Of all the things I miss most about the Xbox 360 it’s the Xbox LIVE Arcade. It was such a good storefront with a curation of fantastic titles. Their Summer of Arcade event was something I looked forward to every year.
Yes so many great games shipped on XBLA. It’s how I first played Braid, Limbo, Shadow Complex, and many other indies. There’s still some which are exclusive to the platform, hidden gems like “ilomilo”.
Ilomilo functions on modern Xbox hardware, thankfully. Lovely little game. Also weird that it inspired an early Billy Eilish hit.
I do. I had two games on there that I haven’t been able to find since.
- A silly game called Office DisOrders which was basically an early visual novel about busywork
- A jigsaw game which I seem to recall is called Square Jigsaw (or something?) that had a really cool feature I haven’t seen before or since - fractal jigsaws. You could do really huge jigsaws quite easily with that, it’d break larger puzzles down into smaller jigsaw-piece-shaped puzzles, then after you’d completed each of those puzzles, you’d assemble them into the final image.
Office DisOrders (aka Office Politics) wasn’t XBLA, it was one of the less curated (but wonderfully weird) XBLIG titles, which had their own subsection on the store and which exclusively used the XNA Game Studio; essentially it was a sort of Net Yaroze (to go even older and more esoteric) model but for the early broadband age.
A lot of those games are straight up lost media, I believe. Although a handful have made it across to PC in recent years, such as the utter standout I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1.
Yeah, the 1s and 0s are stored on archive.org, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to play them.
Someone please please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d put a bounty on this and pay… *checks pockets* …an empty chewing gum wrapper and a used bus ticket?
Xenia may get XBLIG support eventually, but considering how long that’s been in the works it could be a long time yet if ever.
