Stacking and Costume Quest exceptional examples of creativity being allowed to flourish as a direct result of the possibilities opened up by the Digital Distribution services.

As a self-confess achievement maniac I am never one to turn a game away, but over the last few months there have been some very solid titles that simply arrive with a lot less fanfare than we used to see.

Also – many of the better titles released earlier were either remakes/ports/updates of series that have become popular elsewhere. Pop Cap has made a fortune from blitzing – see what I did there – the service with it’s brightest and best as well as the aforementioned Twisted Pixel and Ninja Bee producing solid titles with some regularity.

Capcom took a chance on the service with it’s two Dead Rising episodes – opting to release as Live Arcade titles instead of DLC for a retail titles certain suggests that the service is popular enough.

This year’s Summer of Arcade looks stunning, but many of the titles require a look before being sold on them. I was dubious, but all bar one are now on my MUST HAVE list – hopefully there will be another multi-buy promo.

XBLA isn’t dead, it’s just sitting maturely on the shelf ready when we need it, while giving the XBLIG the spotlight when needed. The two services are not mutually exclusive, and supporting smaller titles often means a full XBLA release further down the line. It’s not unfeasible to envision Braid and Limbo as XBLIG titles – were it not for the efforts made to promote these gems they could have been sat there amongst the other gems, fighting for the top spot against ‘massage’ apps and other Spectrum-esque ‘rip-offs’ of popular titles.

I personally think that developers are now a little bit stuck on how to get the best out of the arcade.

For example the game where you play a cowboy puppet (the name has escaped me) that was supposed to come out for the Arcade for Kinect looked to be brilliant however Microsoft thought it was a good idea to make this a retail game however i think this is a bad move as i think it would of sold a lot more on the Arcade, so this shows that Microsoft themselves have lost faith a little in XBLA.

The only way for the Arcade to get back to it’s old brilliant ways is if Microsoft themselves get behind it a little more and show people how things should be done on it.

One last quick point most developers now who are looking to make a game that is suited for the arcade are now developing more for the playstation store as this is a more easier opportunity for them to try something new and different instead of just the same old games that have been done thousand of times over.