Feature: Live Arcade for Windows: Five Games We Want Subscribe to this RSS feed
Check out the rest of the games that would make Live Arcade on Windows worth trying!
Hunter Hunted: Oh Sierra, how I miss thee. Back in 1997, your games were the ones that dominated my PC with its measly 4 GB hard drive, not allowing me to share any of my precious storage space with any other company's titles.
Hunter Hunted is one of Sierra's best games to date. A fast-paced sidescrolling action game that puts you in the shoes of Jake or the paws of the "Beast" a minotaur-ish looking ... well, beast, Hunter Hunted pits you against your rival in a maze of aliens, power-ups, acid-dripping passages, booby-trapped platforms and more. One of the unique things about the game was that it allowed you to go "into" the screen through certain doors to make it feel more like a 3D affair. You could use these passages to sneak up on your opponent and surprise them, sometimes turning the tables in what would have been a losing affair up until that point.
Excellent title for sidescrolling fans. Priced correctly, it could be one of the highlights of Live Arcade for Windows.
Need for Speed 2: Special Edition: Still the best NFS title in existence if you ask me. Need for Speed 2 was, and still is, one of the best arcade-style racers I have played. Sure, it tried really hard to simulate real-life driving, but hey; no game that features an alien car named "FZR 2000" in addition to dinosaur statues and crates and lets you drive them through everything from mountain peaks to a Hollywood studio can say it's trying to be realistic.
Still, NFS2: SE is an excellent early Need for Speed game, and was chock full of some very impressive extra content for its time. Full videos and slideshows for all its cars, several racing modes, an online multiplayer mode, a good selection of both cars and tracks and great graphics made this game a must-have for racing fans back in the day.
SkyRoads: If you haven't heard of this game, you probably never owned a PC back in the 90s. A remake of a game known as Kosmonaut, SkyRoads was an excellent platforming game, which put you in the cockpit of a simple spaceship, steered using the arrow keys. You could jump from platform to platform using the Spacebar key.
It sounds easy in theory, but SkyRoads was a pretty tough game. The levels got progressively harder and the game even incorporated gravitational changes, which determined the manner in which your ship would jump. Easy to pick up and hard to master, SkyRoads is still one of my favourite retro titles.
Like I said earlier, though ... this is all speculation. Microsoft could very well have an entirely different idea on their minds, which doesn't even involve retro PC games (even though it's what makes the most sense). Assuming this is part of their plan, I'm curious ... what titles the rest of you guys would like to see on Live Arcade for Windows?
