So my copy of MechAssault 2 Lone Wolf came with a free XBox Arcade disk. I was curious as to what it was so I popped it in the ‘Box.

Basically its a framework to give you an MSN Zone or Shockwave.com kind of experience on the XBox. It comes with Ms. Pacman, but there’re a decent selection of other games to demo or buy.

I actually ended up buying a Breakout clone for $9.99. It runs in high def and is just gorgeous to look at, and it comes with a lot of typical uber-breakout gizmos like power-ups, moving blocks, exploding blocks and the like.

The problem with the rest of the games is that they’re too expensive. Most of them are $19.99. To me, that’s a bit too much. Mind you, a game like Zuma or Bejeweled (both of which are available) will cost the same on the PC, but I think that’s too much there, too.

$10.00 is like the cost of a movie ticket and a soda, so I can see d/ling a little ‘lite’ game for that much. I’ll play it for a few hours right away and then once in a blue moon thereafter, but for $10 that’s ok. $20…well, I may demo some of them and if they’re really really great, who knows? But they’d have to be top notch for me to buy them.

And sadly, no strategy games yet. Maybe they’ll convert Settlers of Catan to XBox Live!

Oh, and the single player games have online scoreboards so you can see how you rank against the XBox Live community, or just the people on your Friends list.

Its a cool idea. They just need more games and lower prices. Heck, let me buy a 1 week license for $5.00 or something… I can see doing that, too.