Remember How AWESOME Xbox Live Arcade Was?

let's talk about velocity girl she might pick up a controller every once in a while over at a friend's house but really Gaming's not a central part of our existence how do we get the velocity girls of the world reconnected to our industry and back into the game she's going to rejoin us through the Xbox Live arcade [Music] thank you the Xbox Live arcade did have an impressive lineup didn't it with 612 games it almost felt like its own separate console like the special little private sanctum that was tucked away in the Attic a place you could go to play games when there just wasn't much else to play with each and every title having been curated by a quality control team at Microsoft a lot of what you would find on here was actually pretty decent whereas today the Xbox store is filled with a Cavalcade of inconsistency take me back to the days where the worst game in the Xbox Marketplace was some piece of junk car game that Toyota made to promote their new car Yaris from Toyota a game which on its release had been ranked the 10th worst game of all time on Metacritic today the 10th worst game on Metacritic is something called undertale take me back to the time where the only people that were allowed to make video games were the people who deserved to make video games like Twisted pixel fiop fish Jonathan Blau and of course Doritos who made three Xbox Live arcade exclusives since you know making video games worked out so well for Burger King back in the day and coincidentally enough anytime I ever ate Burger King I got diarritos so come with me if you will on a trip down memory lane as I talk about what I deem to be the best games that the Xbox Live arcade had to offer you know Games like World of Warships now this is not the sort of Warship you would find at a Catholic church instead it is the ultimate game of Battleship whether you're an old man a young man or Rihanna this is a video game anybody can play they have newer content releasing every month like new ships Nations Cosmetics or collaborations like the one they did with Transformers you can dock your warship at the Michael Bay in over 40 unique Maps each with Dynamic weather all of which have been updated with new water effects and textures and with multiple ship classes to choose from like iconic destroyers aircraft carriers battleships and submarines World of Warships has got you pegged and here's the best part World of Warships is now available on consoles whereas before it used to be inconsolable use the code Bravo to receive a huge starter pack which includes credits premium account time a ship and a bunch of doubloons which isn't as good as having a bunch of triploons but it's better than having a bunch of singaloons now big thanks to World of Warships for the sponsorship now let's get back to the video if you could scrounge up 10 bucks to purchase 800 Microsoft points to purchase a video game then Mr and misplosion man would be well worth your money I mean what a great set of Platformers and I will mostly be focusing on misplosion man for this video since it surpasses the original game in pretty much every way the gimmick here is that you can do a triple jump by exploding after three jumps you run out of explode juice and to recover that juice you simply land back on the ground or slide down a wall for long enough and that's it it's such a simple mechanic but they managed to keep it fresh by giving you barrels to splodon which send you flying but also refill your splod juice green barrels that lock you into a scripted trajectory barrels that you kick into scientists walls which give you infinite slow juice granting you an entirely different mode of traversal a goddess named Mandy that you can possess foreign [Music] through dangerous areas it was brimming with variety too through all kinds of scenarios at the player like having something dangerous beneath you that you need to outrun the tried and true classic of timed platforms a series of hover cars to jump across robots to avoid bosses to battle reflex based on rail segments portions where you're free falling with no spilled juice slower and more methodical segments where patience and precision are required as you try to find out when and where to launch your woman General puzzle solving and general puzzle solving while acid is rising beneath you and you need to outrun it the puzzles are super intuitive as well generally you understand how to solve them the instant you stumble into them since they're quite simple they're not meant to be so complex that you're sat there scratching your head they're meant to give the game a much needed change of pace without slowing things down too much and they've definitely succeed at doing that from start to finish the game is just super fun to play and it has a ton of personality I love the sense of humor the game has and while I don't find it to be terribly funny I love the spirit of fun behind it it never takes itself seriously and gives off this sense that everyone at the studio was having a blast working on the game what I like most about it though is that it's pretty challenging it puts all your skills to the test reflexes performance under pressure and if you've played the co-op mode with a buddy which involves you needing to explode off of one another to reach every single shoe for an achievement it'll really test your patience and back in the day I did manage to get all those shoes I was able to get them with my buddy Michael from the 7th grade we didn't have a good time together though we yelled and bickered at each other throughout our entire playthrough in fact it got so bad that we actually didn't speak for a few weeks after we had beaten it it put our entire friendship in limbo now it's no secret that limbo is an amazing game it's been talked about to death and yes it is available on PC and the PlayStation store now but it was an Xbox Live arcade exclusive for a really long time and after revisiting This I Gotta tell you this game hasn't aged a day the design of this game is sheer perfection it is remarkably intuitive it tells you how to do everything without telling you how to do anything like look at this in one Fell Swoop the game teaches us to scan our environment more closely for threats and that the body of an eight-year-old boy is no match for a military-grade bear trap shortly after we stumble into a rope with meat but the meat is too heavy preventing us from progressing upwards now here we can surmise that if bear trap destroys little boy then bear trap also destroys meat because when you think about it meat is pretty much all an eight-year-old boy really is and this is what limbo does so well it presents you with a problem while also providing you with all the tools for the solution after it silently teaches you how each tool works there are environmental hazards everywhere which really keep you on your toes the gaps are spaced out perfectly so that it feels like you might not make your jump which keeps things feeling tense for a game where the only things your character can do is jump and grab it's got a lot going on and like Miss splosion man the level of variety on display here is impressive you get wrapped up by a giant spider and you're all cocooned which completely changes how the kid moves forcing you to think differently about how and when to jump a gap you get globbed on by a mind-controlling parasite that forces you to move in One Direction only turning around when exposed to a light source forcing you to play the game completely differently and no one section goes on for too long everything is paced out to make for a nearly perfect one to two hour experience from the sound design to the visuals this game is oozing with an atmosphere that I find to be both slightly unsettling but also somewhat comforting at the same time due to the ambient noise of the environment it sounds like you're in a safe and peaceful wooded area yet everything in it is terrifying and wants to kill you every time I start this game up I always feel compelled to finish the entire thing I must have played through limbo six or seven times and that's a lot for me the puzzles are real solid too some of them are super simple but others will provide you with a significant brain challenge brain challenge is pretty cool it's essentially WarioWare but for smart people it's just a series of mini games that are meant to provide you with a multitude of mental challenges and lucky for me Kyle loved being mentally challenged the more you play the better you get the better you get the higher your brain percentage and the higher the percentage the harder the mini games become ultimately the goal is to hit 100 brain power and become like Bradley Cooper from that film where he took all those pills you know A Star is Born it has a ton of mini games to choose from and each one exercise is a different part of your brain you got combination equations deductive reasoning the Rain Man game where you count matches simple addition which forces you to calculate a route you got one here like look at that which ball bounces the highest is that fun I don't know but my personal favorite game traveling I find this one to be fun because I seem to be a bit of a savant this game all you need to do is follow the pattern that you're shown on screen and no matter how hard it gets I just can't seem to miss you only have one minute to complete each mini game and the more tasks you complete within that time frame the higher your brain percentage Rises I really love the challenge this game provides and the pressure that it puts on you it's surprisingly addicting and if you don't understand a mini game at first it feels really fulfilling once you're able to figure it out for yourself there's something so gratifying about getting answers correct especially when you start getting them back to back netting yourself some juicy five in a row 10 in a row and sometimes even 15 in a rows oh baby they say that if you practice this game enough you can actually learn how to do honest to God Geometry Wars if you've never played this game then you're a square it is the king of twin stick Shooters with one goal and one goal alone get the highest score you possibly can so that when the servers eventually get shut down they got nothing to show for it on the surface Geometry Wars looks really basic but it's actually deceptively deep and that comes down to the enemy types you got these guys who float across the board board aimlessly these just come towards you in a straight line these come towards you in a straight line but Dodge your fire purple blocks when shot become a double box once a red circle takes damage it turns into a black hole absorbing everything around it and once it gets full it bursts and spawns fast little circles these guys create a hot tron-like trail behind them and can only be killed by shooting the frenulum this flies at you really quickly and can only be destroyed by being shot in the back or when it stops moving entirely Jacks come after you in such a large quantity that you can't help but feel overwhelmed as they begin to completely infest the board in combination with one another these eight enemy types create such a fun Dynamic you have to constantly prioritize which enemies to kill first in order to ensure survival things start to feel dire pretty quickly as the screen fills up with enemies it becomes so tense that I often find myself involuntarily grunting like an elderly man at a public urinal as I barely squeeze through improvised gaps I had ripped through using my blasters but the final and most difficult enemy of all is your own self oh what because because you focused it's all too easy to become complacent and let your mind wander after a few moments of safety to only then be heartbreakingly struck no after obtaining a certain amount of points you'll earn additional lives and bombs too overwhelmed you can use a bomb which eradicates every single enemy on the screen and it sounds exactly like part of the theme song for American Horror Story one of my least favorite shows which is though you don't get any points for any of the enemies that you killed with a bomb but you get to continue living and staying alive is as important in this game as it is in real life since you'll start to multiply your points after killing a certain amount of enemies once you get a 9 times multiplier you need to kill 2 000 more enemies to cap out and hit times 10. and getting 500 points for killing the Blue Diamond Phillips is sheer insanity but if you die you completely lose your multiplier which makes staying alive for a long time incredibly exciting but that excitement is Tainted by a deep deep dark fear of dying again of losing my multiplier and feeling that terrible demoralizing heartbreak once more but by God if that fear doesn't make me feel alive and that right there is Geometry Wars Geometry Wars two and three were also pretty good and are still really fun to play with gameplay additions that deepened gameplay mechanics like being able to collect the gems off of dead shapes to increase your multiplier and there are new shapes to destroy like arrows and teeny tiny triangles I love all three of these games I find them to be very addicting I replay Geometry Wars 3 for this video and I couldn't put it down but the real reason I brought up Geometry Wars 3 was to show you that I got some pretty high scores on it back when it came out look at that right there even today Geometry Wars is still an absolute marble blast to play and marble blast is an absolute classic it's like Monkey Ball except it doesn't suck all you do is roll your marble around and collect all the gems in the arena to open up the exit for the next level and while marble blast did only have one song in it that looped forever the song was a doozy like everything else in this video marble blast is pretty simplistic but they give you some power-ups to play around with like a speed boost a super jump and a gravity modifier which do shake things up the maps are pretty well designed too some of them are built to challenge you While others are built with pure fun in mind like this one here my personal favorite which just allows you to go really fast if you hit all the pyramids just right when I was a kid I used to play this level over and over again with my brother to try and beat my personal best time it was pretty fun and while I never found this game to be all that challenging I did find it to be very pleasant and I can't help but think back on it fondly marble blast used to have a multiplayer component to it too where you race other Marbles and collect gems before they do to get the highest score I met one of my oldest and longest online friends through this game and 15 years later we still talk to one another as far as I can tell though it seems like marble blast Ultra was pulled off of the Xbox Live arcade and is no longer playable which is kinda sad because it was a pleasant little platformer meaning marble blast is now nothing more than a distant memory I have realized while making this video that I truly love a challenge while I'm gaming if I'm not challenged I'm not engaged this is why I play things like enter the gungeon or starit in or Geometry Wars or misplosion man a hearty challenge leads to good replay value and it feels badass to unlock the hardest achievement in a tough game like Geometry Wars 2 live on Twitch TV everybody calm down oh I did it [Music] I did it oh my God it was really fun making this video going back and revisiting things that used to bring me joy and yeah I know I did leave out a few Classics like Shadow complex Kingdom for Keflings and Aegis Wing but that's mostly because I really just don't care about those games and yeah braid was pretty cool but it had this really sad music that just reminded me of the elderly so I couldn't play it anyway I'll see you guys in the next one bye bye [Music]

Channel: RennsReviews

Views: 28,300

Keywords: renn, renns, ren, review, reviews, xbox live arcade, ms. splosion man, splosion man donut song, splosion man, limbo gameplay, limbo deaths, brain challenge, phillip fish, johnathan blow, braid, twisted pixel, the maw, geometry wars, geometry wars 2, geometry wars 3, marble blast ultra

Id: VtQiP6n6pz8

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023