14 DAY TRIAL // Although the idea itself is not new, the Xbox Live Wednesdays' initiative caught players by surprise and is slowly turning into a success. Originally launched in 1981, yesterday's treat was Namco's classic shooter Galaga. The game isn't a straight up port of the arcade version, though it does have the classic graphical and gameplay options. This time formatted for HDTV, the arcade features overall and friend-listed top score boards and achievements to boost your play score, aiming the casual, nostalgic crowd, not just the hardcore gamers. In an effort to consolidate the momentum, Microsoft plans on releasing a new Xbox Live Arcade game every week.
Microsoft aims to have no less than 160 games for Xbox 360 ready by Christmas and, understandably, a lot of these titles will belong to the XBLA department of fun. "We certainly have enough games in the pipeline - more than enough, in fact - to achieve that goal on a weekly basis," said Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Xbox Live Ross Erickson.
Games will be ported in a design limited to only 50MB, in order to fit Xbox machines that do not have hard drives. Larger memory options are being discussed, yet won't be available for a while. For only 400 Microsoft Points or $5.00, you could play one of the upcoming titles, like Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting the next week and Pac-Man after. Future makeovers include a lot of popular games from the past twenty years, previously developed by Sega, Midway, Namco, Capcom as well as Microsoft's independent partners in game publishing and development.