Xbox Live will soon begin delisting certain titles.

Microsoft has apparently decided that it hates making easy money from its Xbox Live Arcade Marketplace. They will soon be delisting titles (that means removing them from purchase-ability) that have a "metacritic" score below 65%. Essentially, this is the equivalent of movie theaters deciding that they will not screen films with a Rotten Tomatoes score of less than 65%, but with less talented reviewers.

The metacritic rating is only one of the factors that Microsoft will be considering when it measures whether to keep or drop a title, but I want to fully make my straw man attack against them before I add the other factors.

Frankly, on the face this seems ridiculous. Metacritic may be a good review aggregation site, but let's face it reviewers are often very much out of touch with what people enjoy. They are especially out of touch with what I enjoy. Let's have a look at some successful films and how their metacritic scores line up.

If SEX AND THE CITY were a video game, it would be delisted. That 53 Metacritic score isn't even close.

National Treasure 2? 48% and it only made $239 million.

Does Microsoft realize that 48% means "mixed or average reviews?" They probably do. In fact, they probably notice that the ratings for video games seem ridiculously forgiving. It's as if people are judging games with 100s of hours of content upon a couple of hours of play time, or just on how "cool" they think the idea is. This explains the 65% as a measure of critical quality for games, especially given that it wouldn't work so well with movies. But let's hope it isn't the only criteria since there are over 45 XBox Live Arcade games with Metacritic scores below 65.

Let's see how many of them I own and enjoy...

Time pilot... ummm... classic.
Arkadian Warriors... I bought this game due to an add on the XBLA site. It's fun.
Rocketmen... Disappointing? Sure, but it's a fun Robotron style game.
Battlestar Galatica...Crap. Total Crap.
Battlezone...Not updated enough for some, but still fun to play.
Tempest... ummm... classic.
Tron... ummm... classic. 1337 gamers must not like the old school.
Cyber Ball...Plain old fashioned fun.

Now for the real comment. Thankfully this 65% only applies to games that have less than a 6 percent or lower trial conversion rate. Meaning that if the sales numbers are more than 6% of the number of trial downloads the metacritic rating doesn't apply. That means if we as consumers are easily entertained, lowest common denominator boobs, other people will be able to share our misery.

See how that 6% conversion rate changes things? That's why I left it out of my initial comments. It makes Microsoft reasonable, and we can't have that...can we?

PSN and XBLA Retro Gaming Remakes

The game for Playstation Store Network and XBox Live Arcade releasing this year that I am looking most forward to is the remake of Bionic Commando Rearmed. No, not the next gen game that will be coming out shortly, but a graphical and gameplay upgrade of the NES classic. Behold!



I got this game in 1988 when it first game out for NES. I was a kid at the time, but I remember this was one of the most challenging games that I owned for the system. I played the heck out of it, even though I wasn't any good at it. One of my favorite memories in all the time I played my NES was the day we, my brother and our best friend, managed to get past a level that had been puzzling us for a whole year. We finally got to beat the game and save Super Joe. The sense of accomplishment and triumph after hours of playing this incredible game is still fresh to this day. I am certainly looking forward to the new Next-gen Bionic Commando, but it's this remake of the classic that I am looking forward to the most.

Retro games sell.

Nostalgia sells.

Why else do companies constantly roll out 2D platformers for the Nintendo DS, like Contra 4?

The NDS is perfectly capable of rolling out awesome 3D games, like Legend of Zelda
Phantom Hourglass. My favorite NDS game, a game I played a bunch last year, was Final Fantasy III. It's an old game from 1990 originally designed for the NES. One of our favorite PSP games here at Cinerati was last year's Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lions War, a redo of an old PS1 game from 1997.

This type of graphical and gameplay overhaul has already been executed on another awesome 2D side-scroller for XBox Live Arcade. The game was Prince of Persia and here is a cool side by side comparison of how it looked in 1990 on PC and on Sega Genesis in 1993 and how it looks now now on XBLA.



As long as they keep doing these amazing upgrades for the classic quality games and not overdo it with bad retreads of awful games I will keep buying these downloadable and portable gems of old. These games work well for both the handheld systems and for the downloading networks of the Next-gen systems.

Nintendo is also in on the trend, selling old games from their old platforms as emulation software on the Wii, via Virtual Console.

All I want to know is; Where is my Galactic Super Mario Bros., Nintendo?