More news on the Live Arcade status at launch, brought to you by www.QJ.net. Included with every Xbox 360 sold will be Hexic, a puzzle game created by Alexi Pajitnov. This will be the full, unlocked version of the game and is accessible by going to the Xbox Live Arcade menu. This is hardly the only game, though.

Other Xbox Live Arcade games that will be available are Marble Blast Ultra, which was covered in an earlier news post, and Bankshot Billiards. Also included are Wik and the Fable of Souls, the Indie Games winner from this year's Game Developers Conference and a truly awesome game. Both can be downloaded as a trial version and then unlocked from there.

Perhaps two of the most exciting games that will be available for download on the day of launch are Midway's Joust and Bizarre Creation's Geometry Wars, both also available as downloads. Let's get a bit more detail on both of these.

Midway's Joust is, to the bit, a perfect dump from the arcade game. But then it's been modified. This isn't the typical hack that you can play by using MAME but involves a bit more. First of all, the graphics have been updated through the ROM data itself. Instead of recreating the game to create new graphics, this uses the ROM itself and modifies the code. Secondly, the code has been modified to allow for multi-player gaming, which works like an absolute champ. The game is absolutely true to the original and all controls work very well through the 360 controller. Also, the menu gives you the option of using the updated graphical code or using the direct ROM graphics that were present in the original. Definitely an interesting approach to updating a classic game, and one that hasn't often been done.

The other, more modern classic would be Bizarre Creation's Geometry Wars. A hidden game inside Project Gotham Racing 2, it quickly became one of the world's worst kept secrets and was enjoyed by a ton of gamers, who pretty much unanimously declared Geometry Wars to be better than PGR2 itself... funny since it was a part of PGR2. Anyway, it's going to be there, ready to play, on the day of launch. Once again, the translation to 360 game play has been done without a hitch. It is remarkably smooth and gorgeous to play, while being remarkably small in size.

The more I hear about the new Live Arcade, the more psyched I am. Beyond all the indie possibilities, it looks like Microsoft itself is going to be truly dedicated to putting the best of games on there. I really look forward to it!

Article written by Garp.