Microsoft is making me angry

Mainly because they are seriously slacking off on their Xbox live service recently. Two weeks have passed without a new Xbox live arcade game. Sure, we got a couple of sweet demos like Battlestations: Midway and the brand new Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 demo that was released this week, but live is looking pretty shoddy when Wii gamers get classics like Link to the Past, Contra III, Comix Zone and Mario Kart 64 just in the past two weeks, and MS has countered with virtually nothing. Live Arcade was initially a big reason I was interested in the 360. But so far the original content is pretty uninspired and the classic games are all horribly butchered ports that reek of laziness and incompetence.

So what's coming and when? Well MS has released a list of 10 coming soon titles, but no indication of when they are out, or in what order. This seems like a giant fuck you to 360 owners (especially ones like me who have been drooling over Worms for the past month and are wondering what the FUCK is the holdup for a game that could be done on a SNES) who have been patiently waiting for something truly worthwhile to spend their Microsoft points on (which reminds me, where the hell is Castle Crashers?).

As much as we've bagged on Nintendo for their somewhat flaky release schedule, I own 3 very worthwhile VC games (and it would be a few more if I didn't still have my Genesis and a few classic games) and the console has only been out two months, so that's a pretty solid average. I own no Xbox live arcade titles and am only interested in one that is supposedly coming out sometime in the next two & a half months. That's well over a year of offering this service, so that's pretty appalling that I can't find one truly appealing game out of the current crop.

Finally I did pick up Rogue Galaxy, but I honestly may not get too much into it until I lighten my load a little bit (namely by finishing off FFXII, which I probably still have a good 40 hours to go on. But I'll certainly get a few hours in and give you some impressions in my next post.

Stand up of the week: George Carlin-The 10 Commandments