Play Zuma, where a weird stone frog regurgitates coloured balls into other coloured balls! Regurgitate quickly though, or the balls'll kill ya! Xbox Live Arcade Reviews Pt. 3 Xbox Live Arcade reviews Pt. 1

Zuma

My personal favourite of the bunch. Kind of like Bust-A-Move, only you shoot balls from the centre of the screen outward as lines of coloured balls slowly inch their way toward the centre. It’s unfortunate that the Xbox controller can’t possibly be as accurate as a mouse (this game originally was released for PC a few years back) but you actually get used to it quickly enough. You can choose adventure mode that gets progressively tougher or just do an all-out challenge mode where you play until the balls reach the centre. The only other problem with this game is that in adventure mode, you start from the beginning of the last level you completed – you can’t start from the very beginning if you want to for whatever reason. Still, these are small complaints. Zuma is funa.

Hardwood Backgammon

Methinks I’m spending too much time playing video games lately. When you get to yelling at the computer in a backgammon game, there’s definitely something wrong. But hey, that’s a sign that this Xbox Live arcade game is fun. It’s a straightforward backgammon game that’s great for a round or two when you’re waiting for your game of Quake to load (ohhh, dis). There’s a decent tutorial for those of us who need to brush up on the rules as well. For those of you with insomnia, just start a game up, close your eyes and listen to the music, which is sure to lull you to sleep, what with its harps and ocean waves. If you’re a little more competitive with your backgammon, though, feel free to add some Rage Against the Machine from your custom soundtrack as I did.

Gauntlet

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Ugh….this game may hold some retro appeal for a very few certain fans, but it just doesn’t hold up like the other arcade games do years later on the 360. In Gauntlet, you play as either a warrior, valkyrie, wizard or elf and basically fight your way through room after room and wave after wave of enemy. The worst part is, you can basically hit a button to get more and more health, as opposed to adding quarters in the arcades back in the day. There is no limit to how many times you can add to your health in the game, though it does affect your score. A mind-numbing addition to the Xbox Live Arcade.

Robotron 2084

Another uber-retro game from the heyday of coin-op fun, this game actually holds up fairly well despite it’s very old-school graphics and sound. In Robotron, you go from room to room where you have to defeat a whole whack of enemies. As an added bonus, there are helpless humans walking aimlessly around the rooms that you can save for more points. Fast-paced action that’s good in small doses.

Bejeweled 2

Yet another fun Arcade puzzle game. Fans of Zookeeper will be right at home here. In Bejeweled 2, you have a screen full of gems and you have to line up three or more like-coloured gems to erase them. The catch is, you can only swap two gems that sit right beside each other at a time. You have a time bar at the bottom of the screen – take too long to make a move or use too many hints and the bar empties and the game is over. Bejeweled gets very challenging very fast but has that addictive flavour to it that should have puzzle game fans coming back quite a bit. There are several game modes, all of which are quite fun and challenging – as long as you can stop yourself from using unlimited hints in the Puzzle Mode.