XBLA Wednesday 4/30: Go Play GTA Instead Edition
By Chris on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:41 PM PST In Game Companies, Game Consoles, Game Platforms, Games, Microsoft, Microsoft
As Jonathan reported yesterday, no new Xbox Live Arcade games were released today, thanks to Grand Theft Auto IV’s release yesterday. The day after Halo 3 was released we also saw an XBLA release of Jack Squat, so today’s lack of any releases doesn’t come as much of a surprise. After a rocky start to the whole Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday campaign, we’ve had just four weeks (not including today) since August that didn’t bring any new games – and that was due to new games becoming Arcade Hits, Undertow being temporarily released for free, or Halo 3’s release. So I won’t go too hard on Microsoft.
What you can find new on the Xbox Live Marketplace today is a totally free Dr. Pepper theme! Please, hold your applause, because there’s more. A bunch of Turok themes have also been released (although they’ll run you the ridiculous standard price of 150 Microsoft Points each), a free F-16C -PJ Emblem- download for Ace Combat 6 owners, an Alone in the Dark trailer, and some sort of Raving Rabbids invasion of Chessmaster Live that will run you 150 points. I have no idea what it’s all about, but I’m jealous that Chessmaster gets it and not Spyglass Board Games.
You may now resume your regularly scheduled GTA session.
I hate these “free” releases. Because I was affected by the XBLA outage (had all of my buddies together and was going to duke it out online, but couldn’t connect) and was told amends would be made, but I never heard about this free game and never got it. I missed out on a bunch of other stuff, too, like Carcassone and the Texas poker game.
I didn’t get Carcassone either. It’d be better if, instead of making it a period of time where you can get it for free, make it so that all the accounts that were active during the period of trouble were flagged to get it for free. That way, people wouldn’t miss out just because they didn’t hear about it in time, and people who joined after the trouble couldn’t also get the game for free. Like if someone joined while they were giving the game for free, it doesn’t really make sense, because they didn’t have to deal with any downtime.