Reimagining classics has been the hot thing as of late, oftentimes with phenomenal results (see: Pac-Man: Championship Edition and Bionic Commando: Rearmed). Galaga is a natural step forward as one of those “original games” like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, and this Wednesday you’ll be able to experience Galaga in modern fashion with the release of Galaga Legions.

As the second-to-last game being released in the Summer of Arcade, Legions will have some stiff competition to live up to with so many top-notch Arcade games being released in a short period of time. Geometry Wars 2, Rearmed, Braid — the Microsoft points are adding up fast, and you’ll have to cough up another 800 points ($10) for the full version of Legions.

During E3, 1UP got to go hands-on with the game. Andrew Pfister said of Legions:

Like Geometry Wars and Pac Man CE, this is going to be another one of those games that’ll make you obsessively track your friends’ leaderboards. It’s challenging, but fast while being easily accessible. There’s an option to enable automatic fire so all you have to worry about is moving around (but manual fire is just holding down the right trigger, so even that isn’t too complex). With different graphical skins that honor Galaga’s roots, we’re very much in favor of this family of classic remakes.

Sounds pretty interesting to me. Legions will be available this Wednesday; make sure and check back with 1UP for a review shortly thereafter.

It took years to get a true sequel to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved on Xbox Live Arcade — although we did get Waves in PGR4 and Galaxies on Wii and DS while we waited. Going forward, a shortage of ideas is certainly not among Bizarre Creations’ problems in creating future Geometry Wars titles, as programmer Stephen Cakebread told MTV Multiplayer, “We have enough game ideas to do Geometry Wars for probably about 10 games. It depends on what will work.”

Bizarre games manager Craig Howard further confirmed the inevitable Geometry Wars sequels. “Geometry Wars is definitely a franchise,” Howard said. “It’s not going to stop.” With the way Bizarre parent company Activision has handled Guitar Hero recently, it’s not difficult to imagine.

As a big fan of Geometry Wars, it’s great to hear that Bizarre fully intends to move forward with the series. But I certainly can’t be the only one that is worried I might end up with a serious case of Geometry Wars fatigue (also known as Tony Hawk syndrome). Bizarre seemed in no rush to release Geometry Wars 2, but with Activision now calling the shots, should gamers be worried?

Braid, the second release in the ongoing “Summer of Arcade,” has been released today for the somewhat-pricey sum of 1200 Microsoft points ($15). It’ll be hard to follow up on the success of last week’s release, Geometry Wars 2. At the very least, this looks like an innovative game — certainly by XBLA standards, where there are more twin-stick shooters and ports of classic games than I care to count.

Strangely enough, the game has essentially been done for two years. But the game’s solo designer, Jonathan Blow, has spent that time tweaking puzzles and polishing the game in a fashion that he believes most indie-developed games don’t receive. “By the time the initially-playable version of the game was done, the puzzles had been decided upon — anything that didn’t work was thrown out. But over the two years since then, many puzzles have been adjusted, and a few have been changed entirely,” he told 1UP earlier this year. “When you get really detail-oriented, you find a lot of problems to fix. Many independent developers release games without going over them in this fine-grained way, but most of those games are unpolished and fail to reach their potential.”

Hopefully for Blow that extra time and persistence will equate to big sales on Xbox Live Arcade. It certainly has a good chance of doing well, thanks to being featured as the only Arcade title this week and the big Summer of Arcade giveaways that only ask you to try out the newest XBLA games.

It’ll be damn near impossible to top last week’s Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday, which saw the release of Geometry Wars 2. The “Summer of Arcade” brings Braid to Live Arcade this week, a platforming game that centers on the concept of time manipulation. Developed by indie gaming company Number None Inc., the game gives you only a single life but the ability to rewind and undo any mistakes you’ve made.

The game’s aesthetic style is sure to turn some away, but the game’s designer, Jonathan Blow, doesn’t worry about the game’s inability to blow people away with screenshots.

“Games are different from other art media because of their interactivity,” Blow told 1UP back in February as part of an in-depth preview of the game. “So if a game is expressing something, and doing it well, then you shouldn’t be able to understand that thing from screenshots, because the meat of the expression should come from the interactivity.”

Braid will run you 1200 Microsoft points ($15) and will be available this Wednesday at 2AM Pacific.

Warning: The video above has some salty language and it’s quite possible you’ll be offended by it. You’ve been warned.

1UP’s Shawn Elliott is at the ongoing QuakeCon 2008 and rather than do a traditional tour where we get a look at the highlights, we’re getting the exact opposite. Featuring the pizza box and LEGO computer case mods and the 3D gaming box, you’ll at least be getting a look at what sort of stuff you’re missing out on that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else. (Although that might be for good reason.)

It’s funny as hell — trumping the Geometry Wars 2 developer interview as the funniest thing I’ve seen today — and I’m left with just one thought: can I get one of those rad, bad boy t-shirts?

Interested in some fascinating developer insight about Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2? Then you probably won’t get much out of the video interview above with the “developers” from Loading.Ready.Run., which instead focuses on finding out how they were going for a “truly cinematic experience” which they think “should give Metal Gear Solid 4 a run for its money.”

It’s funny stuff, particularly seeing them pretend to use a green screen (which, remember, is the expensive technique also used for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films!) to model the behavior of the blue diamond, which has returned as “the principal antagonist.”

You can find more hilarious videos and other good stuff at Loading.Ready.Run.

(Thanks to Infinity Ward’s fourzerotwo for pointing it out!)

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.

Read the full article

More than two and a half years after Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 was released on Xbox Live Arcade, a sequel has been released. And from the time I’ve spent with the game so far, it was totally worth the wait.

Rather than just the Evolved game mode from the first game, there are now six game modes (including Waves, which was the version of Geometry Wars included with Project Gotham Racing 4): Deadline (score as much as possible in three minutes), Evolved (the classic mode; play until you run out of lives), King (you can only fire while in certain areas of the level which move around), Pacifism (you can only destroy enemies by running through gates), Waves (enemies come in waves across the level), and Sequence (a series of levels with preset enemy layouts — including a MONSTER wave of green enemies that simply blew my mind).

There’s also a new multiplayer mode for up to four players locally. Online support would have been great, but with a game of this nature it would probably have been extremely difficult to compensate for lag, so I can’t kill Bizarre over the omission.

It might be early to say this, but so far the game has met and exceeded all of my expectations. 800 Microsoft points ($10) is the price, and in my honest opinion, it’s worth every cent.

Microsoft promised it would be releasing some of the most anticipated Xbox Live Arcade games in the next 4-6 weeks back on July 19, which would peg most of them inside August at the latest. Today they announced release dates for five big XBLA games (although we knew about one of them already), and they’re all coming by the end of August. Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars 2 – it’s going to be a great five week span on Arcade.

The full “Summer of Arcade” lineup is:

• July 30: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (800 Microsoft Points)
• August 6: Braid
• August 13: Bionic Commando: Rearmed
• August 20: Galaga Legions
• August 27: Castle Crashers

As for those prizes:

Play the trial or full version of the featured blockbuster Summer of Arcade game of the week and receive one entry into both the weekly prize drawing and Grand Prize drawings:

• Grand Prize (x1) – 100,000 Microsoft Points, 12 month Xbox LIVE Gold subscription and an Xbox 360 Elite console
• Runner-Up  Prizes (x2) – 10,000 Microsoft points and a free 12 Month Xbox LIVE Gold subscription
• Weekly Prizes (x5) – 4000 Microsoft points

Not too shabby. If my math is correct, 100,000 Microsoft points equates to $1,249. That might not buy you everything available on the Marketplace, but it’d put a pretty good dent into it.

With Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2’s release less than a week away, 1UP spoke with with developer Bizarre Creations’ Craig Howard to chat about the development of this long-awaited sequel, why there aren’t any multiplayer modes that allow you to shoot at other players, and the possibility of Geometry Wars landing on PlayStation Network.

Was there any specific feedback from Geometry Wars: Galaxies that shaped what you guys put into Retro Evolved 2?

Well we paid a lot of attention to people?s feedback from Galaxies. Retro Evolved 2 was well underway before we designed Galaxies, so we were interested in seeing how people responded to some of the elements that the games shared… such as the Geoms.

Did mixing the standard Geometry Wars “lots of stuff on the screen” approach with four players provide any specific development challenges — i.e. did you have to do anything special so players wouldn’t lose track of their ship in a busy game?

It’s definitely something that we acknowledged could be a problem. To solve this we have ensured that the game does a lot of clever technical stuff for looking at how to ensure you can see what is going on in the game at all times.

You can read the rest of the interview at 1UP. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 will be available this Wednesday for 800 Microsoft points ($10).