Today, I thought I’d take a look at how Xbox Live Arcade did for the month of March. As I previously mentioned, the Top Thee Problems with Xbox Live Arcade are the lack of games coming out, the pricing and the number of retro games. For each of these areas I’ll take a quick look at how things fared this month.

Slow Game Releases
In this category Xbox Live Arcade has made some great improvements this month. There were four Wednesdays in March and every week there was a title released. Also, Alien Hominid HD was released the last day of February so I’m going to include it in March’s grading. The games released were Alien Hominid HD, Worms, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Jetpac Refuelled. Xbox Live Arcade went 5 for 5 so I’ll score it a 5 out of 5 in this category.

Pricing
It has become pretty clear that Arcade titles are pretty much going to be either 400 ($5) or 800 ($10) points. Personally I find there are very few arcade titles with enough replay value to be worth $10. Only Jetpack Refuelled and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were 400 points this month. The other three were all 800 points each, but some would argue they have a longer replay value. So, in the pricing category I’m giving a score of 3 out of 5.

Retro Games
If you’ve been reading my reviews you know that I’m not a fan of retro titles on Xbox Live Arcade. They were fun when they were originally released, but now they don’t stand up to the current games being made. There were not any actual original games this month. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night are direct ports of the original game. Worms is a new version of a long running PC series. Alien Hominid has been around on about every previous console and the PC, but the did add new High Def graphics to the Arcade version. Jetpac Refuelled is a revamped version of Jetpac, and they include the original game for the price of purchase. This category is probably the hardest to judge because of the updated graphics and things of that nature, but I think a 3 out of 5 is pretty fair.

Overall
That bring the overall score to a 11/15. That is a 73%. Unless things have changes since I was in school Xbox Live Arcade receives a grade of a C for the month of March. Hopefully next month they can put out some original games and bring the prices of retro games down.