I just noticed that Quake Arena has been released on Xbox Live Arcade. I'm not really interested in ever switching to playing Quake on the xbox as opposed to the PC, but I thought I would check it out.

It's a 300 meg download, which is reasonably small. Started it up and the menu looks quite a lot like the CPMA menu actually. I didn't bother looking at keys or anything and just went straight in and started up the intro game to crash. This level is a combination of the original crash level and the introduction to Quake live. Although they point out that it is very important to pick up armour. They don't highlight spawn times. They should do that.

I was unaware that you could set the difficulty so I won pretty easily 5 to 0. I played the next game and won 10 to 0. So I was thinking either console gamers are really shit or I need to make it more difficult. It wasn't pointed out, but the option was there, so I ramped it up to Nightmare. This was much much harder and found I needed to time the armours to win.

Something I didn't particularly think much of was how the bot would sit on the other side of the map and rip you apart with mg or sg while you can't do anything because it's like impossible to aim. For some unknown reason, there is absolutely no auto-aim. Which means lg and mg have been rendered unusuable. FEAR MY 8% LG!

Shotgun seemed ok, and surprisingly enough I was hitting quite a lot with plasma, but most of the time you just want to run around with rocket launcher. I think duel on this platform would be rendering into controlling rocket launcher rather than armour and MH.

Apart from sensitivity issues and me not being able to aim with the sticks, the controls are not bad. In fact it is setup in such a way that you could theoretically strafe jump, probably if you weren't a console fps noob like me. RT is fire, and LT is jump, which means you can strafe, have direction and jump at the same time. I was able to perform a couple of rocket jumps quite easily without multiple tries.

Bright skins are also included (you have to set it though) which makes it better to see the enemy and it runs very smoothly. Even though it could only be running at 60hz. It felt completely different to 60hz on pc, and was nice and smooth.

I must admit, it was quite fun, and I could see it being pretty cool playing split screen with some friends.

But there is no split screen. Ok. So I tried to go browse for a game. The trial includes 1 hour of play time, so you get to see the full "product" for one hour and then your time is up. I browsed for a game, and that was simple enough, but it was a bit upsetting that I could see a bunch of games, but not their location or my ping. I decided to join a FFA on the campgrounds.

I joined the game and it seemed responsive... until I decided to fire a weapon. My ping must have been over 500, but I don't know because I couldn't check! I think it was an american server, from the guys accents.

Well, that experience was less fun, and couldn't see myself preferring that to playing quake on PC.

My final comment would be, If you are looking for old memories and you have the cash to spare, go for it. If you play quake on PC, don't bother, it isn't worth the 1200 points.

ps. but doom is. Buy doom!