Game: Fatal Fury Special (Demo)

Thumbs?: Down. No nostalgia=no purchase.

Game: Cyberball 2072 (Demo)

Thumbs?: See Fatal Fury Special

Game: Sonic 2

Thumbs?: Up but I'm not buying it. I actually love this game to pieces but I have a working Genesis copy if I need my Sonic fix.

Game: Geon: Emotions

Thumbs?: Undecided but leaning to down. Game seems okay but the demo gives away quite a bit of gameplay and I'm not sure I care to see the difference with the other emotion cubes and arenas. If I need a small fix I'll just play the demo again.

Yeah, I started to wonder what happened to this :)

Game: Fatal Fury (demo)

Thumbs: Down - Not bad, but nothing special. I prefer newer beat 'em ups. And was it just me, or is this game incredibly hard?

Game: Cyberball (demo)

Thumbs: Down - I didn't understand the rules! And it wasn't interesting enough for me to learn it.

Game: Sonic 2 (demo)

Thumbs: Up - Much better than the first.

I'll comment on Geon later, not sure what I think about it right now. Need some more playtime.

 

Fatal Fury Special (demo)

Thumbs: Down. Despite being a mere 400 points in comparison to other fighting games for XBLA (SFII and UMK3 which come in at 800), I still didn't wasn't interested enough for a $5 buy.

Cyberball 2072 (demo)

Thumbs: Down. This game basically falls under my general blanket policy of not buying those really old arcade games for $5. That and even then, I didn't find the game all that fun anyway.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (demo)

Thumbs: Generally undecided. I've never been particularly good at Sonic games, which is why I haven't bought either this game or the original. I might give them another chance down the road, though.

Geon: Emotions (demo)

Thumbs: N/A. I played the demo once this morning, and I didn't quite get the hook of this game. I was half expecting my emote to turn yellow and start going 'wokka wokka wokka.' I'll still give it more of a chance, but as of now it's looking unlikely. Especially at $10.

Fatal Fury Special-Full Version

Thumbs: Down. This game is way too hard, even on the easiest setting. That, and the plane switching is a nuisance.

Cyberball-Demo

Thumbs: Down. As was stated before, couldn't quite figure out how to play the darn thing, plus I'm not a big football game fan anyhow. If they want to give us a good XBLA football game I'd actually play, give us the Mutant League series.

Sonic 2-Full

Undecided-I picked it up to play with some friends, but haven't really had much time to play it yet (especially once I found out there was no multiplayer co-op).

Geon-N/A

Don't even want to try the demo from others opinions of it.

 

Oh an if I had done this for SoR2 week, that totally would have gotten thumbs up from me. The first game system I ever bought with my own money was the Genesis fighting system which came packaged with it, and I played the hell out of it then. It's even better now that I can play co-op with friends online, had to have played through it at least 4 times already.

Game: Fatal Fury Special (Full version)

Thumbs: Up, but with a caveat

First, if you didn't enjoy the older 2d fighters in their time, this won't convert you, so it's something of a niche title. However, if you do like the genre, then FFS is well worth your while. The game has a lot of personality, interesting characters and a solid enough fighting system (plane shifting is a bit annoying, though). It's also pretty playable, as long as you stick to the easiest setting (it's not easy, it's pretty tough, but I don't think it's as bad as everyone else says it is), and at 400 points it makes Street Fighter 2 look a little overpriced.

The only problems I have with it are that there is no dedicated versus mode, so you have to keep challenging on the single player mode if you want to fight a friend, which doesn't let the winner choose a new character, and the fact that you only get 4 coins. A retro title like this should let you brute force your way through it even if you really suck - that's part of the appeal of these home versions, to see the things that you were too poor or too crap to get to in the arcade.

Note that I have no idea how well online multiplayer works - my connection is way too slow to play a fighting game against someone on the other end of the world.

 

[b]Game:[/b] Cyberball 2027 (Demo)

[b]Time Played:[/b] 10 minutes or less

[b]Thumbs?:[/b] Down

[b]Comments:[/b] American football, robots, and an exploding ball in an 8-bit style video game originally designed for an Atari 2600... GIVE ME A BREAK!!!

 

[b]Game:[/b] Fatal Fury Special (Demo)

[b]Time Played:[/b] 10 minutes

[b]Thumbs?:[/b] Down

[b]Comments:[/b] Its okay, but not for me. I'll stick with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

 

[b]Game:[/b] Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Full Game)

[b]Time Played:[/b] 8 hours, 20 minutes on release day (Wednesday, September 13, 2007) - check [url=http://www.theliveeye.com/profile.asp?tag=lightsup55]my LiveEye profile[/url] for updated time

[b]Thumbs?:[/b] Up

[b]Comments:[/b] Played this back in the day when I had a Sega Genesis. Oh the memories. I managed to unlock all of the achievements within 8 hours of it's release. Co-Op is nice, but [url=http://www.xblarcade.com/node/1174]despite what Xbox.com says[/url], it is only local (offline). A big bummer for me, but still a good buy. I would've gladly paid 800 Microsoft Points for this, but Sega was nice enough to keep it at 400 Microsoft Points.

 

[b]Game:[/b] Geon: Emotions (Full Game)

[b]Time Played:[/b] 1 hour, 9 minutes as of the time of this post - check [url=http://www.theliveeye.com/profile.asp?tag=lightsup55]my LiveEye profile[/url] for updated time

[b]Thumbs?:[/b] Up

[b]Comments:[/b] Marble Blast Ultra! Well, pretty close. In other words... if you like Marble Blast Ultra, then I'd highly recommend this. Amazing graphics and sound, 4-player Xbox Live multiplayer, Co-Op, the works! Nothing else to say really...

Geon (Full game)

Thumbs? Undecided.

The concept is exciting. The presentation is awesome. It takes the best part of Pacman and puts it in an lay-your-food-in-a-basket-competition (I'm not really sure what I mean with that). But is this fun? I can surely spend some hours with this game not thinking about the time but I have no idea if I enjoy it. It's easy to pick-up and get a grip of the rules (the power-ups will probably take some time to fully understand and know how to use).

I believe this is a game you just play for the reason to play something. Kill some time. But that's about all, and it wont last more than a week.

Game: Fatal Fury Special

Thumbs?: 30 degrees upwards

I like the SNK fighting games, but they could definitely have picked a better fighting game than this (Last Blade 2 or KoF'00 please!), and they made it even worse by having this emulate the arcade version instead of the console version (so there's no dedicated VS mode and no practice mode). Nothing I'd bother to buy.

Game: Cyberball

Thumbs?: 75 degrees downwards

Absolutely confusing. The presentation is surprisingly polished considering it's such an old game, but I had no idea what I was doing and I wasn't tempted to learn how it works.

Game: Geon

Thumbs?: 450 degrees downwards

So, they base the game on Pacman, just without the ghosts... and you play against another player who's on another map you can't directly compete against? Who the heck thought this would be a good concept? This is one of the most stupid gameplay concepts I've ever played. If they had only bothered to make both players play on the same map it would at least have a better competitive element. But without that you can just memorize a perfect route for each level, occasionally press the powerup button and that's it.

I think XBLA releases has been very very weak the last few months. I'm hoping games like Switchball and Puzzle Quest will be released soon.

Game: Geon (Full Game)

Thumbs?: Down

I've two big problems with this game.

1. It's simply not very fun to play 2. Almost impossible to find anyone to play with online.

1 + 2 = I don't know why I bought it, but i regret it.