Xbox Live Arcade Gets Two More on Wednesday

Ticket to Ride
In addition to the extremely violent, cute animal cartoon game, Happy Tree Friends False Alarm, which I reported on last week, Xbox Live Arcade will also be getting Ticket to Ride. Ticket to Ride puts you in charge of a train route across the country, where you get to “claim your tracks and complete your tickets”… fun. Both games will cost you 800 Microsoft points and will be available on Wednesday as usual.

Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday

Two more games this Wednesday for all you Xbox Live Arcade fans. Both games can be picked up for 800 Microsoft points.

Sea Life Safari
Sea Life Safari places you in the wonderful world of the deep sea, where you get to take pictures of the colorful life in the water. Aspiring photographers may want to pick this up. YOUNG aspiring photographers that is.

Elements of Destruction
Elements of Destruction gives you the powers of creating disastors, using elements such as tornadoes, lightning, and earthquakes. Basically, you were fired, created a machine that lets you control nature, and took revenge on the company who fired you. This sounds like a fun one.

Frogger and Commando 3 on XBLA

Two more games this Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday. Some good ones too.

Frogger 2
First off, you have Frogger 2. This game needs no explanation. Everyone knows the classic Frogger games. This version comes in HD though, and can be played by up to 4 players online. It’ll set you back 800 Microsoft points.

Wolf of the Battlefield
Next, you can pick up Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3. This is one of the most popular arcade shooters ever, and for good reason…cuz it’s good! This one is also 800 Microsoft points. Now go shoot some stuff up and take care of those testosterone levels.

Next Weeks XBLA Release: Roogoo

Roogoo

Microsoft hasn’t announced next weeks game yet but the company who created it did. Southpeak Games has revealed that next weeks Xbox Live Arcade release will their own, Roogoo. Roogoo is puzzler in which the player has to guide meteors in the form of shaped blocks through rotating discs. This will be task given to you to save the world. Cool.

Buku Sudoku and Warlords On XBLA Today

Two games on Xbox Live Arcade this week, so get ’em while they’re hot.

Buku Sudoku
Yet another Sodoku game on Xbox Live Arcade. I guess there’s a reason though; gamers love it. So today you can pick up Buku Sudoku, which has 1,200 puzzles and multiplayer up to four players. You can get it for 800 Microsoft points.

Warlords
The other game offered this week is Warlords. This game features a Breakout-style type of gameplay. Each player controls a paddle which is used to protect their castle from bouncing fireballs. Of course, it’s your job to knock them into the other player’s castles. Get this one for 400 Microsoft points.

Delisted Games on Xbox Live Still Available

XBLA Storage Space
There seems to be a lot of confusion, myself included, about Microsoft delisting underperforming games on Xbox Live Arcade. It seems that even though a game will be delisted from the service, it won’t really be removed entirely, just thrown in a sort of “back room.”

According to Aaron Greenberg, Director of Product Management for Xbox 360 and Live has stated that this is the case and that if you own one of those titles and you delete it and decide you want it later, you’ll still be able to re-download the game. Multiplayer and leaderboards will still work as they always have and delisted titles can still be purchased through the tell a friend option. So don’t worry too much about it, but it still sounds like a hassle to me.

To the Graveyard With Unsuccessful XBLA Titles

Rocky and Bullwinkle

Microsoft has announced that they would like to put more focus on successful titles within their Xbox Live Arcade service and will soon be removing underperforming titles from the service entirely.

Right now the service contains somewhere around 130 different games, and Marc Whitten, Xbox Live general manager, has stated that they would now like to focus more on quality instead of quantity. Below is what determines if a title will be removed from the service.

  • At least 6 months old
  • Metacritic score below 65
  • Conversion rate below 6%

If an XBLA title meets the above criteria, a three-month delisting notice will be given. So that means if there’s a title on the service that you don’t think is doing well, and you’ve been on the fence about purchasing it, look for a notice. If you see that notice, you got three months, homie!