It’s always pleasing to hear publishers announcing that they’re bundling a load of their Xbox Live Arcade and PSN games together for a retail release. More often than not these packages work out cheaper than downloading the contents individually and from a personal point of view I always find something that I didn’t think I would enjoy but end up getting glued to.
Ubisoft are the latest to reveal such a compilation. A triple pack featuring From Dust, OutLand and Beyond Good & Evil HD is due for release on 23rd March for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s available online for a mere £14.99 on Play or £14.95 on TheHut.
Late last year Capcom confirmed the Capcom Digital Collection, containing a mixture of retro and modern games such as Final Fight: Double Impact, 1942, Super Street Fighter II, Puzzle Fighter and Flock!
It’s advertised as containing 8 games but it does in fact contain 9 – Final Fight: Double Impact also contains Magic Sword. Nothing like selling yourself short.
The problem with these collections is that they are few and far between. Early in the Xbox’s life there was Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged: Volume One but Microsoft never followed it up with any others, although we suppose the Arcade Compilation which was bundled with the Xbox 360 for a while counts. There was also the Limbo, Trials HD and Xplosion Man Triple Pack which sold very well.
It’s a shame that publishers don’t get into the habit of bundling their virtual goods as there are a lot of PSN and XBLA games that are forgotten about soon after release. We’d love to see a collection of Double Fine’s downloadable efforts and we’re sure Atari has released enough retro revamps to fill an entire disk. Konami and EA too, we’d wager.
Perhaps as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 fade into their twilight years then we will see more compilations, similar to how publishers bundled older PlayStation 2 games together.