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Game Room is basically a 3D shell where you can buy classic arcade and console games from. They cost $3 for owning on either 360 or PC, or $5 if you want to own it on both. Each game comes with a nifty arcade cabinet that you set in your own arcade space. You can mess with DIP switches, challenge other players to very specific goals (survive level 30, get this amount of points in this amount of time, etc.), and can even go into a "Cabinet" view where you see the art around the screen and they make the screen look like those old SDTV monitors they shoved in there! It's starting out with 30 games available for purchase, and will add more as time goes on.
The one thing that felt very sleazy about the whole thing was when I bought Asteroids Deluxe on there, it gave me an achievement for buying a game. Other than that, I'm having a blast playing Asteroids and Centipede again. Man, my dentist in New Jersey had a Centipede machine. Best thing about having braces for a while.
I installed it last night but haven't checked it out much yet. The music is tinny and annoying as hell, I'm hoping you can turn that off, I don't need THAT much of a replica of the arcade experience.
Games can be full screen can't they? Don't want to be playing them in the arcade cabinet
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Aliasalpha: I installed it last night but haven't checked it out much yet. The music is tinny and annoying as hell, I'm hoping you can turn that off, I don't need THAT much of a replica of the arcade experience.
Games can be full screen can't they? Don't want to be playing them in the arcade cabinet

You can pretty much mess with any setting, so you can turn off the "ambient" arcade sounds. I'm pretty sure you can full-screen as well. By default it's not in Cabinet Mode, but it's not exactly full-screen, either. I'll have to mess with the settings.
EDIT: After going through a few options, yes, you can have it take up the entire screen. You just have to go into Options, Graphics, change it to Basic, and mess with the X and Y values to fit your screen. You have to do it in the menu of that particular game.
Post edited March 24, 2010 by TheCheese33
Meh, I'm playing arcades since the Nineties thanks to MAME....
I have to lol at the presentation here. Microsoft are actually using something very much resembling Mii-figures, in an environment that sort of closely resembles Playstation Home, on their competing X360 console.
Is that lawsuits I hear trudging up the hill?
Is there DRM involved?
Well it already runs a damn sight better than pshome.
The really annoying thing is the inability to set the default background when gaming, the translucent black with the animated arcade behind it is incredibly distracting when playing a twitch game and some avatar does a stupid move. In a way it replicates the arcade experience quite well but in another way its fucking annoying
I do have a nice copy of lunar lander now though, after playing games like Thrust, I'd forgotten how slow the lander reaction is
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Aliasalpha: Well it already runs a damn sight better than pshome.
The really annoying thing is the inability to set the default background when gaming, the translucent black with the animated arcade behind it is incredibly distracting when playing a twitch game and some avatar does a stupid move. In a way it replicates the arcade experience quite well but in another way its fucking annoying
I do have a nice copy of lunar lander now though, after playing games like Thrust, I'd forgotten how slow the lander reaction is

But you can block out the background entirely, by changing the settings to Basic and messing with the X and Y value sliders. As for DRM, you have to run Games for Windows Live, which is a kind of DRM. I haven't checked if you can play while offline, but I assume you can.
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TheCheese33: The one thing that felt very sleazy about the whole thing was when I bought Asteroids Deluxe on there, it gave me an achievement for buying a game.

LOL, yeah that is a bit sleazy.
Also: http://www.atari.com/arcade
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Faithful: Is there DRM involved?

They are tied to your GFWL account, as for Activations I am unsure.
On a personal level are you lot serious? $3 for Centipede? $3 for a Colli game? I have the compete Atari collection which has 80 Atari arcade and 2600 games and it cost me €4.99!
I expected to buy them in packs certainly not individually. Add up the costs an you can probably buy a classic console and games for less. This is way too expensive for even my retro tastes. Maybe if the Game Room starts offering arcades from the 1990's like Street Fighter 2 I would be interested but there is no way in hell I am paying that for bloody Scramble.
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stonebro: I have to lol at the presentation here. Microsoft are actually using something very much resembling Mii-figures, in an environment that sort of closely resembles Playstation Home, on their competing X360 console.
Is that lawsuits I hear trudging up the hill?

Microsoft introduced Avatars long before Game Room. On the 360 they are fully customisable (you don't just pick pre-made ones like on the PC) and they have already been included in various games and meta-gaming environments (watching Netflix rentals in a virtual theatre and whatnot). Game Room is a natural progression of that.
As for comparisons to Home, Home is more like Second Life for consoles while Game Room is entirely game-centric; you don't "hang out" in Game Room with your virtual buddies like you can in Home.
Against my better judgment, I decided to install GFWL the other day, just to check this out. Unfortunately, I should have stuck to my instincts and just ignored it. First, I couldn't even connect to it, but after browsing the internet, it looks like a lot of people had that problem. Then they have two game packs listed as free downloads, but they don't actually add anything free to Game Room at all, there's only the paid games that seem to each have a one-time use demo; pretty pointless when some of the games in question don't even work when you try running them. So I decided to try to remove it... big mistake. Now Game Pack 002 is stuck saying "removing" in the GFWL client but it isn't actually doing anything. I was able to uninstall Game Room itself, but Game Pack 002 stays there, still trying to remove itself. So I go so far as to remove GFWL itself, then reinstall it... Game Pack 002 is still trying to remove itself. So I uninstall again, then rape my registry and hard drive to eliminate all traces of GFWL and Game Room, reboot, then reinstall GFWL... Game Pack 2 is still trying to remove itself. What the fuck Microsoft? You can't even make this thing uninstall properly. So now, I'm trying to download Game Room again in the hopes that it will somehow "reset" everything and let the removal complete, but I do not have high hopes for it at all. I would love to say Game Room is great, but I can't even say it works at this point. I guess this is another perfect example of you get what you pay for.
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cogadh: Against my better judgment, I decided to install GFWL the other day, just to check this out. Unfortunately, I should have stuck to my instincts and just ignored it. First, I couldn't even connect to it, but after browsing the internet, it looks like a lot of people had that problem. Then they have two game packs listed as free downloads, but they don't actually add anything free to Game Room at all, there's only the paid games that seem to each have a one-time use demo; pretty pointless when some of the games in question don't even work when you try running them. So I decided to try to remove it... big mistake. Now Game Pack 002 is stuck saying "removing" in the GFWL client but it isn't actually doing anything. I was able to uninstall Game Room itself, but Game Pack 002 stays there, still trying to remove itself. So I go so far as to remove GFWL itself, then reinstall it... Game Pack 002 is still trying to remove itself. So I uninstall again, then rape my registry and hard drive to eliminate all traces of GFWL and Game Room, reboot, then reinstall GFWL... Game Pack 2 is still trying to remove itself. What the fuck Microsoft? You can't even make this thing uninstall properly. So now, I'm trying to download Game Room again in the hopes that it will somehow "reset" everything and let the removal complete, but I do not have high hopes for it at all. I would love to say Game Room is great, but I can't even say it works at this point. I guess this is another perfect example of you get what you pay for.

Welcome to GFWL. Enjoy your stay....IN HELL.
Way too expensive for some of these games. However, paying a couple bucks more for a cross-platform version is a really good idea that I wish would be implemented on a larger scale for games in general.
Game room is... great? No way, just another way for microsoft to make mega coin from the older generation. I think the whole thing is a rip off, and stupid. They don't even have games that are very good. You want to buy classic games? Buy Sonics ultimate Genesis collection. Its 30$ and it comes with like 40 of the best games on the Genesis and Megadrive.