Holy crap, you guys. Remember Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion last year? Where they released Braid, Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars 2 and Bionic Commando: Rearmed, four of the best games the service has ever seen, over the course of less than a month? WELL THEY’RE DOING IT AGAIN.

This year, Microsoft is once more releasing five purportedly high-quality downloadable titles, and they even priced one of them reasonably! How considerate of them. Here they are in nega-order of how excited I am for each:

 

5. TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled

($15 / 1200 Points)

Genre: Nostalgiasploitation

This remake of the classic arcade/SNES brawler comes courtesy of Ubisoft Singapore. An amalgam of the best parts of both versions, the game is likely going to be the definitive version for people looking to relive one of their favorite childhood games. To the rest of us, it’s an updated port priced startlingly at a whopping $15.

Considering Secret Of Monkey Island: Special Edition, another recent remake, contains hand-drawn graphics and full voice acting yet was priced at only $10, it’s hard to look at the 1200 point pricing as much more than a cynical move to sneak a few extra dollars out of the pockets of nostalgic late-twenty-somethings. Anyone who buys this without at least playing the demo first should probably have put their $15 towards getting their glasses de-rose-tinted.

 

4. Marvel vs. Capcom 2

($15 / 1200 Points)

Genre: 2D People Puncher

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is nuts. As far as fighting games that throw canon and convention to the wind go, it might be second only to the Super Smash Bros series. The game is a 3-on-3 tag-team 2D fighter featuring all your favorite Marvel and Capcom characters. The game came out in 2000, though, so if you’re expecting any new characters from the past decade, you’ll probably be disappointed. Conversely, if you can name a new character that either company has made any money on over the past decade, I’ll eat my hat, but that is another subject entirely. With 56 playable characters (28 from the Marvel universe, 28 from Capcom’s universises), a tournament community that is still bafflingly vital, and the ability to pit Mega Man against Jill Valentine or Ryu against Peter Parker, there is a lot to like.

It’s hard to argue from an value standpoint that $15 isn’t the right price for MvC2; it’s certainly much cheaper than dropping $100 on eBay for a console copy or more than a grand for an actual arcade cabinet. Still, it’s functionally identical to the game released nine years ago, but with the additions of online play, widescreen support, a handful of antialiasing options, and the entire roster of fighters unlocked from the start. For a lot of people, though, that’s going to be more than enough.

 

3. Trials HD

($15 / 1200 Points)

Genre: Pain

There is a certain type of person out there who loves games that make them hate games. For some of us, there’s an immense euphoria that can only be found after dying one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand times. Those of us who can’t see why everyone else hates Marble Blast Ultra, Ninja Gaiden, or this week’s Free Indie of the Week, MoneySeize; those of us who aren’t done with a game until we’ve gotten under every excruciating par time, those of us who laughed uncomfortably when we got this N+ achievement; Trials HD is a game for us.

This video, taken from the PC version of Trials 2, gives a pretty good impression of the type of trial(ha!)-and-error, adapt-or-die gameplay that should be expected from the console version. As you can see, it looks precise, punishing, and excruciating, just as it should be.

Trials HD is yet another game within the Summer of Arcade that is coming in 400 points above par, but to be totally honest, I can’t imagine that I won’t end up buying it. With the nigh-infinite potential of a sharing-friendly level editor and over 50 stages in the game proper, I’ve definitely paid much more than $15 before for much smaller doses of masochism than this.

 

2. Splosion Man

($10 / 800 Points)

Genre: Action Platsploder

Splosion Man is a game about a man made out of explosions.

Every button in Splosion Man is the explode button.

I can’t imagine a human being who wasn’t sold after at least one of those two sentences, but just in case, here’s some more information. Splosion Man was developed by Twisted Pixel Games, makers of indie darling (although more ‘darling’ than ‘indie’) The Maw. While The Maw was a sort of adventure/puzzler very much in the vein of N64-era , Splosion Man seems to go as far in the opposite direction gameplay-wise as possible while losing none of their last game’s Pixar-ish charm. The game is pure unadulterated 2.5D platforming. You are armed with just a triple jump and infinite walljumps. Both of these, unsurprisingly, are explosions. Your goal is to reach the end of each of the game’s 100 single-player and co-op (4 player!) as quickly and destructively as possible. Everything out there about the game basically makes it look like fun incarnate.

Unbelievably, Splosion Man is also the first game I’ve mentioned so far that is actually 100% new. Not a remake, not a reboot, just a fully original property being given a shot. Even more perversely, Splosion Man is also the only Summer of Arcade game priced at the growingly-rare $10.

 

1. Shadow Complex

($15 / 1200 Points)

Genre: Neometroidvania

Shadow Complex looks like it may well be the best Live Arcade game of all time. A sort of modern take on the action/platformer/exploration genre championed by old classics such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid, Shadow Complex is impressive for more reasons than I could possibly list, but here’s a few of the major bullet points: it’s running on Unreal Engine 3, it’s 10 to 16 hours long, it has full in-game cutscenes and voice-acting,  18 major powerups, a “New Game +” option, over 100 items to collect, and a story that takes place within Orson Scott Card’s novel Empire. The game seems to be absolutely packed to the gills with content, and with the final game said to be weighing in at nearly a gigabyte in size, it had damn well better.

Yes, the name is terrible. Yes, by agreeing to pay $15 for an XBLA game, you’re essentially sending the message to Microsoft that eaking an extra $5 out of customers is alright by us. But it’s hard to care about any of this when the game looks so damn good. Everything about Shadow Complex seems so polished and so dense that appears to fall squarely into the hallowed category of downloadable titles that could easily have been full, disc-based retail games. More importantly, though, the game looks like an absolute labor of love. In interviews, the developers have openly extolled the original Metroid and Castlevania games as inspirations throughout development, and that is good, good news indeed.

 

Also, don’t forget that yesterday, the functionally-titled Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition and the maddeningly-punctuated MadBalls in… Babo: Invasion came out, the former being a a fully redrawn and voice-acted remake of the original Secret of Monkey Island and the latter being a reboot of some disgusting 80s toys in which you get to detach your 360 Avatar’s head and turn it into a killing machine. I know which one I’m more excited about.

Oh, and also Tour de France 2009 – The Official Game. Not joking. This was a big week for Xbox Live Arcade, indeed.

 

Alright, commenters, which Summer of Arcade game are you the most excited about this year? Which one last year did you find yourself enjoying the most? Tell me how wrong I was about all of this in the comments down below!