XBLA review: Scramble (2/10)

Hey, Digital Eclipse guys. You do a great job porting arcade games to the 360 - it's almost like playing the old games themselves. Just one comment:

The games you're porting pretty much sucked.

This week's game is Scramble, an old side-scroller where you moved your ship on the left half of the screen, firing with one button and dropping bombs with the other. You can play it in all its glory on the 360, either with the authentic graphics and sound or with updated graphics and sound. Yep, that's right.

Did they change the controls, the ones that wore out your fingers (because it didn't auto-fire)? No. In fact, they're even worse on the 360 controller, because the buttons aren't close together, and for some reason, on an eight-button controller (L3 and R3 don't count), they wouldn't let you reconfigure the controls.

Did they add additional game-play modes? No.

Did they even bother to persist the high scores table? No.

So this is what you get. I don't know what the Live co-op mode is, and frankly, I don't care. Scramble wasn't that good when it came out in the '80s, and it didn't age well.

If you are a classic gamer, and for some reason you're a big fan, and no one else you know has this game, then I guess you can get it. Otherwise, stay away. Stay far away.

zlionsfan's rating for classic gamers: 2 poorly-configured buttons out of 10.