In the past I went on record as saying Microsoft's game room was the equivalent of being mugged by a rich man, I even went as far as designing a logo which involved a classic cartoon burglar carrying two bags of swag.
Needless to say I was upset at the pricing scheme which listed games available for $3 and rentable for a single play session at the lower cost of $0.50, since the time of that post I have had somewhat of a change of heart.
Today was my first chance to check it out and instantly on loading the game up something came over me, a wave of nostalgia that hit me hard enough to part with 1200 of my hard earned points, Already I bought 5 arcade cabinets, Asteroids deluxe, Lunar Lander, Shao-lin's Road, Crystal Castles and Battlantis, I still plan to buy Millipede and The Red Baron.
The games themselves are faithful recreations of the originals, when you place a purchased game in to your arcade you are treated to a full 3D render of the original cabinet and that cabinet will be yours too play forever more, that's not all though each game has 3 different medal challenges.
The buster medal rates your score, the higher your score the better your medal, the second medal is the survivor medal which in order to obtain you must stay alive, the longer you survive the better the medal the 3rd medal is for the total playtime of the game, just keep playing and the medal will be yours.
There are a lot of problems with the game however, asides from the aforementioned pricing, the actual community side of the game is under developed at best and unfinished at worst. Challenges are a great idea, however when you send a friend one, they have to actually go into the main menu and select challenges and play the game from there, any play from within the game simply doesn't count.
When a friend visits your arcade, you will only know they have done so by reading your messages, they will not appear in the actual arcade itself.
Lastly you can use 5 tokens to buy a play of any game for free, you start off with 20 and can obtain more but of course it is very difficult to do this, each friend that visits your arcade and plays a game will contribute 1 token to your total and for most of us this means we probably will never obtain any of them.
The last thing I want to mention is the Intellivision games because the games require a keypad the control scheme is difficult forcing you at times to press a button to bring up an onscreen keypad and use that while the game continues playing, making them frustrating to play.
To sum it up Games room is a great idea, poorly executed at a price that is beyond most of us, however on the other hand it's a great way to make a Retro compilation of your favourite few games at a lower price that you would pay for a Disc based compilation such as Atari Anthology (XBOX) and Intellivision Lives! (GC).
Personally I can't wait to see where Microsoft take it from here, with almost 1000 games coming in the future there is bound to be a few Gems in there that most of us can appreciate and with 1000 gamerpoints up for grabs its worth at least trying it out.