My most recent obsession is with Xbox's arcade format, called Xbox Live Arcade. Unlike the gaming consoles I grew up with, Xbox 360 and its contemporaries offer you two ways to enjoy gaming, the first being the traditional buy-a-whole-game-at-the-store variety, and the second being smaller, less-expensive, and less-ambitious (but still addictive and fun) arcade-style games that you download from the Xbox Live server. As these games are cheaper to buy (due to being cheaper to make), there are a lot of them available, and I've been spending the past week pretty much fully engaged in trying to learn about all the games and decide which ones I might be interested in. To make matters both worse (for my time) and better (for deciding which games are best), Xbox Live Arcade also lets you download free trial versions of all the games, giving you a taste for the game mechanics and look. Needless to say, playing a bunch of trial versions for over fifty titles results in a lot of used time...
The types of games available on Xbox Live Arcade can be broken down into two basic categories: emulations of classic/older games (such as Pac-Man, Galaga, Contra, Street Fighter II, and Sonic the Hedgehog), and entirely new games, often based on old game formats (for example, Braid, Geometry Wars, and Castle Crashers). Despite being old, the classic games are often cleaned up or sometimes even 'evolved' to have both better graphics and gameplay, and you sometimes even have the choice to play the original port or the evolved version.
Anyway, there are definitely some games that have stood out to me more than others, and I'll probably post about them later, but a more pressing post will concern my first Xbox Live Arcade download: Alien Hominid HD.
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