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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 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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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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Yes, XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are back. If you’re not familiar with them, 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 was set to break my own rule of playing no more than ten minutes of an Arcade game for this here feature. You start off by playing the tutorial, and six minutes in, I had seemingly gotten no closer to the actual game. I didn’t want to write my impressions based on nothing more than the game’s tutorial, but it worked out where the trial actually cut me off a few minutes later — so I guess that’s all they want you to experience with the trial version of Roogoo. Suffice it to say, that’s not a promising thought.

To put it simply, you basically are playing a videogame iteration of that toy you had as a kid where you had to match a shape with its outline and you could push it on through. In Roogoo, that’s the fundamental gameplay mechanic, where you want to push a shape through its respective hole(s) as quickly as possible in order to save the meteors from the evil Meemoo, blah blah blah. Playing this game for its story is like watching Baywatch to become a better lifeguard.

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Yes, XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are back. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re simply 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.

Right off the bat, I wasn’t particularly enamored with Aces of the Galaxy. It’s an on-rails space shooter that seems to have about as much strategy as those web games where you see how many times you can click your left mouse button in ten seconds. The trial lets you try the game’s first two levels; after I was through with the first (which took around four or five minutes), I was dreading another level.

But around halfway through the second level, I found myself genuinely enjoying the game. It wasn’t like the game suddenly become more sophisticated; it was more that I had let go the expectation of something more sophisticated and was able to enjoy the game for what it was.

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Yes, XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are back. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re simply 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 think the most telling part about Buku Sudoku is that I really had a hard time putting my controller down after 10 minutes. (I actually ran over and play for 11:36, according to the handy in-game clock.) If you’ve ever played a Sudoku puzzle before, then you’ll know precisely what you’re getting into. I’m far from an expert on this particular genre of logic puzzle, but I do enjoy the occasional Sudoku.

When I wrote this week’s XBLA Wednesday story, I said, “As much as I like Sudoku, though, I can’t imagine buying this. When I first heard about it I was excited, but then I realized: Do I really want to stare at numbers on my TV screen?”

As it turns out, I really do.

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Rocketmen: Axis of Evil
Developer: A.C.R.O.N.Y.M Games
Publisher: Capcom
Price: $9.99
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3
Category: Arcade Shooter
ESRB Rating: E10+ for Everyone Ages 10 and older (Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes)
Release Date: March 5, 2008

One of the highlights of last years E3 for me was my trip to visit and interview the folks at Capcom about their upcoming games. I was jazzed about the upcoming Harvey Birdman game, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles looked like it was going to resurrect the arcade rail-shooter on the last platform I’d have expected and the Street Fighter II ultimate hand-drawn coolness edition was in the works. One of the titles that flew somewhat under the radar at the time was the Xbox Live! arcade game Rocketmen : Axis of Evil. I even wrote a quick preview of it during our E3 coverage.

Even the PR guy who politely showed me around did not have any clue what the game was based on so I guess he was surprised when I mentioned that the title was an interesting choice for a license built around a constructible card game where ship-to-ship combat was the main focus. Instead of the Star Control-like  melee I would have expected instead I was watching someone grind through a swarm of burly Martians in a Smash TV-like top down shooter.

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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 15 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

Commanders: Attack of the Genos seemingly came out of nowhere; I had never heard of the game, and suddenly it was being released on Arcade. Strategy games are certainly a genre that XBLA is lacking, so I was more than willing to embrace Commanders. What I walked away with was the feeling that I was playing Advance Wars in 3D on my TV – and there’s nothing wrong about that, especially for only 800 points ($10). Read the full article

XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 15 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

I’d never actually played or even heard of Discs of Tron prior to hearing it was coming to the Xbox Live Arcade; I’m simply too young to have played it when it was first released, and unlike many other classic titles like Pac-Man or Pong, it hasn’t been ported to every single platform ever. Having played the original Tron on Arcade, I had a vague idea of what sort of experience to expect. And I wasn’t too excited.

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