d20b_1_bl On the 15th Xbox Live reached its five year anniversary. I can still remember putting on the black headset for the first time and going online to play a Moto GP demo that came with the subscription. I had been a PC gamer for a while so the prospect of playing against people over the internet wasn't exactly revolutionary, but I hadn't really done the whole voice communication thing which has since changed console gaming a lot. The real point to all of this is that in celebration of the day Microsoft announced that they'll start releasing original Xbox titles on the Live Marketplace for download. This is something that both the Nintendo Wii and the Playstation 3 have had since the beginning, both with their respective back catalogs, so when I heard about it I was pretty pumped to get a chance to play some of those games I missed back then.

The first wave of confirmed titles (to be released December 4th with the Fall dashboard update) include Halo, Psychonauts, Crimson Skies, and Fable. All really great games that were among the best that the original Xbox had to offer. The only problem is that I don't have much incentive to grab any of these games since I have already played and in some cases still own them. Still I might give it a shot just to see how the whole system works. I'm shocked that Psychonauts made it into their first run of titles, it was a huge surprise when I played it a few years ago but it psychonautsnever got the acclaim it deserved. Just to have a chance to play a brilliant game like that again will be pretty awesome, and I  hope they bring more games like it. I'll be kind of bummed if what they give us are all the blockbusters that everyone played. Let's see some Shenmue. Maybe some Silent Hill 2. Go easy on the Splinter Cell and Madden games.

The only downside of this whole deal is the price. Each game, as of now, will be priced at 1200 MS points, which translates to $15. You might think to yourself "hey, that's not bad, $15 for a slightly legacy game" but most of these games can be bought from EB or GameStop for as little as a couple dollars. The price isn't terrible I suppose but it could be better. They're obviously playing to the urgency of the situation, same with their downloadable movies. If you want to play something but don't feel like hunting for it you can get it relatively quickly from Live for a premium. So, yeah, the price leaves something to be desired but it isn't necessarily a deal-breaker. The other negative is the size of the downloads. Everyone is assuming that the average size of an Xbox 1 game was somewhere around 5 gigs. On the 20 gig hard drive that came with my 360 (of which I have about 4 gigs of free space) this could be a problem. To really get the most out of the Xbox Originals I'll probably have to get one of the proprietary, ridiculously over-priced hard drives Microsoft offers for the 360. I think the largest size they offer is a 120 GB drive for $179. Almost $200 for a drive you can get for half the price without the quirky 360 shell on it. I really wish Microsoft kill the proprietary hardware like Sony has with the PS3.

Still, all things considered, this is a good thing and I can't really be mad at Microsoft because I'm an early adopter. When December 4th comes around chances are I'll be queuing up some Psychonauts to give it a spin. If the games run better than the ones Microsoft made backwards compatible I'll be impressed. I'm just hoping they execute and make this a feature worth touting down the road when they've released a quality list of games.

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