Reshaping the past

By Tom Bramwell Published 2 February, 2006

Geometry Wars picked apart with help from its designer.

Eyes around The Beehive widen and brows furrow in incredulity. I'm suddenly instructed to tell everyone at the table what I've just said to one half. I clear my throat. "The worldwide high score for Geometry Wars is 12.8 million." Nobody says anything. Everyone just thinks about it. "Terrifying," says someone, eventually.

"Mine's 2.1 million, which I originally thought was pretty good," says Stephen Cakebread, creator of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and its predecessor, "but I've since been put to shame by all the people who've scored five times that!" Well, six times, but we're not counting. It's too painful.

Meeting the retrograde

Now, to give you an idea of the cross-section of my pub table, we're talking about varying degrees of IT professional - ISP support, network redundancy specialists, etc.; people who keep up with games; people who I've played eight-player Wi-Fi Mario Kart DS with; people whose general reaction to Xbox 360 so far has been virtual indifference.

'Reshaping the past' Screenshot indicator

The indicator top-centre shows how many lives and smart bombs are available. Smart bombs clear the screen but for no points.

People who largely all feature somewhere on my Friends list leaderboard for Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved anyway. The fact that I can bring up the 12.8 mil' score and the people there can immediately contextualise it is pretty amazing - especially when you consider that Retro Evolved's a downloadable, one-man-in-a-shed shoot-'em-up that began life as an Easter egg in an Xbox racing game and is only available on a console nobody in the UK can actually buy.

Its success has been truly impressive. It's the most popular Xbox Live Arcade title by far with 200,000 trial version downloads and more than 45,000 paid downloads: nearly a quarter of the people who tried a demo buying the full game is no mean statistic. More than 12,500 people have got a better score than I have, and I've played it for more than ten hours; that might not sound like much to a world of people who've finished Final Fantasy games and see "d" number at the front of their "/played" when analysing a World of Warcraft habit, but then you have to keep in mind at all times that this is a downloadable game. Someone's side-project.

It's particularly impressive when you bear in mind that Cakebread was genuinely worried about how it'd do. "When you've been working on a game for a while it's difficult to feel objective about your creation," he says. "Some folks feel what they're working on is the best thing ever, but I tend to go the other way, so I was thinking, 'Oh my god, how am I going to make this better, it'll never be as good as the original!'"

A bizarre creation

That original began life a long time ago, back when Bizarre Creations - Cakebread's employer - was working on Xbox title Project Gotham Racing. "I actually wrote the first version of the game to test some code for PGR1," says Cakebread. "After PGR shipped I kept tweaking the test code as a hobby project, and it soon started to come together as a game. Folks around the office started copying it to their devkits to play... Eventually one of the producers on PGR2 saw it, and asked me if I'd like to tart it up a bit and have it included in PGR's sequel as an Easter egg."

'Reshaping the past' Screenshot shopping

It's a lot like Saturday shopping, except nobody really dies.

The idea was incredibly simple, evolutionary of a lot of existing shoot-'em-up casts. Play took place on a square area into which little geometry shapes - enemies - spawned. Controlling a little "ship" of sorts with your left analogue stick, you moved around the area directing an unrestricted stream of laserfire with the right stick. With a system of scoring that increased bonuses exponentially the longer you survived waves of enemies without being hit, power-ups and screen-clearing smart bombs to master, and no theoretical end other than the peak of your own skills, the original Geometry Wars - included with the Retro Evolved 360 download as a bit of extra fun, and enough fun that somebody's got a 20-million-plus score on the leaderboard - became enough of a cult hit that Bizarre wanted to follow it up.

"We wanted to do a sequel to the game, but the eventual decision to do it for Xbox Live Arcade came down to the amount of time I'd be able to spend working on it," says Cakebread when we ask how it ended up on Live Arcade. "If I'd been doing another Easter egg, I'd have been lucky to be able to get a week out of the main schedule, which would never have been enough time to do the game justice! However, because it potentially has its own income, we could afford to spend more time on it. In terms of programming, it's pretty much identical to any normal game, and apart from a few restrictions (such as fitting on a memory unit), generally we're free to do what we want." Cakebread also had help from three people on sound effects, while the chap creating some of the music for Bizarre's Xbox 360 racer PGR3 also contributed music.

The game took "at a rough guess, around three months in total". "All of the code in the original game came over... Twice! Once for the Evolved version, although I obviously did a fair amount of rewriting for that, and once to get the original game in there too."

Live Arcade also appealed, Cakebread says, because the 360's extra power allowed for something pretty. Indeed - the 360 version's underlying game grid is a system of 60,000 points poised in a delicate gravitational balance that reacts beautifully when struck by shockwaves; it runs on the 360's second core along with the audio system. It's a far more dazzling experience than its predecessor all over - the visual style owed a lot to "fireworks and galaxies" apparently. "I spent a rather unproductive few hours looking at pretty pictures on the web!" We'd argue they were quite productive, actually, as would 45,000 other people presumably.

Doing battle

'Reshaping the past' Screenshot extra

Extra lives and bombs are accumulated when you cross different score thresholds, so dying once early on isn't necessarily an issue.

But why is Retro Evolved popular? What's so special about it? Many games do the things it does. Perhaps the difference is that it appeals on a number of levels. One person who thinks so is Leo Tan of PR firm Barrington Harvey, who despite having no association with Microsoft or Bizarre Creations is well known in trade circles for going around telling everyone how great Geometry Wars is, and how he's got the "UK games industry high score" of 970,360. The interesting thing is that he doesn't play it just to lord it over us. "I love the sound, the insanity, the borderline nature of trying to stay alive. It's an assault on the senses. Turn the volume up, the lights down and get an excessive amount of caffeine and chocolate by your side," he says, soundbiting us a little in the process.

When we've calmed him down, he agrees that for others a lot of its appeal is in the way the "creatures" behave. "You only need to see them a couple of times to work it out. After that, it's really as simple as going where there are no bad guys and shooting at where the bad guys are," he says.

That said, for me it's not about defeating recognisable patterns or learning level designs so you can create improbable completion tapes and whack them on Google Video. It's more organic, reflexive. Quite soon you gather how each enemy works, but dealing with them in concert's rarely the same because they move in relation to you and you to them, and they don't spawn the same way on subsequent goes either.

There are letter-shaped purple bastards who chase fast then split into two smaller spinning versions; there are snake-like enemies that twirl around dangerously; others just swarm you without any particular strategy; there are sort-of twirling black holes the bounds of which spit sparks like Catherine wheels. My favourites are the little green ones who chase you while you're heading in the other direction then wimp out when you turn round. "If you shoot them head on they don't duck, only if you shoot slightly to the side of them. It's herding more than shooting," says Tan. The more you play, the more these strategies become innate, and the more you're left to pick up on finer points like that.

'Reshaping the past' Screenshot background

Simply watching the background grid is a great way to hurt your eyes. Better than using a stick.

"It's all very instinctive. It's about dealing with the situation that arises. The more different situations you can deal with, the further you'll go." Or of course you can just play it without having to think too hard.

On that level, it's the epitome of arcade design and deserves to be Live's arcade poster-child; it's rewarding whether or not you're trying to understand it, but more so if you are. The availability of a demo and the competitive nature of Friends list leaderboards in particular fuels both types of fire. "I think that the limited download size, and trial version requirements will really put the pressure on developers to deliver great games with no wastage," says Cakebread, when asked about GW's success and Live Arcade in general, "so with any luck we'll see some absolutely smashing games come out for it in the near future, and they'll be cheap to boot!"

Mission accomplished

If anything though, the reason Geometry Wars is proving so popular is the variety that everyone's fingers help infuse it with. When no two games are utterly the same and everyone's starting from the same point every time, it's impossible to get left too far behind. And thanks to a couple of decades of exposure to the multi-directional move-and-fire "retro" schemes that Geometry Wars "evolved" from, most of us have a solid base and affinity for it.

12.8 million though.

Oh well, at least I know what I'm doing this evening. Crying in the pub.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved is available now on Xbox Live Arcade through Xbox 360. It costs 400 "Microsoft points".

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (74) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Cloudane #1 6 years ago

    This game is so beautiful.

    Nice article too - 12.8 million though indeed!

  • OllyJ #2 6 years ago

    good article!

    how about some more live arcade stuff, reviews, news etc...

    it's frustrating having no decent source of news for this stuff and it's a big part of 360!

  • Pablo2k5 #3 6 years ago

    Is this good use of the 360 hardware?
    This arcade live stuff is nonsense, I can't understand why loads of people are getting excited by the likes of Street Fighter when I've pumped enough 10 pences into the original to fill the royal mint ten times over.

  • Xerx3s #4 6 years ago

    Tripping screenies ftw! :D

  • mentat #5 6 years ago

    I *hate* those sodding greenies. It's always them that get me.

    I'm still only on a lowly 280,000 :(

  • jlaakso #6 6 years ago

    Really: this is one of two reasons I'm at all excited about the 360. The other is Mutant Storm Reloaded. I'm quite the "2D" shooter junkie, even though I'm not at all good at them (still haven't beaten Ikaruga).

    Reall cool to see that people are into this kind of play. It's not surprising, to me, it must be all about the accessibility. I did wonder why the 2D shooter died after the 16-bit era. Or rather became a hardcore pursuit instead of being mainstream.

  • BartonFink #7 6 years ago

    Is this good use of the 360 hardware?
    This arcade live stuff is nonsense, I can't understand why loads of people are getting excited by the likes of Street Fighter when I've pumped enough 10 pences into the original to fill the royal mint ten times over.

    Perhaps because the games are good, fun, enjoyable. I thought that's what gaming was all about. Or am I missing something here?
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 08:35

  • fergal_oc #8 6 years ago

    gaming industry high score of just under a million hey? I know what I'm doing in work today :)

  • freedumb #9 6 years ago

    They may well be fun Bartonfink, but its not worth getting a new console for something that could have easily been done last gen.
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 08:38

  • neuroniky #10 6 years ago

    This is the only reason I see right now to get an XBox 360. If only Live Arcade could become an indie developer's playground...

  • BartonFink #11 6 years ago

    Yea and there are no other games on the console and all that trollish talk. blah blah.

    I got the 360 to play games and that's exactly what I am doing, Live Arcade is a welcome bonus.
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 08:41

  • reality_cheque #12 6 years ago

    @Pablo2k5: Have you played it? Because if you haven't then I suggest you try before you claim it as nonsense. It may not be using the X360 to its full capacity, but it's still better than 90% of the games I have played in the last year! In fact I'd actually go as far as to say I enjoy it more than most of the games I have played in the last FIVE years. Not once have I been frustrated by this game.

    The reason people are so happy about old/simple games appearing on Live is that:
    1) they don't need their snes/megadrive/ps1/saturn/jaguar/whatever plugged in anymore
    2) they don't need to head to a dirty nasty arcade full of crackheads to play arcade games and when they get there they don't need a pocket full of change
    3) it's a game we know we like, and IT DOESN'T COST £30+.
    4) The demos are FREE, which as we all know is the best price something could be (without being paid to download it)
    5) You can play a 5 minute blitz while waiting for your girlfriend to finish putting on her makeup. Ever tried that with FFXI? Or any other recent games.

    Don't be a hater, be a player!

  • OllyJ #13 6 years ago

    "Is this good use of the 360 hardware?
    This arcade live stuff is nonsense, I can't understand why loads of people are getting excited by the likes of Street Fighter when I've pumped enough 10 pences into the original to fill the royal mint ten times over. "

    Reason 1: it's not just porting games onto a new console with absolutley no new features, that would indeed be shit, it's adding new depth to classics and new games like GW by giving us leaderbords and multiplayer.

    Reason 2: it's getting my missus gaming for which I am very grateful.

    Reason 3: it's there if you want it, no ones forcing you and it's just fun, simple values gaming.

  • reality_cheque #14 6 years ago

    @freedumb: Nobody is saying it's worth buying a 360 for. However it is a nice bonus that you CAN'T get last gen, because none of the console companies had a live service at launch let alone launched their own arcade.

    So if you own a 360, get this game. If not, wait until you want a 360 for something else, and then get this game. It's simple!

  • reality_cheque #15 6 years ago

    Interesting to note that nobody who has played this has a bad thing to say about it. It's only the people who don't own a 360 who just don't get it.

  • BartonFink #16 6 years ago

    Yup interesting point r_c

  • Tejstar #17 6 years ago

    Great article - wish I had the skills to improve on my 178k high score. :(

  • RobDonald #18 6 years ago

    LOL, Leo manages to pop up everywhere! Guess that's what being a young industry starlet does for you ;)

  • Wabe #19 6 years ago

    Just because it's not using textures or polys doeasn't mean it's not taxing the hardware. With the reacting gravity grid behind and millions of moving particles there's no way this could run on previous gen.

    The fact it does all this with zero slowdown and perect collision detection is also fundemental to what makes this game superb to play.

  • lennon #20 6 years ago

    Great game but im rubbish at it :(

  • reality_cheque #21 6 years ago

    @Lennon: Same here, my top score is only about 180k (and that was a one off that I have no idea how I achieved)

    I've got the pacifist award though, trying for that is probably even more fun that playing it normally!

  • barnard666 #22 6 years ago

    there does seem to be an overwhelming "2D = simple" vibe coming from people who are yet to play it...
    really this is the greatest game on 360 for me, and thats not to say the others aren't good, PGR3 is probably the best racing game on any console right now, Quake IV is only challenged by a few as is COD2, kameo is a worthwhile title too...
    xbox live arcade is a piece of genius, when you want to spend ten minutes playing something stupid you just hand over a few pounds and unlock the full version of marble blast or something...

    its even possible to just enjoy watching other people play Geo wars, it really is that beautiful...

    we had a conversation at work the other day about beautiful games, we didnt get very far, vector games in the arcade due to their vector screens, ikaruga, outrun II, ico and geo wars....
    any for any more?

  • reality_cheque #23 6 years ago

    Yeah, 4 quid sounds about right.

  • Scientist #24 6 years ago

    What an excellent surname Cakebread is!

  • Dizzy #25 6 years ago

    I seem to be stuck at 350K :(

    GW is more that a game... it is a drug :)
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 09:28

  • DrDamn #26 6 years ago

    XBox live arcade games are getting more and more play on my X360, and it's not due to the quality of other games I have for the system, more to the accessability and fun of the live arcade games. Current favorites are Zuma and Geo Wars, but I also have Hearts, Spades and Hexic to play.

    They are cheap fun and very well implemented. Who cares if they push the hardware, they are fun - that's the main thing.

  • a_random_gnome #27 6 years ago

    Quite an artsy game...

  • InfiniteFury #28 6 years ago

    Another vote for the "game that got my missus gaming" camp and this is always a good thing.

    Surely the killer ap for the 360 but I just wish I wasn't so enslaved to Warcraft.

  • ZeTimbo #29 6 years ago

    Dizzy is right: GW is DEFINATELY a drug. And I'm hopelessly addicted.

    My personal opinions of what makes GW so good are:

    1) It's fast paced, pick-up-n-play gameplay that takes seconds to understand and hours to perfect.

    2) It never feels like the game cheats. If you die, it's because you missed that annoying purple bastard, one of the blue diamonds sneakily warped in behind you or you got stuck in a snake ambush!

    3) Beating your highscore is ALWAYS atainable. You can always almost taste it...

    4) It's satisfying watching yourself move up the leaderboard of a game that you know takes hours of practice and buckets of skill.

    5) There's no adrenalin rush quite like the one you get when the screen is full of baddies, you have one life left and you don't want to use a SMART bomb. Fighting your way from one shit-storm to another really gets the blood pumping!

    Current highscore? Somewhere around 544,000.

    Last acheivement? Survived 250,000.

    And what's bringing me back? The fact that I KNOW I can survive for longer and by doing so will improve my highscore.

    If Microsoft get more games like this on Live Arcade they're definately going to have a winner. And, like many of you I'm sure, Bejeweled 2 has pulled my g/f away from the PC and onto consoles for the first time. Which, I'm guessing, is what they wanted. Mission accomplished.

  • Concept #30 6 years ago

    Best game on the system so far for me. Not bad when you consider how good PGR3 and Condemned are.

  • ZeTimbo #31 6 years ago

    @Truk: Me too. Using Firefox 1.5 and it's gradually sucking the life out of it.

  • InfiniteFury #32 6 years ago

    Quest question for EG - what score would you give this?

  • Eighthours #33 6 years ago

    Is this good use of the 360 hardware?
    This arcade live stuff is nonsense

    Congratulations, you're actually the first person I've ever seen be negative about LIVE Arcade. You should win a medal for extreme dumbness.

  • InfiniteFury #34 6 years ago

    I am desperate for more people to compete against in this game. Please feel free to either post your GT or send an FR to mine: InfiniteFury

    I've hit about 390,000k and want some numbers to aim for.

    Edit - actually disc, it's called the best of both worlds.
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 10:20

  • Scientist #35 6 years ago

    No one's mentioned the Revolution yet. I can see myself playing classic NES and SNES games instead of Mario Party 8.
    Which is no bad thing.

  • Furbs #36 6 years ago

    Way to read the comments above disc...

  • Arganoid #37 6 years ago

    Spheres of Chaos did this kind of thing years ago ;)
    http://www.spheresofch aos.com/

  • Concept #38 6 years ago

    FluffyTucker - Retro Evolved is probably a better demonstration of the 360 through HDTV than the rest of the games out there (bar Kameo perhaps).

    Gob smacking. Bizarre need to create an extended version that lets you use soundtracks on the HD which the types of enemies and formations of enemies react to. You know, like a 2D hyper-concentrated shoot'em'up version of Rez. ;)

  • tonynibbles #39 6 years ago

    I thought it was a Fantavision screenshot on the homepage at a very first glance. Man - if this game is anywhere near as good as that game (I still love that game) it is gonna be pretty darn good..

  • Tommo #40 6 years ago

    Excellent article Eurogamer, more like these please. :)

    "There are letter-shaped purple bastards who chase fast then split into two smaller spinning versions; "
    ^^ Ah ha, popular misconception. Hit them the right way and three little ones come out. Which leads me to believe there are actually 'four' of them in a big one, and when you hit it, it can kill one of the little ones (or more often two of them), causing the others to split up from each other.

  • #41 6 years ago

    my high score is just shy of a million.

  • reality_cheque #42 6 years ago

    My GT is Exalts, for anyone who wishes to see evidence of my utter crapness at this game on their friends list :)

    I'll also lose to you at NFS:MW and Quake if the opportunity arrives...

  • ZeTimbo #43 6 years ago

    *Is looking forward to Tommo's thesis "The Evolution of GW Baddies"*
    Edited by 1 at 02/02/06 @ 10:47

  • Murbal #44 6 years ago

    Probably one game that would convince me to get a a 360 (and a BB connection of course!) at the moment! Hearing so many good things about it.

  • smelly #45 6 years ago

    Is this good use of the 360 hardware?


    Is it fun? Is it a good game? Is the 360 designed to play games? Then I'd say YES, it IS a good use of the 360 hardware.

    Or would you rather boring crap which looks pretty?

  • OllyJ #46 6 years ago

    my tag is Goatmaster12


    feel free to get me on your GW score list (and bump my rep up too if you want...:D)

    totally agree about 360 having the best of both worlds, it's not like I sit there and only play retro games, why only today I've been getting thouroughly destroyed by the veteran AI on COD2!

    Reality: what is Q4 multiplayer like? I'm tempted to get it on 360, basically I'm maybe taking RR6 back and exchanging it for something else, quite fancy Q4 if the multiplayer is good. there is a thread in the forum you can reply instead of me hijacking this one.

    cheers

  • reality_cheque #47 6 years ago

    @smelly: Even boring crap would have a hard job being prettier than when your guns make the screen ripple :D

    *wishes he had a 360 for work so he could play GW:RE right now*

  • Eighthours #48 6 years ago

    My high score is 560k odd.

    By the way, they're "Gravity wells".

  • smelly #49 6 years ago

    @reality_cheque : Precisely!

    A lot of people on here think i'm a fanboy because im against all these endless racing/fps games we've been getting recently.

    The fact is, i'm a fan of games. And having played this, it's restored my faith in gaming (for the short term).

    THIS is what gaming is about, not how many polygons/pixels you can draw. To me, games are about excitment, fun, interaction, pick-up-and-play, etc. Not some tired long drawn out story that once you've completed you'll never go back to.


    (i'll stop ranting now)

  • manuel_garcia #50 6 years ago

    12.8 million????

    bloody hell.... i need some practice....

  • Wabe #51 6 years ago

    Sure your not mistaking the 'fans starting up' for the jet engine noise the DVD drive makes when playing a disc based game?

  • morriss #52 6 years ago

    I can't even break the 200,000 mark. I'm getting old :(

  • bloke #53 6 years ago

    Geo Wars 2 is great - a fact I can appreciate even if I'm not very good at it.

    Tally Mode in Mutant Storm suits my mode of play better 'though - my brain just can't take those very long periods of intensity any more :-)

  • bloke #54 6 years ago

    The worldwide high score for Geometry Wars is 12.8 million." Nobody says anything. Everyone just thinks about it. "Terrifying," says someone, eventually.


    There are some astonishingly gifted humans out there.

    On M/Storm, some people have got the Blackbelt Grandmaster Acheivement, which is finishing Adventure Mode (that's 89 consecutive levels) at Black Belt Level (super aggressive, super fast), something which the authors never, never expected anyone to acheive.

    If the world needs Star Pilots, these Gamers will come in handy........

  • wizbob #55 6 years ago

    Someone in Microsoft UK is breathing a sigh of relief right now. It just goes to show you can't buy a bona fide word-of-mouth sleeper hit for a console launch.

    If they've learned their lesson from pumping money into the Bungie & Rare launch titles, they'll realise that buying this guy for $$$illions to do 'Geometry Wars Next Gen' for the Xbox3 isn't likely to succeed.

    The MS XNA and Nintendo strategies of writing good library & tool support for their consoles seems to be the answer here.

  • Scientist #56 6 years ago


    "There are some astonishingly gifted humans out there."

    And to think he's wasting his talents playing videogames!

  • bloodflowers #57 6 years ago

    "we had a conversation at work the other day about beautiful games, we didnt get very far, vector games in the arcade due to their vector screens, ikaruga, outrun II, ico and geo wars....
    any for any more?"

    Look up Imperishable Night. My non-gamer girlfriend sat there staring at it when I was playing that one.

  • mazzl #58 6 years ago

    by the way how much money ($ or euro) is 400 microsoft credits?

  • DrDamn #59 6 years ago

    About £3.50 or €5.00.

  • Rambaldi #60 6 years ago

    By far and away the most positive response to a 360 title so far..and they don't even bother to review it..:(

    The plot thickens.

  • joephish #61 6 years ago

    My friend at work got well over 1m, and we are programmers at a game company.

    Anyway, that person can't say that 900,000 and something is the game industry best - what about the creator of the game?!

    Ah well, too bad my high score is only around 240,000!

  • captainrentboy #62 6 years ago

    My bastard mate has got just shy of 900'000 on this,and when i've watched him getting just that measly score it's kind of astonishing,the guy who got over 12 million must have the reflexes of a Panther....On speed.Crazy.Me,i've got 240K I think,pretty darned crap.
    I'm with most peeps in that this has been the best marketplace download so far(ignoring the fight night 3 demo),although saying that I am really enjoying the new marble one,can't remember the proper name now,it's basically marble madness but snazzier.

  • Pablo2k5 #63 6 years ago

    Eighthours, "You should win a medal for extreme dumbness."

    Well, you should understand that other peoples opinions may differ from yours AND Im not prepared to buy a new 250 quid console to play an old skool 2d shooter. Duh.

  • Beanie #64 6 years ago

    I remember the original Geometry Wars was one of the only games one of my non-gamer friends spent a considerable amount of time on. I shoulda known this would be popular. But I didn't.

    Anyway, Geometry Wars reminds me of Mono somewhat with the trippiness and the control scheme. Both are quality.

    Hope Jeff Minter decides to do more than a lightsynth for the 360! Bring back Unity!

    Edit: And in case the last comment was misleading: I'm aware that it wasn't Minter who made GW. It seems the kind of game he would make, though.
    Edited by 1 at 03/02/06 @ 03:23

  • Netfreak #65 6 years ago

    "Pablo: why defend your opinion and then complain that people like this then? Isn't that a bit daft? "

    Its called hypocracy. ;)

  • neilka #66 6 years ago

    The person with the 12.8 million score hasn't got the Multitastic achievement though. Is it possible to get?

  • InfiniteFury #67 6 years ago

    Completely possible if the Multitastic is the one I'm thinking of which is 10 x combo.

    That's 2000 enemies and a score around 800,000. If he doesn't have the Multitastic, he can't have the survive 1,000,000 either I guess.

    Edit - on a different note it was so weird being able to actually go home and play an excited Eurogamer game last night, it actually felt strange.
    Edited by 1 at 03/02/06 @ 10:32

  • neilka #68 6 years ago

    Actually, when I look at his Gamercard on the 360 it shows two Multitastic awards, one which he has got and one which he hasn't, both with the same name and description. Must be a bug...

  • JonFE #69 6 years ago

    All I need is bring my x360 here at work, connect it to XBL through the office DSL, purchase the bugger, download all current XBL Arcade demos, try them out and purchase a couple more (Mutant Storm and Marble Blast also look like fun) and keep the rest for future reference...

    Do you think that my boss would object ???

  • velocity_girl #70 6 years ago

    I really am unsure why Euro Gamer has paid no real attention to Geometry Wars and the just the whole Live Arcade system

    I think the main reason live arcade is so great is that we are gonna see creative games from independent companies and also even companies like EA will come on board, and because an arcade title doesnt cost millions to develop like a retail game they can afford to take a risk... also on live arcade the sellers have a much higher profit margin on each game downloaded. Yes, some of these games are available to download on pc - but having a centralised system using the live benefits of player skill, achievements, leaderboards etc takes it to a whole new level.

    Also free full games will be available soon to download on Live Arcade. They will be 'sponsored' apparently. The first will be a poker game.

    This and what the Revolution might offer has made me more excited about gaming than I have been for ages.

    oh yeh i prefer mutant storm reloaded to GW...

  • Pablo2k5 #71 6 years ago

    Netfreak "Its called hypocracy. ;)"

    No, its called sticking up for yourself when some calls you dumb! ;)

  • mojo_x #72 6 years ago

    Great article...more of this please!

    I'm halted at 400k at the moment :)

  • morriss #73 6 years ago

    "Now, to give you an idea of the cross-section of my pub table, we're talking about varying degrees of IT professional - ISP support, network redundancy specialists, etc.; people who keep up with games; people who I've played eight-player Wi-Fi Mario Kart DS with; people whose general reaction to Xbox 360 so far has been virtual indifference."

    So these people know what they're talking about then I take it? o_O

  • mingster #74 6 years ago

    Geometry Wars for PC/Mac
    http://ww w.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?t=49122