XBLA Catch-up, Nintendo Monday

This weekend I had a moment to fire up the XBox 360 and catch up with what's new on XBox Live Arcade during the past several weeks.

Two games of interest to us in the, er, older demographic are the new HD remakes of Sega's 80's arcade hit Outrun and Broderbund's Apple II-era hit, Lode Runner.

Both are solid remakes -- they're very faithful to the gameplay mechanics of the originals, with graphics suitably updated. Outrun looks like the original might have had the Daytona USA technology been available at the time, and Lode Runner adds some nice dimensional visuals and a faster pace to what remains a classic 2-D game design. I played through the trial versions of each and ended up buying Outrun -- the remixes of the classic tracks were just too appealing to pass up, and the simple arcade racing gameplay is what I was in the mood for on Saturday. Lode Runner is also very nicely done, and I will probably buy the full version at some point.

Nintendo's Monday today was semi-disappointing -- Cocoto Platform Jumper is a WiiWare release of a minor 2004 PS2/Gamecube game, not of interest to me despite the rarity of platformers on WiiWare. But Koei's Nobunaga's Ambition is a classic strategy game, brought to the Virtual Console in its SNES incarnation, and I may be tempted to pick that one up when I have some time to put into it.

I did pick up Square-Enix's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King on WiiWare over the weekend, I will share some impressions when I've had time to play it more.