Arkanoid Live is out today.  It costs 800pts which is a fair price for a remake of a stone cold arcade classic.

But what’s this?  The demo shows that the main menu has options for four episodes.  It’s only once you complete the demo (which is six stages long) that you realise that your 800pts only buys you episodes 1 and 2.  What’s the odds that 3 and 4 will cost 400pts then?

The achievements only relate to episodes 1 and 2 also which makes us think that another 50 gamerscore will be attached to the DLC.

Note to Microsoft:  it’s one thing charging 1200pts for games, but charging it for a full game and then tricking people into buying part of the game for 800 makes you literally cunts.  XBLA is dead.  Go fuck yourselves.

Pirates!

A couple of news items showed up this week that may be more related than you’d think.  First up we’ve got developers Stardock complaining that their PC strategy RPG has had only 18,000 legitimate online connections and over 100,000 filthy piratey ones.  One of their number bleated ‘we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly ‘ha ha pirate’ message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy).’

Not arsed obviously.  PC strategy RPGs belong in the Austrian cellars that home most of their players but the rather natty GTA: Chinatown Wars has also threw up some evidence of pirate shenanigans.  You see, it only sold about 90,000 in the States despite being good, being on the DS and being a GTA game.  Of course once you get past the DS’ main userbase a GTA game would only appeal to the kind of user that might happen to know about the wide range of no fuss, but highly illegal, flashcards widely available for the machine.

Amazon.

Amazon (in America) have started selling XBLA games on their website.  Why should we care?  Well, refreshingly it means that you’ll now see a real monetary value when considering purchases and it’ll mean no left over points to waste on jungle tables for Texas Hold ‘Em or costumes for Bomberman.

This is a fairly welcome move as you’d hope that Amazon will take a nice chunk out of Microsoft’s profits which would serve them right for utterly spacking up the XBLA service with shit games or good games at shit prices.

XBLA is dead to us*.

*Until Wednesday when MOTHERFUCKING OUTRUN IS OUT FOR 800 M$P!  We love you, Microsoft**!

**Until next week, you Bastards.