As a student (and fan) of the truly old school games, I'm a big of a snob when it comes to these re-releases on new consoles. When you have the original carts in the closet at the ready the differences are noticeable. To someone that hasn't played the game in 20 years it's usually no big deal, but to me it's usually a make or break situation.

After downloading more than a few retro games for XBLA and PSN I've come to a conclusive reason as to why most of them don't work out well... it's the controls. The controllers today are either too complex or ill suited to the gameplay style of back in the day. Of course this has always been a problem to some extent. Bringing an arcade game home meant changing the controls around, and essentially changing the experience. To me, a game like Asteroids is best played on the arcade cabinet with no joystick, only buttons. Granted I'm probably in the minority but that's just the way I am.

So let's take Smash TV for instance. It was a super early XBLA release, and has been available on the service for quite some time. Is it worth diggin back into the XBLA library to take a look at this one?

the game is still arcade at it's roots, so it's incredibly hard. You can still feel it pulling quarters out of your pocket. So you're gonna die... a lot. But if you wrangle up someone to play some 2 player action it's much better. Of course it's not like you're teammates. Competition in a Running Man style game show for cash and prizes, you're working together to survive but you're still out for yourself for cash and prizes. It's one of those games where you'll work as a team, but only to a point.

Waves and waves of baddies attack you in a seemingly endless stream. In between all the shooting you'll have precious little time to grab the money and prizes that scatter themselves at random around the screen. Minor break occur as you move from room to room but it's almost all non-stop action.

Smash TV was part if a very short list of arcade games that used 2 joysticks to control the action. One controlled the direction of your character, the other the direction of your shots. Though it wasn't the fist game to do so (That would be Robotron 2084) it worked amazingly well and it was a perfect fit. The ability to shoot and move independently is what made the game. And for this style of control, the dual analog controls of the 360 are a perfect match.

It'd be nice if some of these titles that have been out for quite some time offered some sort of price drop, but since there's no shelf to make room on there's little reason to do so. But at 400 points (5 bucks) it's cheap enough for an impulse buy.

In spite of this, this one is still worth your attention. Not only is it a faithful re-creation of the arcade classic, the controller doesn't get in your way and is perfectly suited to the task at hand. It's infinitely better when you're playing 2 players, as the game gets stale rather quickly. But with a friend or random person over Xbox Live, the replay factor jumps considerably.

If you didn't get a 360 at launch you probably missed this one when it was first released, but do yourself a favor and dig back and take a second look at this one.

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