Is Xbox Live Arcade really almost four years old? Like any tyke, it's full of promise, but it has some growing up to do, too. Join us as we explore XBLA's successes...and the changes it needs to keep growing strong.

Remember the early days of Live Arcade, when it hosted a couple dozen coin-op ports, a few puzzle games...and little else? We can barely remember that time either. And there’s a reason for that. Since its Xbox 360 relaunch on November 22, 2005, Xbox Live Arcade has slowly evolved into a little giant, amassing a 200-game lineup that spans all sorts of genres, studios, and audiences.

It’s come a long way in a few years, to be sure. But even with a big catalog and some serious blockbusters — Uno, Geometry Wars, Castle Crashers — XBLA has plenty of room for improvement. With some small but fundamental tweaks, we think it could go from really-cool extra to big-time system-seller. And we’ll tell you how.

Read on for a list of Live Arcade’s success stories — followed by our to-do list for rejuvenating XBLA. Hopefully, the lords at Microsoft are listening.

Sleeper Sells: The XBLA Games You Should Be Playing

Peggle, Portal — everyone knows they’re great. But Arcade has a bunch of golden oldies and lesser-known games that are just as essential. Try these. Now!

Aces of the Galaxy

When we’re in a big, bad spaceship, we don’t want to explore nebulae; we want to kick some intergalactic ass. And Aces lets us, from the cockpit of a fast-action fighter that darts swiftly across the screen, spewing an endless stream of ammo. With asteroids to dodge and waves of enemies to annihilate, you’ll almost forget you’re on rails. Smack-talking aliens (“Human worm!”) and a sort of cosmic bullet-time help keep the action fresh, fun, and non-stop.

Astropop

Astropop is an “homage” to (read: stone-cold ripoff of) the forgotten Neo- Geo title Magical Drop. Instead of dropping blocks, you pull them from the ceiling and throw them back in groups to match and remove them. Think Tetris mixed with Bust-A-Move, plus a super-attack that nukes the screen and gets you out of tough scrapes. Four characters with “supa weapons” are yours to unlock, and now that we have nice arcade sticks from Hori and Mad Catz, you can get that old Neo-Geo feel.

Catan

Yes, there is a steep learning curve to this deep, masterful board game. But there’s also a great tutorial and rich rewards for developing even basic competence. Essentially, you’re battling opponents for resources to build up cities, but the level of trickery, deviousness, and canny strategy that you can deploy kept us up until many a wee hour achieving world domination! If you’re the type of gamer where the tagline “mindless” is a turn-off, you gotta try Catan.

Commanders: Attack of the Genos

Advance Wars was a huge hit on Game Boy Advance — yet this cheeky clone on XBLA sank like a stone. Why? It has a cute tongue-in-cheek style, some bouncy ’40s jazz, and retro sci-fi Art Deco tanks and spider-walkers. The production values are humble but clean, and the turn-based gameplay is a pretty good way to mellow out while still blowing stuff up. With a campaign, skirmishes, and both online and four-player couch play, there’s a lot to like.

Feeding Frenzy 2

Sequels are a risky business on XBLA: Geometry Wars 2 sold like gangbusters, but games like Mutant Storm Empire and Assault Heroes 2 seem to have been ignored. In the case of Feeding Frenzy 2, the sleeper is a whale of a catch — this 2D eat-’em-up looks loads better than its predecessor and adds co-op and party modes (which, sadly, aren’t playable over Live). More importantly, it sports the same addictive, fluid, fish-chomping fun.

Gauntlet

What? A straight-up coin-op port, minus major enhancements? You betcha. Gauntlet graced XBLA early on, and like Smash TV, it fit the 360 perfectly with Live support allowing online multiplayer you just couldn’t get in the good ol’ arcade. Up to four players battling through 100 dungeons is still surprisingly fun, as you face hordes of ghosts and wizards and work together to navigate tricky labyrinths (all while offering bad impressions of the announcer intoning, “Warrior needs food, badly!”). If you’e got a buddy or three with an itch for old-time hack-and-slash, it’s a $5 beauty.

Jewel Quest

Dink-dink-dink-dink — bloop! Oh, how we love the magical sounds of this matching-shapes puzzler, another very early XBLA game. Similar to Bejeweled but more hectic, Jewel Quest hits you with screen after screen of gem-pairing mania, daring you to keep your cool as the clock ticks down. Charmingly, the game’s music and backstory embrace its Mayan theme, making the whole package an archaeological wonder worth exploring.

Mutant Storm Empire

There’s no shortage of shooters that ape Geometry Wars’ twin-stick mechanic, and this second Mutant Storm definitely does it well. But where it really delivers is in sheer variety and visual interest. The whole game isn’t set in a fixed space; instead, finishing a stage scrolls you into a new, different playfield where you’ll battle new and weirder monstrosities, including mammoth slugs, giant cannons, UFOs, and other ruthless beasties. With five difficulty levels, there’s challenge for all, and playing in co-op mode is intense.

Outpost Kaloki X

Think Halo Wars is accessible? This über-cute strategy/tycoon game has it beat with pared-down play that’s amazingly easy to learn but deceptively deep. As the manager of a fictional space station, you’ll build new stores (bars, video arcades) to please visiting voyagers, while maintaining power plants and other key facilities — and even fending off incoming meteors and invaders! Catchy music and goofy plotlines are a definite bonus, and if you enjoy the main game, you’ll love its DLC missions, too.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipise of Darkness, Episode One

Point-and-click adventures are not dead! Witness this old-style entry featuring Gabe and Tycho from the popular webcomic. The first installment in this episodic series is super-well-written (by Tycho), with all kinds of hilarious gags and dialogue-tree conversations that revolve around your hunt for a fruit-loving 50-foot-tall robot (and let’s just say it’s a carnal love, and the game is rated M). The gameworld is crammed full of clickable objects, and even the RPG-style combat is engaging. Hey — did that clown flip us off before he died?

Roogoo

Remember Perfection, that board game where you had to match triangles, squares, and other shapes to corresponding holes? Roogoo translates it into a uniquely captivating XBLA experience, where you try to guide shapes from the top of the screen to the bottom while pesky alien Meemoo (hey, it’s always somebody) try to block your path. Simple controls and a great premise mean big fun, and for added kicks, you can join pals for Party Play. Either way, it’s awfully hard to put down.

Schizoid

In many ways, Schizoid does exactly what XBLA should do: showcase nifty new ideas, nimbly executed, at a budget price. The game asks one player to control a red ship, while the other (A.I. or human) controls a blue ship; touching enemy ships of your color destroys them, while hitting opposite-colored ships destroys you. It’s a simple concept put to marvelous use, as you frantically dodge and dart through enemy-filled mazes. Bonus: an adorably insane ÜberSchizoid mode where a single player controls both ships at once — one per thumbstick!

Switchball

You’ve already played games where you roll a marble through 3D mazes, but Switchball is no Marble Madness or even Marble Blast Ultra. It’s much more puzzle-based. Navigating tricky (and gorgeously rendered) levels, you’ll use a metal ball to nudge crates; shift to a helium ball to fl oat up to a platform; and become a giant ball to roll down a ramp. It’s light and fanciful, while tapping your grey matter in all the right ways as you solve clever conundrums and avoid electrical shocks and other dangers. Roll on.

Soltrio Solitaire

This one’s purely for solitaire fanatics, but if that includes you — and hey, there’s no shame if it does — you’re going to be stoked. No more Freecell on your PC; these 18 variants will keep you busy for a millennium, bolstered by a quest mode that rewards you by letting you customize the card design. Breaking the very nature of the game, Soltrio offers some interesting multiplayer, too, with both competitive bouts (solve your stack first) and a cooperative mode where you work together. We’ve been playing this game for ages.

Wits & Wagers

Some of us were skeptical at first glance: the presentation and production values are modest, to say the least, and you’ll either love or hate the big flowers, animals, and people-costumes that frame your onscreen photo. We found them amusing; what we really love is the gameplay, which hits you with trivia questions about movies, geography, and such — and after everyone makes their guess, you all wager on the accuracy of each other’s answers. It’s a brilliant mix of trivia and gambling, and against human opponents (rather than shifty A.I. foes), it’s a LOL-rich riot.

What Xbox Live Arcade Can Do Better

XBLA's come a long way, but it could be — and should be — so much more. And it will be...if Microsoft follows our humbly offered plan for greatness.

We’ll be the first to rain the love down on Xbox Live Arcade. Some of our favorite multiplayer games live there (hi, Peggle!), and we dig the Board Game Renaissance that’s in full swing these days (Scrabble, you look purdy snuggled up next to Catan!). Retro games are being rebuilt and reinvented for Arcade, not just ported and dumped. R-Type Dimensions, Lode Runner, and Space Invaders Extreme are beautiful steps in the right direction of improving on nostalgia, not just appreciating or vaguely remembering it.

But yeah, we want more. And it’s just not just because we’re greedy like that; it’s because Arcade can and should be so much more. If you think about it, XBLA is Steam for your Xbox 360: downloadable awesomeness, no disc required. Or at least, that’s the theory. Its paradigm-shifting potential has been obvious since the 360 launched, but only infrequently has Arcade lived up to it. If we were its teacher, we’d give it some words of encouragement…and then some stick. Since we were nice just a paragraph ago, here’s that stick:

(1) Take Creative Risks!

A lot, not just the sometimes that games like Braid and Schizoid represent! Without all the manufacturing and distribution costs that a $60 Xbox 360 game entails, XBLA should be a fertile breeding ground for innovation. Sometimes it is, but not often enough. Honestly, Sony’s PlayStation Network does this better and more often — who else is jealous as hell of Flower and Everyday Shooter? Instead, we here at OXM really, truly have a running office joke about how most Arcade games score a 7.0. Not because we’re scoring-impaired, but because XBLA is getting by on way too much “good enough” and “it’s alright,” and not nearly enough “groundbreaking” and “great.”

Microsoft should fervently and frequently support indie developers doing awe-inspiring and crazy new things. Some of them will belly-flop harder than a portly game-mag editor stumbling off a diving board, but some of them will do wondrous things. And those things will pay off a year or two later in fancy $60 games that do those grand new things commercially and sell by the millions. The best stuff in life was invented in someone’s garage, not a corporate test lab. Supporting that with way more than the baby step that Community Games represents will win gigantic dividends.

(2) Upgrade Community Games

Speaking of which, this segment of the 360 dashboard is looking more and more like a student-project ghetto than an XBLA farm team. That’s not nothing; people need to learn, and Community Games has some genuinely interesting work amid all its white-noise clutter. But this league is too minor. Many Community Games are built with the Achievements system in mind, but they don’t get to implement them. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…

More than that, the best Community Games should be made into a much bigger part of the Xbox Live ecosystem. Help the truly pro creations with upgrades; reward the folks who have brilliant ideas by helping them develop the level of polish and proficiency that’ll make them succeed. Essentially, build a deluxe layer into Community Games. Microsoft would earn such an investment back in spades, and becoming the hotbed of smart young talent would hardly suck.

(3) Make Pricing More Aggressive and Fluid

Basically, XBLA should price aggressively and wisely, the way retail stores do (and are doing even more in this recession). Microsoft has dabbled in this a bit with lowered prices and weeklong specials, but it’s nowhere near as aggressive as it should be.

Why not make price drops much more frequent? Or do “buy two games, get a third game free” deals? Or make games that’ve tanked for a fair amount of time (that’s you, Roogoo and Crazy Mouse) either super-cheap or free with the purchase of other games? Giving customers a bigger perception that they’re getting a bargain or a bonus would boost sales — and popularity.

(4) Retro Doesn't Mean Ancient

Enough ’80s retro; now we want ’90s retro. Duke Nukem 3D should be the first of many. How about Descent, Myst, and The 7th Guest next? Or Bungie’s groundbreaking Myth RTS games? Or Thief or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter or…crap, this list could go on longer than the phone book. Which, honestly, is the point — there’s some seriously ripe, low-hanging fruit out there in the recent past that y’all need to start picking!

(5) Screw The Size Cap

Watchmen: The End Is Nigh was a hefty 1GB download, and it was nowhere near the greatest new XBLA game. Still, plenty of people waited while it dribbled down to their 360. We’ll take massive downloads for top-notch product. Quality matters more than download time, especially when you can queue up your downloads from the web at work, flick on your 360 when you get home, and do other things while the boring part takes care of itself.

(6) Market XBLA More...Lots More

This is probably one of the most important points, but we suck at math, so that’s why it’s last in our list. If you tell people about XBLA only on the dashboard and in the occasional press release, you’re reaching only hardcore gamers like us. We’re flattered and all, but there are way more folks out there playing games, and roping them in only means better things for all of us. Tell people about Arcade with an actual ad campaign; trumpet it as something you can get only on 360. You don’t even have to slam Sony — XBLA is solid and deserves more marketing love for everything it does right.

And, um, thanks. That’s all we got. But we’d love to hear your ideas on how to make Arcade be all it can be. Send your missives to letters@officialxboxmagazine.com with the subject line “What XBLA Can Do Better,” and we’ll print the best stuff in an upcoming issue.