24 August 2006 - 10:59Free Poker in XBLM, Lumines Live extra fees

A reminder to everyone who hasn’t downloaded Texas Hold’em for free from the Xbox Live Marketplace: download it for free while you still can! The promotion ends tonight, and is available in all regions except Japan and Korea.

The game itself seems like a pretty darn good video-gamification of Texas Hold’em. Like most XBLA games, it doesn’t show off any of the 360′s capabilities, but I can see a developer using flashy graphics to justify a higher price (Lumines!). I played for about fifty seconds last night just to try it out, it looks like it might support the Vision camera, or at least gamer pictures.

As for Lumines Live, an article at Gamingbits (which actually just quotes an OXM review) describes the heavily-speculated “extra fees” in the game. It looks like once you beat a certain number of levels in Puzzle/Mission mode and “vs. CPU” mode, you’ll be prompted to buy more levels for 400 and 300 MSP each. This is on top of the 1200 MS Point cost of the game. Before you start whining about it being high for an XBLA game, consider how LOW the cost is for a regular game, which happens to be delivered via XBLM. It’s still cheaper than Lumines II. How much did you pay for Lumines on your PSP when it first came out?

Charging for levels aside, Lumines Live will apparently also have downloadable “Packs” with things like extra music, skins and background videos. You wouldn’t expect a game skin to cost money, but you wouldn’t expect a pack of gamer pictures to cost money either. I’ll probably pony up the dough for Lumines, and probably the extra missions, but I don’t see myself spending money on a Madonna music video. Let’s just be thankful they aren’t included in the base game or worse yet, included in the price.