SAN FRANCISCO – I think I’m going to spend a lot of time hanging out in my Game Room.
The big draws at Microsoft’s X10 event Thursday in San Francisco are Halo: Reach, Fable III and other huge holiday releases. But Game Room, the classic game download service that will be released for the Xbox 360 and PC in March, is every bit as impressive. It’s an inexpensive, full-featured way to download and play classic games that will be overloaded with content. When it launches, 30 games will be available, and Microsoft says it will add seven more every week, pulling from the back catalogs of Atari, Konami, Intellivision and more.
For anyone disappointed with the slow trickle of retro releases on Nintendo’s Virtual Console or the PlayStation 3’s library of PSone games, Game Room promises to be a treasure trove of content. When you’re shoving out seven games a week, nothing’s too niche. The games on display at X10 ranged from the beloved (Tempest, Breakout) to the completely obscure (Activision’s Oink! for the Atari 2600, Atari’s black-and-white Red Baron flight combat game).
All of the emulation seems to be working perfectly. Every game is played in a correctly-sized window – there’s no full-screen option. You can pause every game to bring up a short instruction sheet or look at a controls diagram. As you’re browsing through the library of games for sale, you can demo any title once. After that, you’ll have to pay 50 cents for a single play. Microsoft’s pricing is, in a word, aggressive: Every single game on the service costs just $3 for one version, or $5 if you want to play it on both Xbox 360 and PC.
While these prices are set in stone for individual games, Microsoft said it could introduce bundle packages to spur sales. For example, if Intellivision games aren’t selling, it could bundle three of them together for $5.
The games have tons of added features. You can save and load the games anywhere, and even rewind and fast-forward your play by using the left and right triggers, in case you screw up and want to try again. This won’t worked in ranked online matches, of course. When you set a high score on a game, it’ll appear on a banner above it in your virtual “game room” (pictured above). You can earn medals by playing the games, and even create your own challenges for other players to attempt.
That game room has 12 different rooms that will fit a total of 100 cabinets. If you buy more games than that, you can swap them out. You can always access all the games you’ve purchased through a straightforward menu system. You can also skin those 12 rooms with various decorations, like Atari or Konami themes. In addition to Avatars, little sprite characters from the games will wander around your personal space. You can invite friends there, who will be able to demo any game you own once.
Microsoft says it is continuing to try to get as many classic game publishers as possible on the platform, and support more hardware. (I’d love to see the Colecovision emulated, myself, and I’d assume the guys at Hudson would be up for TurboGrafx.)
In short, Game Room is much more than just a download service. It’s an attempt to add value to these classic games by connecting them all in one universal system with new features that could make playing Pitfall! engaging even to a contemporary audience. I’m looking forward to next month.
Image courtesy Microsoft