Hopefully, you have all read Gerald's wonderfully informative interview with Xbox 360 Product Manager Aaron Greenberg, because I'm about to talk about how some of these updates are going to impact me personally as an Xbox 360 user. Psychonauts! Again: Psychonauts! Let me get one more of those in there before I go on with the article: Psychonauts!
Okay, now that that's out of the way, we can proceed with a minimum of drool.
As an avid fan of the Xbox Live Arcade service, I'm truly excited about being able to download classic Xbox titles on my 360. Like the majority of gamers, I never bought the critically acclaimed Psychonauts when it first came out. Granted, I've since nabbed it off of Steam, Valve's download service for the PC, but sitting at my computer desk is a poor substitute for lounging on my couch, even if I can get the same basic gaming experience from both if I use a wired Xbox 360 controller.
Quick access to a library of classic game titles seems like a perfect use of the Xbox Live service from a user perspective, and the benefit for Microsoft and its associated third-party developers is that it doesn't coast an arm and a leg for them to distribute software. Yet, I wonder how quickly that downloadable library will grow, because after using Xbox Live to peruse its television and movie offerings, I find the selection a bit lacking. Who is still on the first season of "Veronica Mars" that has any interest in the series? Why does the service only offer the Star Trek series that I'm least interested in, leaving out my favorite "Next Generation?" Of course, I'm sure there are especially prickly licensing and distribution contracts at the core of my dissatisfaction, but my point is that there are a lot of things that I'd like to watch that aren't offered on Xbox Live's video download service and I hope that the Xbox Originals program won't labor under the same content-crushing restrictions.
I also hope that the Xbox Originals program won't remind me of GameTap's game download service, which I tried out this week with that PC classic X-Com UFO Defense and was sorely disappointed to find that the game ran in a bizarre aspect ratio that my monitor couldn't figure out and badly needed CPU throttling to make it even remotely playable. In fairness to GameTap, however, I've never seen that game run well on a modern system, so I'm really in the same boat that I started out in. Too bad Microprose never released that game on the Xbox, then maybe I could expect to play it on my 360.
While the new Friends of Friends feature has been trumpeted as a key upgrade to the Live service, I'm just not into that Koolaid. Honestly, I can't really imagine it being very useful to you fine folks either, but feel free to shoot me an email if you think otherwise.
