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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For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to ignore the glitches in the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix beta, because it is a beta after all. Yes, there are numerous system-crashing game freezes, sporadic audio at some points, and some slow-down. The point of a beta is to identify problems like these and fix them, which I’m assuming Capcom will do before they release the full game. That said, I’m going to be very, very upset if they don’t correct these bugs.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let me say this for the game: this is destined to be one of the best XBLA/PSN games to come out this year. Period.

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I’ve been saying it for over a year now: “The day Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out is the day I buy a PS3.” So on Thursday, June 12th, that’s exactly what I did. I even drove an hour to a Wal-Mart in a small town at 6 AM to make sure I could secure the special system bundle. Being a huge fan of the series, I wanted to savor the experience, so I waited until the weekend to start playing, when I could really devote my time to the game. In the meantime, I perused reviews praising the game for its brilliant gameplay and for fixing problems that had plagued the series from the beginning. Naturally, I was even more excited to begin playing. So imagine my dissapointment when I actually popped in the disc and found it to be more movie than 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.

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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The Bourne Conspiracy
Developer: High Moon Studios
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Price: $59.99
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360
Category: Action/Adventure
ESRB: “T” for Teen
Release Date: June 3, 2008

Really, I was surprised they didn’t make a Bourne game at some point while the movies were still coming out. A trilogy of action movies that makes millions at the box office seems like the sort of thing ripe for a shoddy video game tie-in. Thankfully though, the powers that be staved off such an adaptation until a video game company finally just secured the rights to the Bourne books themselves. Well now the wait is over, since High Moon Studios and Sierra have now released The Bourne Conspiracy for the Xbox 360 and PS3. So is this game — though Matt Damon-less — worthy to carry the Bourne name? Read on past the break to hear my impressions.

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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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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.

I don’t know if I should phrase it as being “lucky,” but the trial of Frogger 2 allows you to try out both time attack and story mode. After what I had written earlier, I had to immediately try out story mode and hope the the screenshot I was referring to was an aberration. Instead, I was treated to some extremely-slow moving text (which thankfully you can speed up) telling me the written-for-a-baby story of how Frogger can’t swim and an alien who crashes its UFO and is now sad because some of the parts fell off and have gone missing. Naturally, Frogger is heroic, can speak, and isn’t frightened by the prospect of what’s essentially a capsized UFO and its occupant. He’s going to come to the alien’s aid in the only way he knows how — by turning into a carrot! (Wait, no. That’s the plot to a Rob Schneider movie. Apologies.)

Aside from those story elements of the game — which are just as horrifying as I expected them to be — it’s still the same basic gameplay from the original Frogger game, only now you’re traversing much more complicated levels (in that there are impassable boundaries that you have to go around) and various items to pick up. (Although time attack mode is much more no-nonsense, with nothing but basic beat-the-clock gameplay.) You’ll run into enemies like snakes and bees, but for all of the layers of complexity it’s added, it doesn’t feel like a deeper game than the original, and actually feels like a step backwards.

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