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The “World of Warcraft” of casual games in terms of addictiveness has arrived on the XBLA and anybody who has played any of the iterations will not be disappointed. What makes this version of the smash hit from PopCap different from every other version to date is the multiplayer features it includes.

Peggle as a game is simple in premise. You control a pinball launcher sitting at the top of the game board, populated with blue and orange bricks and pegs. The object of the game is to hit every orange brick and peg on the board before running out of shots, in order to complete the level and move on to designs of greater skill.

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Boy, is my face red. After the terrible experience that was Battlestar Galactica on XBLA I didn’t think there was a space based shooter on the marketplace that could satisfy my urges for mayhem and destruction. My hope for being able to jump in the cockpit of a nice little fighter and blast my way through several levels of eternally spawning enemies seemed so far away…

Then I found Aegis Wing. Here we have a 2-D sidescrolling shooter that satisfies those needs. With normal and insane modes, it appears to be nothing more than your average XBLA title — until you factor in one key bulletpoint: it’s free. This totally free title on the Marketplace offers all the features of a normal game. Several levels of play, two difficulties, upto four player co-op, and a number of interesting power-ups in the forum of health and weapons. Blast through the levels on your own or partner up with friends or randoms over Live — it doesn’t matter. The game is fun.

Aegis Wing is fun and free, so go grab it if you don’t have it and enjoy some mindless shooting. It’s leaps and bounds better than some paid titles on the Marketplace.

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( I know this was supposed to be up Saturday but we had some technical difficulties over the weekend, and as my brain is wired to get these up on Saturday I plum forgot. )

Yessss, it’s time for another exciting XBLA Saturday segment, and it’s actually going to be a current title! How exciting, right? Almost as exciting as the name of the title implies? Just look at it; Death Tank. It sounds fantastic, and the early videos only makes it seem that much better.

If you’ve seen the videos, you really don’t need to play the game. It looks so promising and.. I..

I’m sorry, I just can’t do this. You broke my heart, Death Tank. You show up out of nowhere and you looked so good, and then you decide you’re worth fifteen bucks? I could look past that if your gameplay didn’t continuously reward the winners, and if your power-ups weren’t so ridiculous. How do you expect me to love you if getting losing one round almost always means I will continue to lose?

I guess I understand. Listen, it’s cool. We can just be friends. I had my fun with your 60 minutes of full gameplay demo, but we just weren’t meant for each other. I’m just gonna go home and have a nap, and then see if Worms will take me back.

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Another board game turned XBLA title, Catan brings the best of card based resourse management to the console. Any game is played between two and four players, and takes place on a fictional island divided into hexagonal tiles, each containing a resource type and a number. Players take turns placing two settlements and two road pieces down on the board, and then take turns rolling a set of six-sided dice. If there is a settlement touching a tile that contains the number rolled, the owner of that settlement gains that resource.

The objective of the game is to collect the different kinds of resources (brick, stone, wheat, and sheep) which are used to purchase different pieces. A player can buy road, settlement, and city pieces, as well as development cards. By placing down roads and settlements a player can earn victory points, and the first player to reach ten points wins the game

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The game itsself is easy to learn, but surprisingly difficult to master. Given that the layout of the board is different every time, a skilled player can utilize their roads to block off other players from expanding to needed resources or create a monopoly on a specific resource, forcing the other players to offer deals in order for them to get their much needed resource.

Playing against the AI is a good way to learn the nuances of the game,  but playing against real people brings a whole new level of strategy to the game. Sadly, this is one game that seems to have unfairly fallen by the wayside, and a lack of local multiplayer means you can’t get a few games in with your friends.

The game is sitting at a cool 800 Microsoft Points and while the game is worth every point in terms of gameplay, the difficulty in finding play online should warrant a price drop. If you enjoy the board game titles on XBLA give this one a shot.

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So here we have a unique game on the XBLA, in the sense that there is no real objective to it except to make your way up the build order. The game has no combat, no objectives, and minimal micro-management. Weather doesn’t affect anything, time has no meaning, and resources are infinite. Despite the lack of a driving force I found myself putting the controller down several hours later, wondering exactly where my evening had gone.

You start off by selecting either a stock ‘giant’ character from the game, or using your own NXE avatar. Following this, you assign tiny little villagers — the Keflings — to tasks such as harvesting stone and lumber, with which you use build structures from blueprints. Repeat this a few dozen times and you read the end of the build order, and can set out to move buildings and design your own little world.

The multiplayer is much the same — you can host or join a game online, and instead of building everything yourself you team up with other players in the game. The downside is that communication with other players is severely limited, so it is far more likely that you’ll get in each other’s way.

What it boils down to:

• It was the first game to use the NXE avatars
• Following the build order from start to finish assures several hours of gameplay
• The repetition makes it easy to get into a routine and presents a relaxing atmosphere

If you’re looking for an experience different from everything else on the Arcade, think about picking up A Kingdom for Keflings. Grab the trial — the game is identical to it the whole way through. If you find yourself wanting more then grab the game.

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Do you like frantic combat? Do you like generic weapons and power-ups that really add nothing to the gameplay? Maybe you’re a fan of a badly designed half top-down and half over-the-shoulder camera? No? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Battlestar Galactica on XBLA relies on the name alone to sell it — and after picking it up I can understand why. The game consists of a handful of levels, loosely following the early plot of the re-imagined series. Your ships are picked for you depending on the level, tossing you into a few different models of Vipers, a Raptor, a Cylon Raider and the Blackbird. The final three examples each take the spotlight for a single mission during the campaign, and despite having the opportunity they present for innovative gameplay, every mission comes down to the same thing — see Cylon, shoot until dead.

The camera angle they went with feels like they couldn’t decide if they wanted a top-down shooter or something different, so instead they decided on “all of the above” and stick the camera somewhere above and behind your ship, leaving you with the experience of dragging your head along the ceiling. It has the added bonus of making it difficult to see anything on your screen until you are almost on top of it — leaving you to rely almost solely on your radar to pick a target.

I can’t even say whether the multiplayer makes up for everything the single player experience lacks, since it has been impossible to find a single other person looking for a game, let alone finding a full death match to participate in.

To add insult to injury the game is priced at 800 Microsoft Points, and I wouldn’t even recommend it at 400.

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What do I even need to say about Worms? Everybody has played some variation of Worms at some point in time, whether it be one of the many in the Worms series, or a game with a similar concept like Tank Warz or Gunbound.

It’s good. It’s really good. It doesn’t have a holy hand-grenade but it does have a banana bomb, and what the banana bomb lacks in sheer power it more than makes up for with utter wackiness. You can make your own team, customize the names of your worms, pick their tombstones and set their voices. You can even made a custom game mode and set what weapons you want to be available.

The gameplay is simple. Two to four teams of four worms are randomly placed on a randomly generated map with the single goal of eliminating the other teams. You use a variety of weapons to kill enemy worms and hope to survive to the end of the round. Don’t like somebody’s name? Team up on them and eliminate them fast. See a worm over on the edge of the map? Ninja Rope your way over there and uppercut them to their death.

I don’t know how many ways I can say it. Worms is one of the best games on the Marketplace to date. It doesn’t matter what the price is, pick the game up and get ready to have some fun. (Point of interest: There are a few downloadable backdrops, but the one you really want is Jungle for 150 points.) It’s nearly impossible not to like Worms.

I’m talking to you, David.

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Having played through Castle Crashers on several different characters now, I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it. At the core, playing it with friends is always a fun experience. People you enjoy gaming with can make almost anything fun, even if it’s a substandard game.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Castle Crashers is substandard — I’m just not sure it’s for me. It’s Newgrounds through and through. From the art style to the humor, the game is a typical Newgrounds product. Add one part side scrolling hack-and-slash to one part excessive blood, bake for thirty minutes and liberally sprinkle poop jokes to achieve the final product. But Castle Crashers goes above and beyond this by incorporating multiplayer and RPG elements, Achievements and an incredible variety of items and weapons to create an experience unique to the Live Arcade.

A little blood and poop for you

Wanna be a melee character? Every time you level up you earn stat points that you can pump into strength and defense. Feel like blasting away your enemies with magic? Dump those points into magic and let your friends go head to head with the baddies while you hang back and destroy them with several different magic attacks per character.

Castle Crashers gets positive reviews across the board, and I can see why it does. It appeals to a vast audience and personally, I do enjoy the gameplay. A lot of people lavished praise on the game before it got patched, when playing online was sketchy (at best). This is coming long after the patch that fixed those problems is out, and I can honestly say that the single player holds no draw for me, but multiplayer makes it a fun experience.

If you’ve got the 1200 points and some friends looking for something to play, give Castle Crashers a shot.

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Warlords is one of the many arcade-games-turned-XBLA-games that when I spotted it, I instantly had to pick it up. Warlords is an old school arcade game that was published by Atari in the 80s, and is considered by many to be the perfect example of a classic.

The game consists of four kings in the corners of the screen, surrounded by brick walls for protection. Each player or computer controls a paddle that moves around the outside of their own brick wall, used to catch, shoot, and deflect a flaming projectile that quickly bounces around the screen, damaging the walls and potentially killing the king. The redesigned Xbox Live version sports totally new graphics, colors and slightly tweaked game play. In the original, the projectiles begin fast and increase in speed, while the new version features projectiles that begin slow and gradually increase in speed.

The game functions the same way in both single and two player modes, where the players progress through each stage by working together to defeat the computer players before they are killed — or if a player is confident enough, he may take out his human teammate and rack up more points on his own. Three or four players participate in a free-for-all, where the game ends as soon as any one player wins.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the better choices from the Marketplace. It’s fun and quick to play, and with friends it becomes that much more fun. The only downside is that because most people don’t seem to play it, it’s nearly impossible to find a random game over Live.

Overall, I’d say there are definitely worse ways to spend your Microsoft Points. The XBLA version looks great, the retro version presents a challenge, and the game is fun, pure and simple.

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