on the sound can become a little overwhelming, but other than that the "feel" of an arcade in terms of sound is definitely there. Game Room tends to hit you more with amalgamations of sounds rather than having its own soundtrack or effects to go with anything. It's hard to pick out sounds since each and every item in the app has some kind of sound effect mascots, arcade cabinets, TV's, decor, themes, etc.

Instead it all mashes together, which I believe is what the developers were going for, but in the end makes it hard to hear anything other than just electronic white noise.

Overall it seems the arcade games squeezed by fairly well, but the same cannot be said about the console ports. The Atari games are probably the better of the two console ports, seeing as how there was just a joystick and one button on the original controllers.

The trickiest part is figuring out how to use the Atari console layout difficulty switches, game select, reset, etc , as many achievement guides and such feature a brief cutaway that explains how to use this.

Once you figure out how to start the game most Atari games require you to reset the console first you should be good to go. The developers tend to not mention, however, that many Atari games come with TONS of variations and settings if you flick the "Game Type" switch enough times.

Intellivision, though, is where Game Room becomes frustrating. Whereas the Atari controller was a simple joystick, the INTV gamepad looked like a telephone -- complete with 12 buttons plus a side button.

Converting this cumbersome controller onto that of an Xbox one is bad to say the least. You will find yourself constantly checking the controls for games because some of them are so nondescript they become confusing, and in many cases such as Night Stalker I find that the INTV in general are very clunky and difficult to appropriately play. If you're in Game Room only for arcade games then you should be fine, but be warned about the console titles.

It's best to give them all their free demo run before you hop on the purchase option. For the sake of the review I'm assuming you do. The list of achievements in Game Room revolve mostly around playing a wide variety of games and collecting medals in them, as most achievements deal with getting X number of a certain medal or "leveling up", which is done by earning medal points.

The rest of the achievements are divided up between being social-based sending Challenges and visiting a friend's arcade and decorating your arcade placing props and themes, etc. Game Room will take you at least 36 hours to complete, as there is an achievement for spending this long playing games in your arcade. A very steep amount of time, but if you have ample games -- and using the time rewind function counts toward your cumulative total -- you should be able to get it passively.

Playing classic games is great fun and all, but the price point of the Game Room store structure is just terrible. Ultimately the price wards off a lot of would-be gamers, mainly because Game Room itself is a free app and the Game Packs are all free to download, so getting all this free stuff and then being immediately whacked with charges if you want to go further is a little upsetting, especially considering gimmick titles like Venetian Blinds managed to get into Game Room.

Also available for the Game Room are "Mascots", and every game has one. A mascot is a character or representation of each game that you can have float or wander around your arcade. Each mascot also has an original sound or music bit representative of the game it is from. The mascots go from understandable a dolphin emitting sonar waves to boring a Breakout paddle to downright crazy a dancing black guy who brings his own music wherever he goes.

Each mascot is actually only 40MSP, making them quite affordable and well worth the laughs they bring, However, because of the seemingly steep price of the games, what could have been an active hotspot for XBLA games instead turns into a kind of repository where you end up tossing odd-numbered amounts of points after buying avatar clothing, etc.

If you can get over the price point of the games offered then what it comes down to is an enjoyable arcade experience, if not one that's a little wacky, but at its heart is a mostly solid app. CheetahCurtis 80, 25 Jan This game is a great one, but if you are trying for achievements then it will be a waste of money. In this game you own a game arcade and you must buy games with microsoft points to fill your arcade. You earn medals and level up from playing the games.

Downloading this game from the marketplace is free but it is microsoft points for a game. When you need about 65 games to complete it, it totals up to over microsoft points. I have never heard of a game where you have to spend that much money for Gamerscore. Also, you would have to spend 36 hours of playing games to get one achievement.

You can earn over 10 achievements without spending 1 microsoft point though. If you are looking for some good entertainment for the next few days then you should get this game if you dont mind spending a bit of money.

The game is very good. You can send challenges to your friends and there are leaderboards to try and get onto for every game. You can style your arcade to your liking and visit your friends arcades. This game would be hard to get bored of if it was free. My First Review 4. Cpt Tripps 37, 27 Jan I was very excited by this before it was released.

I am big classic game nut. One of my hobbies is restoring classic arcade cabinets. The Idea of having a virtual arcade room where I could play with my friends sounded awesome. Unfortunately, the games were WAY over priced. At first they did have some great classic coin-op arcade games, but then over time Microsoft seemed to decide not to renew the licenses on the games that were in anyway decent and they soon disappeared.

Own them for life? I guess not. All that was left was crappy Atari and Intelivision console games. The real thing, with the real joysticks, and physical cartridges that wont mysteriously disappear when Microsoft decides not to renew the license agreement. My advice, steer clear of this one like the plague, 1.

Cobalt Robot , 20 May 26 Jul Graphics: 2. Game Room faithfully recreates the graphics of ancient arcade, Intellivision and Atari games, which can be good when it's good and terrible when it's bad. I mean, take Finalizer. A classic, top-down shoot-'em-up that could honestly contend as a modern-day downloadable title.

Although nothing in Game Room really qualifies as gorgeous by today's standards, there are quite a few titles that really get the point across. Visuals are almost entirely sprite-based, though there are a couple of arcade titles that have those nifty wireframe models such as Red Baron , but c'mon, coming from the 70s and 80s, what more could be expected, right? And then there are titles like Adventure Adventure is a game that I vaguely remember from my childhood. You play as a square. You carry around keys, other squares, cups, swords, a I can't figure out what Ninja Turtle Ice Cream induced seizure made it possible for me to tolerate that crap as a kid.

Nevermind paying three bucks for it nowadays. This means that, while playing a game, you can experience its sounds like never before, on your awesome 5. However, when not actively playing a game -- when you're just hanging around in your customizable, digital arcade -- you hear the generic mishmash of sounds that you would hear in a real arcade.

The bleeps, bloops, blips and general cacophonic crap that made a generation of gamers deaf. I honestly have to keep my sound down between games because it just plain bugs the snot out of me.

You get to customize the arcade with props, themes, mascots which fly around your arcade and just plain look cool and, obviously, games. You get to choose from an ever-growing library of games from arcades around the world, Atari , and Intellivision though this can and likely will be expanded upon.

Game Room is available on both PC and , so your platform of choice is really up to you. How does this even happen, you ask? A single play costs 40 Microsoft Points, or fifty cents.

That's a ripoff. Now, three bucks to own a game isn't terrible, but considering the other games available on XBLA for roughly that price makes this a bit too steep to swallow.