You know the program that tried to put the arcade back in xbox live arcade?

It has a great interface and some classic games on there. I heard they were working on online multiplayer for new releases like Sunset Riders at one point. But it seemed like support just stopped. Guess my dreams of building my own arcade full of Capcom and Neo Geo games will never happened.

What happened?

Well the team that made Game Room went on to do Full House Poker XBLA title. From there I heard they were going to go back and work on the Game Room. Don't know if they have updated it since or it could be they are now just concentrating on working on Full House Poker.

The potential is there, but a better selection of games and a cheaper price point would have helped. I'm sure people would pony up to stick a Street Fighter or Metal Slug cabinet in there. Intellivision games, maybe not as much.

I thought I had read that the team responsible for game room shut down.

Yeah...the company Krome went bankrupt.

As for Game Room...I was actually really into it for a while, but it was a love/hate relationship. There were some good games there, but there was a lot of horrible ones too (I'm looking at you Venetian Blinds.) And the pricing was not well handled. A flat rate of $3 for every game doesn't work. Jackal or Twinbee is worth $3...Venetian Blinds is not.

It was also a poorly handled application. Krome couldn't keep up with deadlines. They were a couple of times that they said x amount of games would come out at y date. And then one or both of those promises were broken. The amount of games that would come out at a time kept shrinking and people started to think they were running out of games they had the rights to publish. There were people who happened to notice that all of the Intellivision and Atari games were just games that had already been released on previous compilations.

Emulation was also poor. Practically all the games would experience slow down at times. Some had poor sound emulation. And a few just had graphical issues. They addressed the slow down eventually...but that patch then created new problems. The game could randomly freeze your XBox when you started the game up. And the last time I checked if you want to quit it without freezing your system you have to hit your guide button and dashboard quit.

Then there was the whole issues of the Konami games not having proper cabinet art because the company Stern who made the original cabinets didn't want to play ball. So we ended up with generic looking cabinets for all Konami games.

Plus there was a severe lack of other company support. No Capcom, Namco, Data East, Midway (they were bankrupt at this point too), etc. All the games we had were from Atari, Activsion Atari games, Intellivision, and Konami. And keep in mind these games couldn't have any licenses so you would never see anything like The Simpsons Arcade game in Game Room.

And just knowing that Sunset Riders was going to come out, but then didn't was really frustrating.

To end my rambling...I just want to share with you how bad Venetian Blinds is...and keep in mind they were charging people $3 for this...

Thanks for the info Superman. I saw your high scores all over the place so it figures you would know. Shame they had so many problems. Might still dink around with it some more.

I'm at a loss with Venetian Blinds.

Right now I'm attempting to build up my real life 2600 collection so being able demo titles for 10 mins gives me a good idea on if they are worth tracking down or not. I have a lot of the Activision titles (some in box) and Venetian Blinds is not one of them.

I will check out that Arcade version of Jackal, love the nes version. Did you know they also have an arcade version of Blades of Steel?

No Sunset Riders makes me

Well if I remember correctly Venetian Blinds was never released. It a demo made for some smartass reason I think. (I think it had to do with a court case.)

Jackal is definitely one of the highlights of Game Room. Blades of Steel is also one of the better games in Game Room as well.

Something like that. I guess it is kind of cool that it is available to public for the first time for Lulz, but maybe this should have been free.

Wait, they have the arcade version of Blades of Steel in Game Room? I may have to check that out!

It also didn't help that games above the E rating (US's version of the 6+ rating) were not allowed to be released, which kind of slimmed some of the more known arcade games.

Yeah...near the end of Game Room they actually started to put out some decent Konami arcade titles.



Oh yeah...I forgot about that rule. However, considering what they had to choose from in games I don't think that was ever going to be a big problem. I think a majority of games from that era would've been rated E. The only game I could think of from that time that would've gotten a M would've been Chiller, but Exidy wasn't a supported publisher of Game Room so it wouldn't matter.

One little side rant I have that I forgot before...one of the things that kind of sucked about Game Room was some of it's community. A lot of the top scores in many of the games were obtained by people just using exploits. You can see them doing it because the top 20 people for each game had their replays saved so anyone could watch them. It kind of ruined the competitive nature of many of the games.

First of all I didn't even know there was an arcade version of Blades of Steel, secondly I love the NES game a hell of a lot... so I may have to redownload Game Room just to get it!

Just for reference to anyone who might care...heres a list of all the games in Game Room and the game packs they are included in. This should make it easier to get the games you want instead of having to download all 13 game packs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_Room_games

Subject: So what happened to Game Room?



if you had ever played activision anthology on the gba,Venetian Blinds came with it. its not a game but a technical demo. when you select the game it gives a description/manual for it. there was something about activision stole coding techniques from atari when the programmers left for activision or something like that. so Venetian Blinds was and always will be a joke.

now i liked game room too. but i axed it a long time ago when i was like nuts the this. i already have most of the games on here.

i can't believe that its out on XBLA and is for 3 bucks to boot.