XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based upon only that.

I cheated with this week’s new Xbox Live Arcade game. Typically for these pieces, I download the trial and play that for about ten minutes. But this morning, I bought Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 without a moment’s hesitation. In order to still write about this game XBLA Hors D’oeuvres-style, I’ve restrained myself to playing for only about 15-20 minutes — just enough time to unlock and try all six of the game’s modes.

As I made pretty clear earlier, I’m absolutely digging the game and every single one of its game modes. This is truly the sequel Geometry Wars fans have been wanting.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based upon only that.

I stand by my earlier assessment that Go! Go! Break Steady’s description is irrevocably stupid. But after playing the game for just a few minutes, I can see that there was no better way to describe the game and that — more importantly — it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play.

Part DDR and part Zuma, Break Steady consists of two completely different game mechanics which don’t make a lot of sense to pair together. They do, however (or is that somehow?), go along with each other quite nicely.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based upon only that.

The 194X games hold a special place in my heart, as they were among the first shooters I ever played — certainly the first vertically scrolling shooter. Naturally, an updated version of 1942 seemed like it was right up my alley, particularly considering the number of games similar to this that I play, I’d be glad to get the nostlagia factor in there.

Capcom wasn’t promising the world with Joint Strike, but basically just what you think when you hear “updated version.” I thought that’s all I wanted, but as it turns out, I was very wrong.

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Since I wasn’t the one who wrote any of the three previous stories about Schizoid, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I started up the game. I decided to forgo looking at any of the game’s instructions and jumped right into the game, which turned out to be a good decision.

In Schizoid, you control one (or two) ship that is either red or blue. Enemies will appear throughout the stage which you have to destroy, but with an Ikaruga-like twist: the blue ship can only destroy blue enemies by running into them, and likewise for red. Enemies of the other color can destroy you, so the two ships need to work together to take out enemies and keep them off your partner’s back (whether that’s another player, the CPU, or even you, if you think you’re good enough to control both ships). The game starts off fairly slow, but after a few levels, one of the challenges presented to me completely won me over with the game’s unique co-op play.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based upon only that.

You can immediately tell as soon as you see a screenshot of Golf: Tee It Up! that the game is going for a Hot Shots Golf type of vibe. And that is indeed how it plays: an extremely easy and simple to pick up golf game that focuses less on your ability to calculate the wind and type of golf ball you need and more on reflexes and easy to pick-up-and-play controls. In those regards it absolutely succeeds. You won’t be sinking hours and hours into the game to learn its many nuances; from what I could tell, the game isn’t the deepest golf game around. But that’s perfectly alright, because a simple golf game for $10 is the perfect type of experience for Xbox Live Arcade.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

This seems to happen every week lately — one of this week’s new Xbox Live Arcade games, Happy Tree Friends was released without any prior knowledge on my part that it was an existing property. The whole cutesy animals crossed with blood-splattering violence thing isn’t an entirely new concept (see Conker’s Bad Fur Day for more of that), but it certainly feels fresh in a sea of futuristic space marines.  (Is that redundant?)

Happy Tree Friends plays like a platformer crossed with a strategy game where you don’t have any direct control over the characters. Instead, you remotely interact with the environment to allow safe passage through dangerous, obstacle-laden levels. It’s a pretty neat idea, but from what I could tell from the tutorial and first level, there’s not going to be enough diversity to keep it from becoming stale.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

I had never heard of the board game Ticket to Ride before the Xbox Live Arcade version was announced. I just don’t play many board games anymore, so my knowledge of the subject is, for the most part, limited to Monopoly and Life. A quick glance at the screenshots for Ticket to Ride and even my first two or three minutes with the trial version of the game had me prepared for a real snorefest, but as it turns out, this is a surprisingly fun and extremely approachable game.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

Pokemon Snap was never something I enjoyed. I remember being forced to play it and I found it to be as dull as could possibly be. But, it garnered its fans because it worked well enough and anything with the Pokemon named attached to it is guaranteed to sell a million of 76 million copies — it’s a simple statistical fact.

Sea Life Safari is a lot like Pokemon Snap for obvious reasons, with a sort of Finding Nemo-ish vibe to the whole thing. The trial of the game is quite brief, but it does give you an excellent look at what the game has in store. Perhaps more than any other Arcade title (with the possible exception of something like Buku Sudoku), you already know whether or not you have any intention of playing the game.

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XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

I was fairly enthusiastic about getting to play Elements of Destruction, as you probably noticed in this week’s XBLA Wednesday story. I always found it fun to create a sprawling city in SimCity and then annihilate it with tornadoes and UFO attacks, so surely a game based on destroying everything with lightning, earthquakes and tornadoes would literally be a game made of fun.

As it turns out, I was very, very wrong. Not only is the game excruciatingly repetitive (and it’s sad when that fact is glaring in a 10 minute play session), but there’s very little challenge in this game that seems to be far too simple for its own good.

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Yes, XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are back. If you’re not familiar with the concept, they’re a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

The parallels between Commando 3 and Crackdown are pretty incredible, if you think about it — both, for the most part, flew under the radar, are cel-shaded and come attached with entry into a big name beta (with Crackdown it was Halo 3, and Commando 3 has Street Fighter HD). With that in mind, I’m not surprised at all that I found my time with Commando to be very enjoyable.

You’re thrown right into the action without any unnecessary cutscenes or tutorials, and there’s never a lull in the action. But even with the constant mayhem, the game’s first level feels incredibly well-paced, and the trial packs in one of the best teasers I’ve seen in an XBLA game to date. You make your way through the first level (which took me about seven minutes) and are then faced with a huge, “Holy ****”-sized tank battle, only to be yanked to the game’s “Buy me!” screen. It might have been nice to get a look at what boss battles are like, but the action was convincing enough for me to buy the game right then and there.

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