XBLA Mixed Up in Scramble

Not long ago, Microsoft heralded the special XBLA program for the summer, with great promises of weekly arcade releases coming to Xbox until the end of the year. Thus far, fate was against XBLA twice, as this week's release for Scramble got delayed on account of incomplete testing. It's quite funny to think that the 1981 game is reaching its 25th anniversary and somehow managed to get delayed on his second launch. Maybe Microsoft should have waited one more year before undertaking such a difficult task.

It appears Konami's side-scrolling shooter, Scramble, was set for release this Wednesday when Microsoft's tester team concluded that the game wasn't ready to hit Xbox Live Arcade. An official statement confirms some problems, yet it doesn't specify their nature: "during the final testing and certification of the title, we discovered some minor issues that should be addressed. Therefore, we are going to take an extra week and fix these items to ensure a high quality game experience for all when the title does launch on its new date of Wednesday, September 13."

Alledgedly, Microsoft has a list of up to 80 titles just waiting to his XBLA sooner or later, part of the marketing strategy announced earlier this year. Although there was no replacing of Scramble with another arcade title, the anxious fans were offered a Project Gotham Racing 3 UNO deck priced at 100 points ($1.25). This kind of behavior raises some questions regarding XBLA consistency, since the influx of game releases has been rather poor as of late.