Inside the Xbox Game Room

The Xbox Game Room was finally released this past week and while Microsoft chose not to ignore my suggestions for the Game Room, I nonetheless spent an entire night playing with the quasi-free Xbox add-on. I was surprised how much fun playing doll house with a virtual arcade can be.

Going back to the mall

I’ve been looking forward to the Xbox Game Room (XGR) since it was announced. After all, retro games are kinda my thing and I think the classics have been neglected when it comes to handling within the Xbox world. You’ve been able to download some retro games, like Pac-Man and Smash TV, for a long time, but the XGR tries to wrap the real arcade experience up into a nice little virtual package.

And it doesn’t really come that close.

But that’s not say it’s not fun. In many ways, the Xbox Game Room is what Nintendo should have done with their Virtual Console. In the XGR, your avatars walk around an arcade that is setup kind of like a mall. There are separate rooms and a couple levels on which you can place your purchased video games. Where the XGR tries to drop you in an arcade experience, Nintendo could have totally done the living room experience with the VC, kind of like how Retro Game Challenge on the DS is themed.

Welcome to your virtual mall arcade

One of the first things you’ll need to do with your arcade is decorate. While this doesn’t sound very exciting, I easily spent a hour choosing themes for each of my arcade rooms and then choosing items and furniture to put them. Especially since you don’t start with any actual games to play, all you really have to do is place furniture. Some of the items are cheesy but funny, and some are just awesome - like a pool table and half-built arcade cabinet. Never has placing bar stools been more exciting. Thankfully, everything up to this point is absolutely free. The only thing that costs magic MS points are the games themselves.

Earning street cred

Of course, filling your virtual rooms with chotchskies only lasts so long before you’ll need to pony up some cash to add a real arcade cabinet to your room. I chose Asteroids Deluxe as my first purchase and placed it all over my arcade. Conveniently enough, you can place any arcade cabinet anywhere in your arcade as many times as you want. I have one room just filled with Asteroids. And in total Mii style, your friends’ avatars magically show up in your arcade and walk around playing your arcade game.

Once you have a game added to your arcade, you can play and start working on leveling up. Yes, even in the virtual mall arcade you can level up. Leveling up in the Game Room boils down to reaching seemingly trivial achievements, like certain scores, playing for a certain number of minutes and so on. But keep in mind arcade games are brutal. Lasting six minutes in Asteroids Deluxe is a lot harder than it sounds. Reaching these goals earns you medals, which then earns you points, which then gets you to level up. As you level up, additional doll house items are unlocked. It seems like a lot of for work to unlock a giant fooseball table, but I also played the shit out of Dead or Alive 2 just to unlock a scarf for my fighter. As cheesy at the unlocks are, it’s nice to get something for the time and dedication you put into your game. I should also add that the Game Room is a gamer score whore’s wet dream because you’ll easily get 50G or more just by decorating your arcade, buying a game, and doing other basic intro actions.

Don’t forget about the games!

But lets get real for a minute. Arcade games aren’t about unlocking a giant pair of roller skates! It’s about high scores and earning bragging rights. Leaderboards in the XGR are pretty standard. You have global leaderboards and friend leaderboards. Unfortunately they chose the all-friend leaderboard rather than trying my suggestion of high scores per friend, but whatever. Thankfully they made up for that missing link with friend challenges.

Avatars will wander your mall in search of games

You can easily send a challenge to one of your friends for any game you own (and they own). The challenge gives you control over what type of challenge you want to lay down. You can pick attributes like the number of times your friend has to attempt to beat the challenge, how many lives, and even how long in real time they have before they forfeit. And lets not forget taunting. Along with the straight-up challenge, you can send along an avatar taunt. For my first challenge I naturally picked the taunt called “Full Moon,” which shows my avatar spanking his own ass. Classic.

Even with all the gimmicky fluff in the Xbox Game Room, you can just as easily get in, load a game, play, and get out. The arcade experience is a bit lacking for the most part except when it comes to sound. The ambient arcade sounds in the XGR are great. If you turn off the cheesy background music and just turn on the background noise, it really does have that classic arcade feel. Heck, your avatars even shake their hands and kick the cabinet in frustration. And if you’re into geeking out over the sounds of an arcade, download your own.

Fun but no surprises

Overall the Xbox Game Room package is pretty well done, but if there is one thing that will take down the XGR quicker than a house of cards is the release schedule of games. If Microsoft doesn’t take a Rock Band-like approach and releases new games into the Game Room near-weekly, it will stall and fail. With over 30 years of retro game titles up for grabs, there’s no reason there can’t be a weekly Game Room DLC pack that includes five new games or more. If it’s going to be months between game pack releases, visits to my virtual arcade will become less and less frequent.

While the Xbox Game Room is entirely targeted at the retro gaming crowd, the low price point of $3 per game increases the chances of getting non-retro gamers to walk in your virtual arcade mall. I know not everyone enjoys working hard for a high score, but if someone challenges you in the Game Room, be a sport, pony up your three bills, and have some fun.