I have just been reading about Microsoft’s new Game Room. For those of you who don’t know this looks like it could be a lot of fun. Basically it is a downloadable piece of software that allows you to move around a virtual arcade playing lots of retro arcade favourites. Currently it looks like the line-up of games is mediocre to say the least but it will hopefully keep expanding, depending on the success of course. One feature i’ve read is that you can challenge your friends to beat your high-score and send them taunts. This seems like a great idea to me, i’m sure this will be one of the key elements of Game Room as I can’t think of anything more tempting than trying to beat a friends high-score. I’ve lost count the amount of times i’ve tried to beat someone at a game on Facebook only to fail and frustrate me until my fingers start to bleed! The emulation with the games is apparantely very good according to industry experts (and people who just love old games). As i’ve said the list of games looks OK but it could do with some more titles on there, I guess it takes time to do deals with developers and companies that, well, simply don’t exist anymore. I can imagine it being a legal minefield. There seem to be a lot of Atari and Intellivision titles at the moment which obviously means games like Adventure, Combat and Millipede can be found. I hope they start to introduce much later arcade classics as they are more my era, but maybe thats just me being selfish!
I’ve only just downloaded Game Room but I was slightly annoyed at Microsoft insistance that the entire human race is from the USA. I had to make up my usual US address with the only zipcode I know – 90210 (I bet they get a lot of incorrectly addressed mail in Beverly Hills, but i’m sure the beautiful huge houses and millions of dollars in their bank accounts make up for the torrent of junk mail in their very american trash cans!) I plan to post my thoughts on Game Room after I have had a good play with it.
