So another month has come and gone. Lets take a look at how things faired on Xbox Live Arcade. For those of you who are new to my blog I grade Xbox Live Arcade on a monthly basis for three main areas. These are the release schedule, the pricing, and the number of retro games.

Release Schedule
I’m disappointed with the number of games released last month. There were four games, Pac-Man Championship Edition, Prince of Persia Classic, Band of Bugs, and Carcassonne, and seven expansions to existing games. After getting two games most weeks the last couple months it is sad to have just one game a week. I heard on Major Nelson’s podcast a few weeks back that they are open to having more than 2 games a week being released so I was hoping that would start soon, but I guess we’ll have to keep waiting for that to happen. Standard scoring of 4 out or 4 in the releases category. The expansions are nice to see but I’m not giving any extra credit for them they are not new games.

Pricing
All four titles released this month were $10 each. Band of Bugs and Carcassonne are worth the price without a doubt, but I’m not sure about the other two. Pac-Man Championship Edition was fun, but I still think it should have been a $5 title since all of the game modes are timed. I also think that all retro titles should be $5. Prince of Persia Classic is no exception. Yes, it is a very popular game but that is not a reason to charge more for it. The graphics are not any better and there were not any major changes made to the game so why charge so much for it? In the pricing section Xbox Live Arcade gets a 2 out of 4.

Retro Titles
Only one retro title this month. Nice to see 75% of the games were original titles. Well, assuming you count an update to Pac-Man as an original title. I’m going to since how the game is played has changed so much. That makes this score a 3 out of 4.

So, that gives us a total of 9 out of 12. That is another C grade with a 75%. If these last two weeks are any indication of the games to come I think we’ll have plenty of good games, but I hope they can start getting more than one game a week released again soon.