Developed for Xbox Live Arcade and Games For Windows Live by Krome Studios

Published by Microsoft

Rated E10 for everyone, but with content aimed at those ten years and older

Contains mild violence

Spare a quarter to save planet Earth? Once again Microsoft revisits the birth of video games, this time with virtual rooms where your Avatar can hang out on old-school cabinets, dropping tokens for nostalgic replays of Asteroids or Centipede and loading up titles from the earliest consoles; the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Each game takes up physical space in a virtual mall of themed arcades where holographic banners over the cabinets display your high scores and your friends are free to visit online and try to beat them. Microsoft has hit upon a very novel idea, but once again, muddles it with their complex attempts to make money, taking a social experience that should be easy and enjoyable and making it one where you have to work at having fun.

How much does it cost? The answer is a far, far, too complicated one. The Game Room software is free, allowing you to set up and decorate your own mall of eight arcade rooms. The Game Pack Add-ons, which arrive each week to add new retro titles to the experience, are also free. The games themselves are sold through a store built into the free software and involve four different prices.

You can purchase the game for its “Full” price at 240 Microsoft Points, adding it to your personal arcade to play as you wish, on both your Xbox 360 and Windows-powered PC. However, if you visit the arcade of one of your friends it’ll cost you an additional 40 Microsoft Point for a “token” to use each time you wish to play. To avoid paying that fee again and again, you can purchase instead the “Play Anywhere” option for that game at 400 Microsoft Points. If you just want to try a game out, you can earn free tokens by having friends visit your arcade and these can be used for free plays in Microsoft’s Showcase Arcade, where ever game is on display, but these tokens cannot be used to play games in your friend’s arcades, where tokens are 40 Microsoft Points each.

Can you imagine the number of PowerPoint files and Excel spreadsheets Microsoft went through to work that out? It’s not so much the expense, although you can easily pick up a collection of arcade classics for just a few bucks or even play them for free online, but it’s the confusion. These games are more than twenty to thirty years old, Microsoft is even using the original ROM files that ran those early machines, and as they weren’t complicated to use back then, they shouldn’t be now.

The prices have a negative impact on the social experience. I should be visiting the arcades of my friends, but because it will cost me 40 Microsoft Points per play, I find myself using my free tokens at Microsoft’s Showcase Arcade instead.

Right now the game selection itself isn’t great. This is Microsoft’s second retro collection (first for Games For Windows), when they first launched Xbox Live Arcade they delivered many arcade hits including Frogger, Dig-Dug, Galaga, Time Pilot, Ms. Pac-Man, and Joust, each given both classic and HD formats. Not only has Microsoft not delivered an option to transfer these arcade hits into the new virtual arcade, but they’ve avoided these titles for their Game Room selection and so you’re left to choose from a list of twenty-nine long-forgotten titles where only a handful – Asteroids, Centipede, Tutankham, Tempest, and Scramble – are really recognizable. Most of the selection includes Atari 2600 and Intellivision titles, games with graphics that are very primitive even compared to the Arcade titles, and in the case of Intellivision, which uses a numpad controller and overlays cards faithfully simulated by Microsoft, are too complicated for but the most die-hard of fans.

If you can get past these obstacles, Microsoft has some very creative ideas to offer. Most of the games now include a Rewind feature, allowing you redo the last few seconds of play. Arcade games are notoriously tough, once most players get past the first four or five levels they often abandon them, but the Rewind Play feature helps you get past that bump to move on. The software will also record and store a video recording of your sessions so you can watch them again later.

If you and a friend online both own the same game, you can send them a challenge where the two of you perform a set number of tries on your own time to reach the highest score or last for the longest period of time. The winner gets to send an animation of their Avatar performing one of a selection of taunting gestures; “moons” , ROFLs, ninja moves, etc. The problem I find is that, once again, Microsoft’s price system gets in the way. While I have several friends with their own Game Rooms, everyone’s bought just one title, their favourite, and none the same as my own. Unless we really coordinate and spend some cash, we’ll never use the challenge system.

The easiest fun you’ll have with Game Room is simply customizing your own virtual experience. Microsoft has drawn inspiration from the arcades of malls and cineplexes that were decorated like family-friendly themed restaurants and featured unrecognizable synthesized muzak. You’re given two mall floors, each with four store fronts that have been replaced by arcade spaces that you can apply themes to, from haunted graveyards and ancient tombs to 80’s alleys and rooms decked out as showcases for specific publishers Konami, Atari, and Intellivision.

Each space has a set of slots you can use to place purchased game cabinets or decorations, from bar stools and skateboards to animated coffins and lava lamps. The more time you spend playing games, the more medals, achievements, and levels you unlock which can lead to adding more and more items for decorations.

My personal experience with arcades involved billiard halls, donut shops, and the kind of “secret” industrial arcades where you had to walk down a flight of dark stairs to reach. I’d love to see Microsoft offer a set of themes that reflect those realities. Actually, one item from that scene they need to include is a jukebox, the safe and mindless synthesized music they have playing repeatedly quickly becomes annoying. I cut my teeth on pinball to the sounds of The Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a seminal moment in my life. Sometimes there’s an advantage to visiting places that seem a little nasty, and Microsoft should really recognize that, especially if they are aiming at the nostalgia of adults.

One element that helps bring the mall alive are the mascots. For 40 Microsoft Points you can have a game character wander around your arcade like one of the Avatars. I myself have a vector graphics Red Baron biplane flying around my arcade and it gives it some much-needed life.

While it’s fun to build your own arcade, you can’t do much to explore it. Your Avatar appears, but you don’t control it and while you and your friends can visit each other’s arcades, you can’t really visit with each other. It’s great to see the classic stand-up cabinets and it’s great to play those old arcade games as they originally were, but Microsoft has to make that trip down memory lane and easier and more social one.