Xbox Live Game Room is…LIVE

Xbox Live’s new feature is now up. A free 235 MB download that brings your avatar into a three floor arcade with a over 20 classic arcade games.

I downloaded it earlier and I was suprised at how cool it is compared to just buying regular arcade games. Of course you can customize your own arcade for when friends come to play games in it but in general the whole system is much cooler.

Arcade games cost 240 points (standard 360 arcade games tend to be 400-1200) and instead of the usual achievement system where the achievements are based on the specific game the Game Room is a game in its own. With 56 achievements ranging from decorating your arcade to playing a game continuously for one hour.

Microsoft has put a reward system into the game where all the different arcade games have three categories. High score,Survival, and Longetivity. You can get gold,silver, and  bronze for hitting certain marks in each category. The third category longetivity will reward you a gold medal just for consuming your life in that one arcade game (I have 45 minutes and a bronze medal already sunk into Finalizer).

These medals all count as points that will rank you up levels and the levels unlock different things for your arcade. Things like themes for the rooms and props to place all over the arcade.

Two of the coolest features are the Challenge System where players can create challenges for friends and pick an arcade game and a certain challenge like high score or survival time and set the number of tries they can take and how long the challenge will go on for. Then you invite your friends to the challenge and see who is the best.

The last feature I found as a suprise was a replay system. Where you can save your replay and show it off to friends of an amazing performance you put on or you can even look at a replay of players that are top on the leaderboards and see what they do to accomplish such crazy scores. I watched a player from Japan get 1.5 million points in Finalizer where my high score is merely 77,000 and noticed things I could do to increase my score drastically.

If you have points to drop and are fan of classic arcades especially if you have friends to share it with check it out. Besides you can download it for free and get 20 tokens to play it like a real arcade without purchasing anything.

Also expect new releases every week similar to the usual arcade game releases.