It’s well known among those with 360 that the Xbox Live Arcade (XLA) has been very slow with adding new games, but a new push by Microsoft promises players a new retro game every Wednesday in Summer. Kicking it off is the lean, green roadkill machine: Frogger.

While my subpar screenshots don’t do the game justice, it looks gorgeous, albeit too small. Your eyesight better be good at 1080i. Frogger costs 400 Microsoft Points. Titles rumored to be coming in future weeks include: Street Fighter II Hyper, Galaga and [salivating] Pac-Man. The Seattle PI reports that Microsoft would like to have 50 titles available by year end.

Techdirt wonders why anybody would do retro gaming on the powerful Xbox 360 when they can just buy the game or use an emulator like MAME. The answer is none of those options provide the Xbox Live Arcade with achievements experience. It’s like having the arcade of the world in your living room.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a micropayment service with potential. Perhaps the most promising one we’ve seen yet. I would like to see Microsoft expand their Microsoft Points system and hook it into their Live web services. So far Microsoft Points mean nothing outside of Xbox Live.

Extra frogger at 20,000 points. See you on the leaderboards, er, I mean back to work.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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