It's not as though I don't bring my own qualifications to the party - I spent last year managing the Xbox channels of another major (but competing, and therefore not mentioned) website. So, you can bet that I know my way around the 360 dashboard and can pull off a devastating chainsaw attack in Gears of War. Still, my last few months at GameSpy have not really been focused on my favorite console. I've played a number of PS3 titles as well as shepherded the PSP and GBA channels, but I've longed to return to my old stomping grounds: the Xbox 360.
Since I felt a little out of practice and a bit out of touch with the 360, I decided to download a few of the newer Xbox Live Arcade titles to get back into the swing of things. I grabbed Heavy Weapon and RoboBlitz in the hopes that they would provide me with something to talk about in this first installment, and I must admit that the familiar twitch-heavy tone of Xbox Live Arcade remains in full effect. Still, these two titles represent an interesting dichotomy in the Live Arcade pantheon.
While Heavy Weapon is a super-simple game built in the classic arcade style (a style which has been co-opted by numerous Internet Flash games), RoboBlitz is more of a puzzle/adventure game that still includes plenty of baddie-blasting action to keep things interesting. What strikes me about these two titles is how staggeringly simple Heavy Weapon is in comparison to RoboBlitz, yet they both manage to hold my attention in completely different ways.
Heavy Weapon reminds me of the classic Atari game Moon Patrol due to their shared side-scrolling nature and futuristic space-tank motif. As the landscape rolls interminably to the left, you cruise along shooting down anything that comes across the screen (except the helpful white helicopters which drop upgrade goodies) until you reach the end of the stage, which is signified by a boss battle. With a game as basic as Heavy Weapon, most of the satisfaction comes from increasing your destructive abilities, so bulking up on power-ups is essential to keep the fun flowing. Despite all the carnage, there's something relaxing about a game that makes so few demands on you - you don't have to think, just shoot, shoot, shoot! Then respawn, and shoot some more.
On the other hand, RoboBlitz has its fair share of running and gunning, but adds some puzzle-solving into the mix to spice things up. It also looks gorgeous running on the Unreal Engine, which may make it feel a bit more complex than it is. There's more to RoboBlitz than just blowing stuff up. Your little robotic avatar regularly has to put his weapons aside to carry around objects with his metal clamps. In fact, most of the game is about carrying things from one place to another with your little clampy-hands, with the shooting of enemies only acting as another obstacle in your path to success. Shooting things is simply not the sum of RoboBlitz's parts, as it is with Heavy Weapon.
What I think this means to Xbox 360 owners, and to the gaming public at large, is that we're beginning to see a delivery on the promise of cheaper game design equaling more experimentation. Granted, there isn't anything that Heavy Weapon does that is particularly innovative, but it illustrates the point that sometimes you don't want innovation, you just want a new skin for a game that has been fun since the first humans tied a small round ball to a cup and tried to swing the ball into said cup. In addition to providing a home for classic games, though, Xbox Live Arcade also provides a low cost (and I'm talking development-wise here) platform to produce more innovative titles like RoboBlitz without all the crazy overhead that you'd need to turn such a game into a mega-profitable blockbuster title. Cheap development means more games, and more games means more good times, so I consider this a major plus.
