Braid wants you to understand its world, which is an interesting process; Braid will never hold your hand, and it will never patronize you. That’s not to say its puzzles are difficult because of a lack of direction, but that Braid rewards tactile learners. It wants you to play around with the mechanics it offers, so instead of explaining how different tools it presents work, an act that would only demystify them, a simple puzzle is offered to start, as a brief acquaintance, and you move on from there. The further you progress in levels, the more uses you will find for different tools, and the deeper mechanics become. Like any good puzzle, Braid becomes more interesting the longer you play with it and the more you think about it.

Braid leaves a lot to a player’s interpretation, from puzzles with multiple solutions, to its story and what it means. Without divulging too much, Tim’s story, like The Prince’s, is bittersweet, but it only becomes more beautiful for it, adding layers to its meaning. And maybe that’s what makes Braid so interesting; it’s never gimmicky, it’s never bland, and nothing is unintentional. It’s dense in such a way that will spark thought and conversation in the minds of people who read into it.

In the end, Braid takes a medium and creates something profound. And unlike so many games that present themselves in an artful way, yet fall short of offering anything truly deep, Braid delivers an experience gamers will be hard-pressed to forget.

Additionally the game is artistically striking, featuring a mixture of 2D art with cleverly designed 3D landscapes and characters. Player models look crisp and the environments are vivid and stylish. The rich detail in the numerous cut scenes is a major boon to the title, which draws almost completely off the art style of Penny Arcade’s comics. From the introductory movie to the main menu screen, this title practically oozes polish from every conceivable orifice.

It comes as no surprise then that the two aspects of Rain Slick that are a tremendous success are the hallmarks of Penny Arcade itself: clever and astute writing coupled with extremely polished and distinctive art. Unfortunately, those attributes aside, Rain Slick slips and falls off the titular precipice when it comes to gameplay.

From the start of the game, you create your own character in the Penny Arcade universe and embark on the yarn they have spun for you. Your house is trampled to dust within the first moments by a gigantic steam-powered robot of doom trailblazing its way to the city-centre of New Arcadia, the fictional Lovecraftian setting for the game. You very quickly meet up with Tycho and Gabe, main protagonists of the web-comic, as they pursue the mechanical beast - forming an unstoppable ménage à trois of demon-killing badass. You are aided in this quest by Startling Developments, the detective agency that they manage, tasked with investigating the paranormal and occult goings-on in the world. Equal parts X-Files and Sherlock Holmes, the agency is a hub around which the game revolves – allowing you to investigate clues, watch videos and manage your inventory and characters.

From there the rest of the game is predominantly simplistic adventure fare. Fetch quests, collection puzzles and grinding enemies is pretty much all you will be doing for the 4-6 hours the game will take to beat. The classical RPG combat has a satisfying chunkiness to it but ultimately fails to stave off repetition and boredom. The mechanics of fighting are also unrefined, requiring one too many mouse clicks than what you would instinctively assume and while the special power attacks do employ new control methods, they are so easy to max out that it would have been better to simply make them automatic.

Dialogue in Rain Slick is a primitive tool, yet carries the same sharp writing style as the rest of the game, while the case files themselves range from critically important to borderline insignificant. For example, you are incapable of entering one location without performing a ridiculous fetch quest in another, forcing you to collect X amount of item Y to pay the gatekeeper to give you item Z which lets you enter location… whatever. So far so early-90s-point and click. These are game conventions that belong in nostalgia only and feel out of place in a game that is cutting edge in so many other areas.

Apparently someone has been going around New Arcadia dropping loot chests on every single god-damn street corner. You acquire so many bandages, armour potions, speed boosts, power bracelets and flasks of ultimate evil that you quickly ignore them completely. This is compounded by the blocking system which means that, with practice, you will take next to no damage in battles - period. This is essentially Rain Slick’s biggest flaw. It is far too easy. Of course difficulty is not essential to enjoy a game, but one which is built around combat and puzzle solving is hindered a lot by being a walkover. The game even heals you back to full after every battle! It drains all challenge out of the gameplay entirely – meaning all you are left with is a repetitive grind-fest against a legion of identical enemies over and over and over…

As a complete package, Rain Slick leaves you feeling a little wanting. There is plenty of content and a superior level of polish but while the highs of this game are a triumph, the lows mar the entire experience. Hothead have promised ‘regular’ episodic content, so the problems should be fixed over time, and as an introduction it performs well - setting the scene while still holding back the really juicy parts of the adventure. It’s a solid title that still has plenty to prove.

The denial took a little while to settle in. For the first 30 minutes, Assault Heroes 2 was torture. The first game had a very smooth difficulty curve, usually killing me off right before the end of the game, like any good shooter should. The entire first level of Assault Heroes 2 was filled with death and profanity, followed by more frustrating death and louder, more offensive profanity. The biggest offender here is the position of the camera: it has been zoomed out significantly from the first game. So far, in fact, that many of the units are just too small to see. The tiny infantry bastards routinely hide behind rocks or trees waiting for the camera to move forward, then fire at the player from off screen in a blatant affront to video game bad guy etiquette. The camera never moves backwards, either, so they are free to pester the player in relative safety for minutes at a time.

None of the other additions do the game any favors, either. The one new weapon is just like a weapon that was useless in first game. Big surprise: it’s useless here as well. There are a few new vehicles to try as well, and it is a noble effort, but when I wasn’t killed getting out of my jeep-on-steroids, I was getting killed because the new vehicles universally sucked. Everything new in the game is bad. All that is left is what worked in the first game, just smaller and 3 times as long.

To my own surprise, however, just after the first level something clicked. I stopped dying, stopped yelling at the TV and started enjoying myself. The game certainly hadn’t changed; it didn’t miraculously get better between areas. Because I wanted to like the game so much I had unconsciously made concessions to get there. I had moved my chair closer to the TV just to see what I needed to shoot. I avoided all the ‘improvements’ from the prequel, opting instead to play the first game in new levels with my nose nearly resting on the screen. You could build a circus with all the mental hoops I jumped through to like the game. There was no hype but my own to live up to. Imagine if it would have had a multi-million dollar ad campaign behind it.

There are already too many dual analog shooters out for XBLA and PSN, and this one sits near the bottom if the pile. It takes a lot for me to admit that, mostly because I have purchased and played them all (yes, even the sequel to Mutant Storm). Assault Heroes 2 took what was good and buried it under needless additions, losing the simplicity that worked in the first game. Remember Smash TV? You moved, you shot things. How do you screw that up?

Death in Mr. Driller just happens sometimes, and while most of these challenges offer an interesting twist to levels, this one kills almost all the fun you might have had with Quest Driller. Let’s say you’re almost out of air, so you enter a new section in an attempt to find more air capsules in time, but you expire before you reach any. You had better hope your new quest wasn’t to stay alive. If it was, it’s back to the beginning of the level for you. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, you’re back to square one. It’s infuriating and thoughtless, and really, that describes Quest Driller pretty well. Instantly ending the level seems like the easiest way to penalize the player. If, perhaps, your air consumption was increased while you excavated the next section instead, or your movement was slowed for a certain amount of time should you fail a challenge, Quest Driller might be somewhat fun, but right now it feels more like a cop-out than anything.

A lot of Mr. Driller Online feels half-baked, and unfortunately Quest Driller is the tip of the Iceberg. After re-acquainting myself with Mr. Driller after a few years of absence, I was feeling somewhat adequate in my Drilling skills, and I wanted to check out the online portion. So, I selected Tag Battle (having no fucking idea what that meant) and tried a few games. My experience was consistently horrendous. Movement was sluggish, I was drilling the same blocks multiple times while they constantly popped back, and at one point I just died out of the blue. It was awful and, at first, I felt bad about it. I figured my connection was being fussy, as it often is, and I was slowing down the game for everyone else. After a short break that confirmed my connection was functioning properly, I came back to Mr. Driller Online. This time I tried Solo battle, thinking maybe Tag Battle had a few bugs, but it was equally frustrating. A few clicks in Firefox told me I wasn’t the only person experiencing issues. Unless you’re hosting, Mr. Driller Online is completely unplayable over Live. You’ll be lucky to dig ten meters into a level before the game ends or everyone (except for the host) leaves in frustration.

Mr. Driller Online isn’t all bad, though. If there’s one thing it does right, it’s in presentation. Aside from a few dated sprites, it looks solid. The select screen is colourful and vibrant, the blocks you’ll be destroying look delicious as ever, and the HUD is simple, easy to read, and completely functional. The soundtrack is cheery and eclectic, and fits Mr. Driller Online’s aesthetic perfectly. If you’ve played Katamari Damacy, it’s somewhat similar to that, just don’t expect quite as many tracks.

Sadly, overall, Mr. Driller Online is a failure. It’s a broken, cheap cash-in that hasn’t received the time and effort it desperately wants and deserves. And it’s a shame, because Mr. Driller isn’t a bad game. Even though it hasn’t changed much since its debut in 1999, and doesn’t exactly offer the kind of depth Tetris might, newcomers are sure to find a unique and exciting experience in Standard Driller. But with a broken online portion, no local multiplayer, and frustrating secondary modes, it’s hard to recommend Mr. Driller Online to anyone, especially at 800 Microsoft Points.

But Triggerheart Exelica is just an entirely different story. With the release of Omega Five, I became interested in the shmup genre. Omega Five was a brilliant shooter with great presentation. After the first ten minutes of playing it, I would have said it was one of the hardest games I’ve ever played. In retrospect, it actually has a fair difficulty level and strikes a great balance between challenge and fun. But this is all without the context of Triggerheart Exelica.

So let’s try using the context. This is fairly hard, however, because Triggerheart Exelica is a fairly difficult game. And when I say fairly difficult I mean fucking ridiculous. I guess an example relating video games would be the best place to start. Omega Five is like playing some Barbie video game with some really smart eight-year-old girl who’s really into Barbie, but also really good at puzzles, or good at whatever you do in Barbie games, while Triggerheart Exelica is like playing Ninja Gaiden on Master Ninja while only using your penis to control it. But that doesn’t really capture the difference. Omega Five is like having sex with Natalie Portman while your face is covered in Scarlett Johannson’s breasts and the bed is a big pile of money, and Triggerheart Exelica is like being screwed by Michael Clarke Duncan after having just poured Tabasco sauce all over his penis. And you’re wearing one of the death traps from Saw.

Such extreme depictions are baseless if nothing is explained about the game however. Triggerheart Exelica is your traditional bullet-hell shmup. There are two characters that you can play as, the only difference between them being that one shoots concentrated, linear bullets and the other shoots spread out, thin bullets. Both of them are quite useless. The defining feature of the game is the anchor mechanic. Now, I didn’t understand this mechanic until I actually played the game, namely because nobody can describe it well but since this feature is the only thing that makes the game different from other shooters, I’ll try to explain it a little better. Your ship in the game contains an anchor that you can launch with the press of a button. Launching this anchor at an enemy will hook onto the enemy and kill it. But while the anchor button is still pressed down, the enemy will continue to swing around your ship blocking enemy bullets. After a few seconds (or letting go of the anchor button), the enemy will be launched outwards. If it hits other enemies on its trajectory outwards, it will kill them as well. On large enemies such as bosses, the anchor cannot be used to kill or swing but instead is used to concentrate the fire on the enemy.

This anchor mechanic would make a lot of bullet hell shooters much easier. And it definitely makes Triggerheart Exelica easier, to the extent that having an old hammer makes fighting a zombie horde easier. I know that something described as “bullet-hell” isn’t exactly supposed to be easy, but they’re generally designed to test reflexes, pattern recognition, and patience. Well, these are all tested in the first level of Triggerheart Exelica but after that, it only tests your WTF-meter. The enemies don’t shoot in patterns, but instead create walls of bullets that are literally impossible to navigate through. The only way to get by this part is by using the anchor mechanic, which isn’t really all that intuitive.

But perhaps I’m being a little extreme and unfair. This version of the game does feature infinite continues, so technically the only “hard” part is getting the achievements. In that sense, it’s very similar to the XBLA version of Smash TV (whose review would downright mimic this one’s), and I also have to admit that difficulty also stems from my ignorance of shmups. I’m certain there are shooters exponentially harder than Triggerheart, and that countless players have 1cc’d this game with their eyes closed or something. As I play this game more and more, I’ll probably get used to the anchor and understand the mechanics of the game better. Hopefully I’ll be able to look back and say the same thing about this game as I had to say about Omega Five.

At 800 MS points, I would advise everyone to pick this up, though with a bit more hesitation than Omega Five. The graphics and art style are all passable, but can sometimes cause problems with seeing everything on screen. And the lack of any online modes, just like with Omega Five, really do hurt the game. This shooter is blander and more difficult, but also possesses a certain traditional charm to it. I think it’s a must-have for anyone into shooters, or anyone that wants to be prepared for when Ikaruga hits, but once again, the best reason to buy it is to support the genre.

Not only does it come with a robust and frankly fantastic single player experience, in which you play the eponymous hero ninja trying to collect gold and evade enemies of varying design, it comes with that most magical of things: co-operative play.

Well what game doesn’t these days? Oh, but N+ feels like a game placed on this earth as if its one reason for existence is to play with someone else. Up to four people can play together on one screen, working together or against one another for one simple goal: survival.

You can play a stupidly large amount of levels with someone else, designed from the ground up for co-op. The now well-known N style gameplay of collecting gold, opening doors and flipping switches turns into a breath taking fight for endurance against the odds when you stack up with a friend.

The gameplay remains mostly unchanged, requiring you to do nothing but jump and run. Its simplicity, however, is the genius. But put all of that excellent gameplay into co-operative levels and you get extremely rewarding and thrilling fun again and again. Even more so, throw in all of the single player missions for co-op, not to mention a set of specifically designed versus levels that require you to race an opponent, and a survival mode which pits you against both your friend and the computer, and you have a rich, deep and highly exhilarating experience not found anywhere else.

N+ is, at its heart, fundamentally the same game you played years ago on PC. But what Metanet has done to make this a must-buy is provide you with enough content and multifaceted scenarios that you will be finding new gameplay experiences in this title for many years to come.

Omega Five is in many ways your typical horizontal side-scrolling shoot ‘em up. You make your way across levels shooting through hordes of enemies until you reach a boss. Beat the boss, and you move on to the next stage. But it also does many things unique to the genre. The game features four characters (two of which need to be unlocked) who each have three weapons and one special ability. One of the characters, Ruby, has your typical bullet and laser weapons, but also has a unique lightning weapon. All of Tempest’s weapons seem to differ from the usual shmup fare, as they include a flamethrower, a gun that shoots some sort of blue-green acid, and a gun that shoots out what appears to be liquid chrome. The most unique character however is Sensei, who doesn’t really “shoot” anything at all but instead uses this sword. Other than the fact that he makes the game a paradox in relation to its genre, I can safely say he is an amazing and powerful character and worth every bit of trouble to unlock, not to mention that his special ability is a dog that can target enemies. All characters also have the ability to escape from attacks in exchange for loss of health. And of course it wouldn’t be a shmup if smart bombs capable of doing damage to every enemy on the screen were not available (hint: they are). The traditional gameplay combined with these unique factors provide both variety and strategy, making the game both fun and challenging.

But what makes the game so good? Well, let’s start with the level design. The game is one of the best looking available on the Xbox Live Arcade without a doubt. It features 2-D gameplay on gorgeous 3-D backgrounds. Oftentimes, enemies will enter the screen from the three dimensional background, and the effect is quite stunning. There are only four levels, but they’re all so rich and different from each other that it’s not much of a setback. Also, many of the events are scripted. By this I mean that enemies will always jump out from a certain location and attack you a certain way. This is significant enough to make a large part of being successful in this game dependent on memorization. Reflexes will not win all the battles. This is definitely a flaw, albeit one that doesn’t have much justification beyond that fact that some of the scripted events are just plain cool looking.

Throughout the levels, there are power-ups that can level up your weapons or restore health. The downside to this is that your weapon can only be changed by picking up these power ups. For example, if you’re currently equipped with the character’s Weapon A at Level 3 (the max level) and pick up a power up for Weapon C, you will then be equipped with Weapon C at Level 3. If you’re at Level 2 for a certain weapon and pick up its respective power up, you’ll then be upgraded to Level 3. The lack of on-the-fly weapon switching gives you less control but the same power ups always appear in the same places in every level so strategies can still be planned out. The game also features local co-op play but sadly there is no online co-op. I believe this is due to Natsume wanting the optimal shooter experience without any sacrifices for lag, which I think is a completely unfortunate but understandable reason.

As you can see, I would be lying to you if I told you that these features are what make the game so great. Honestly, the greatest asset of this game comes from its roots as a shmup. The task of facing insurmountable odds and wave after wave of ridiculous enemies is what makes the game so incredibly satisfying. A large part of the satisfaction comes from the unique weapons you’re given. Shredding through enemies with Ruby’s traditional laser and bullet weapons is an absolute blast, but so is covering half the screen in green shit with Tempest’s acid gun. Unlike a lot of shmups that are accurately described by the term “bullet hell,” Omega Five manages to strike just the right amount of difficulty, similar in many ways to Portal. It’s more intimidating than it is challenging. The game can be difficult at first, but multiple play-throughs will make it easy on even the greenest shmup players. If you are really struggling, the game awards you with more lives just for playing a certain amount of time. For example, I haven’t played many shmups, and was doing badly enough that I played for three hours without beating the game. However, playing for three hours gave me eight lives instead of the original three. On my first play-through with eight lives, I managed to beat the game without dying once. This just shows how the game can be overwhelming at first, but in disguise is not unfairly difficult. If you still can’t beat it, playing for five hours will unlock infinite lives. But of course there is some real challenge for pros, as beating the game will unlock the ++ (plus plus) modes, where the objective is to beat the game without getting hit once.

This review may seem a little bit long-winded, especially for an Arcade title, but it’s just something I have to stress. Omega Five is only the second arcade game I’ve played that I would give an A (TMNT gets an A for humor alone, despite what Mr. Letourneau says). Does it get this A for combining traditional shmup gameplay with a few unique and interesting features? Of course it does. Does it get docked a little bit for relying too much on memorization and not including online co-op? That would be a yes as well. But the most important thing here is that it is your duty to buy this game, not only because it’s fantastic, but because it’s a dying breed. We need to show that shmups can prosper on these types of arcade services before the genre becomes extinct. With Omega Five and the announcement of Ikaruga for the Xbox Live Arcade, the dreams of a safe haven can finally be realized, but it is our job to make it so.

Players: 1-2
Publisher: Freeverse Software
Developer: Strange Flavour, Freeverse
Genre: Board Games
Review By: Jay Aphale

“Why oh why did I spend five bucks on board games?!”

Board games can be incredibly fun. I’ve had some very tight matches of Checkers in my childhood with my closest friends, and they were all very entertaining. Then I moved on to Chess, and sucked at it, because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. But I could at least respect the people that knew how the game worked and could master it. So when I heard that Spyglass Board Games was going to be available on Xbox Live Arcade, I hoped that I could relive the memories of Checkers, start learning Chess, and so I did not hesitate to buy it.

So, uhh, how do I review this? Checkers is the same old checkers we all know and love and the same could be said for Chess. There’s also Reversi and Mancala, two games I had no idea how to play and had no interest in. So what differentiates this release from the thousands of ways you can play these games for free on the internet or in your own home? The answer is pretty complicated so read and re-read the following words carefully:

Absolutely nothing.

After playing this, I’m still decent at Checkers, while being absolutely useless at the rest. I mean, they could have at least put in a goddamn tutorial mode that taught you how to play these games. But no, they just fucking released the games like they were completely stolen from Yahoo! Games or something. I guess tutorials are a feature only found in good XBLA board games (see: Catan).

But it’s okay, the various difficulty settings should help you ease into the game, right? Well, you’re exactly right. Except that’s totally inapplicable since this game has no difficulty settings. Actually, strike that, it’s even worse because this game has random difficulty settings that the player cannot control. The A.I. in this game is so fucked up that I’ve gone from being completely destroyed in Checkers to winning with five of my kings still left. Same goes for Chess, where I can get demolished or somehow squeak out a stalemate by just moving my king around for a while when it’s the only piece left or even completely destroy the opponent by taking out every single one of his pieces. Keep in mind I still don’t know how to play the fucking game. Speaking of games I don’t know how to play, Mancala’s A.I. is actually consistent. Consistently fucking bad. Seriously, the only thing I know about this game is that it involves discs and magically moving pebbles. And yet I still manage to win the game every single time.

I mean, difficulty settings are found in the most basic forms of internet games. I bet you I could type in “checkers” in Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky search and it would take me to a site where I’d be able to change difficulty settings, but the game that I paid five fucking dollars for does not have such a thing. So are there any unique features in this game? Well, it contains this fucking awesome (read: unimportant) feature that lets you play all four games simultaneously. Well that’s fucking great if all four games were worth playing. I’d be surprised if you’d want to play some Reversi after a heated (read: wtf) game of Mancala, let alone still having the game on your hard drive. You also get new board game pieces every time you get an achievement. Both the achievements and this idea are dumb, don’t even deny it. Oh, and there’s also the saving grace for most XBLA games, online multiplayer. This would be good if you could actually find somebody playing it. After the hour of searching, you’ll probably run into someone that’s either way better than you or just completely terrible, so it’s basically like playing the A.I. again.

So, if you want to buy a board game on XBLA, do yourself a favor and buy Catan. Hell, even Carcassonne, Catan’s nerdy brother, is better than this game. If you want to replicate this game’s experience for free and you don’t have internet access, it’s incredibly easy. I’m sure you have an old Chess/Checkers board lying around somewhere. That’ll let you play three of the board games in this game. As for Mancala, don’t even bother because it’s just fucking terrible. If you don’t have a board, just get a piece of paper and draw some squares on it. If you don’t have pieces, use some Skittles or action figures or some shit. Whatever you come up with will be better and more creative than this garbage.

Players: 1-4
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Microsoft Game Studios / Carbonated Games
Genre: Action
Review By: Ryan Letourneau

“Stinks of formula.”

Why are you even reading this review? With a whopping price tag of 0 points, Aegis Wing is the best value on Xbox Live, at least now that Texas Hold’Em costs money. Rather than wasting your time reading what I have to say, you could be downloading the game and judging it yourself in less time than it’s going to take you to finish this review. Need any more encouragement? There is absolutely no reason not to download Aegis Wing. As far as I know, it won’t corrupt your hard drive and it won’t cause your Xbox 360 to go HAL 9000 on you. You might even have a good time with it – I did!

…at least for a while. Aegis Wing is exactly what you would expect from a free game made by interns. It’s serviceable, for sure. If it wasn’t it never would have made it to the marketplace. But it stinks of formula and its main gimmick, the ability to ‘link up’ your individual ships, squanders promise and ends up contributing heavily to the game’s overall boredom inducement after repeated plays.

If you’re not familiar with the game, it’s a side-scrolling space shooter in the vein of R-Type. The story goes that in 2105, humanity fled Earth for the planet Europa. Soon after arriving, Europa is threatened by an advanced alien race known as the Araxia. Your job is to use stolen Araxia ships (the Aegis Wings) to crush the Araxian threat. Although this might sound grandiose, the story is just told through little blurbs of text under the in-game lobby before each of the six levels and really has no effect on the game itself.

The gameplay itself is standard space-shooter fare. You use tiny red bullets to shoot down wave after wave of Araxian ship, which start out as simple ships that fly in predictable patterns but by the end include big vessels that fire destructive laser beams, as well as small ships that home into you and free-flying crafts that rotate and shoot. Along the way you can pick up weapons like EMP pulses, homing missiles, and protective shields which make the game a lot easier. The game’s six levels are reasonably different graphically, offering beautiful 3D backgrounds, but feel monotonous in terms of gameplay. You see, although the ability to couple with other ships to increase the power of your weapons seems like an interesting idea, it ends up making the game more boring for everyone. Don’t get any ideas about becoming Voltron or Megazord when four people link up. When two people link up, the one who presses the button to link attaches to the other person’s ship, losing the ability to drive but gaining the ability to shoot in 360 degrees. When three people link up? Two shooters, one driver. When four people link up? Three shooters, one driver. Within 10 seconds, most games have one designated driver who navigates through a rarely treacherous path of bullets and asteroids, while the other three shoot at the enemies. Repeat this across all six levels for the short (half hour) length of the game and you can see how it can get tedious.

Admittedly, it isn’t all bad, and the game provides reasonable entertainment for at least a few playthroughs as you work on the achievements, which are pretty balanced between easy and challenging. Simply put, though, Aegis Wing does not stand up to repeated playings as well as many other games on the arcade. One can easily cruise through the game on normal difficulty, and insane difficulty rarely offers any problems since enemies drop an obscene amount of extra lives and even if everyone on the team dies you can just restart from the beginning of that level. With little incentive to beat it multiple times, and almost no variety between the levels, Aegis Wing will very quickly gather dust on your hard drive.

But still, there’s no reason not to download it.

Players: 1-4
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Digital Eclipse/Konami
Genre: Action
Review By: Ryan Letourneau

“One of the most worthwhile and complete experiences on Xbox 360.”

About a year and a half into the lifespan of the Xbox Live Arcade, TMNT 1989 serves as a great barometer of the state of the service. Like most XBLA games, it’s a re-release of a game that came out over a decade ago. Also like most XBLA games, it is completely worthless from a single player perspective but when balanced by the social aspect of online multiplayer it ultimately becomes a very enjoyable experience. Although not much has been altered in this release compared to the arcade original, TMNT 1989 survives based on its solid co-operative gameplay and retro charm to ultimately become a worthwhile experience – provided you have Xbox Live.

Make no mistake, TMNT 1989 is both short (about twenty minutes) and repetitive. Although you can play as any of the four turtles, they are all fundamentally the same. True to the arcade set-up, you only need to use two buttons: X to attack and A to jump. Pressing A and then X will result in a jump attack, while hitting the buttons simultaneously results in a sideways slash which will kill all foot soldiers in range in one hit. That is, unless you’re Raphael. He inexplicably does a rolling kick which knocks enemies down but doesn’t kill them, making him both the worst and the only unique character in the game.

Although the two-button gameplay is quite simple, TMNT 1989 is actually quite challenging simply because of the sheer amount of enemies the game throws at you. Early packs of enemies are often easily dispatched with an X+A attack, but once foot soldiers start to carry weapons (ranging from javelins to hilarious Elmer Fudd style guns and bombs straight out of the end of Dr. Strangelove) it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid their attacks, and as you watch the game go on you will see your stock of lives dwindle at an ever-increasing rate. Speaking of which, the amount of lives you start with in an online game (19) seems to be well conceived to avoid frustrating for new players and boredom for the experienced. It’s worth noting that boss fights are generally easier than handling the throngs of enemies the game throws at you throughout a normal level, and most can be beaten easily by just hitting them once and then moving a bit, waiting for them to come to you, then repeating the process. Overall, apart from one heinous level where you have to kill bomb-dropping helicopters while riding a rocket-powered skateboard (undoubtedly the money-maker back in the arcades), TMNT 1989 strikes a difficulty level that is challenging but rarely frustrating. Some well-designed achievements like beating a boss while avoiding a certain amount of damage and avoiding freeze traps in the Technodrome add some variety and difficulty for repeat plays.

The most entertaining thing about the game probably isn’t even the gameplay, though. Simply put, TMNT 1989 oozes old school-charm and is a bit like rediscovering a movie you loved as a kid and enjoying it for entirely different reasons. The story is half-baked and rarely makes any sense, but is endearing nonetheless and is oftentimes a source of unintentional humour. Along those same lines, the script is hilarious, and muffled it’s impossible not to love a pixilated Rock Steady challenging you to “Come and get us, shellbrain!”. From a technical standpoint, both sound and graphics are right out of the late 80’s, which is infinitely more damning to the former than the latter, as the game features pretty crisp and cartoony graphics (reminiscent of SNES’ “Turtles in Time”) but muffled sound and an annoying MIDI soundtrack. Still, though, voice acting isn’t something usually seen in games this old and is handled competently, so kudos to that.

TMNT, objectively, has a lot of flaws. It’s short, simplistic, and repetitive. If you only want this for the single player game, this is a waste of money. However, the ability to go online and enjoy the team-based gameplay with some friends and perhaps even make some jokes at the expense of the game’s writers makes it easy to ignore its shortcomings. For 400 points this is a much better bargain than pumping quarters into the arcade machine (if you could even find one) and if you have some friends who enjoy a fun, casual game, you could soon find yourselves playing TMNT 1989 an awful lot.