XBLA Review: Double Dragon Neon

I was excited to finally get my hands on Double Dragon Neon, a game that I thought would bring back great memories from the old days of my youth. However, after playing Neon for only a few minutes, I realized that those memories may not have been as great as I thought. Double Dragon Neon isn’t a bad brawler game. But, I will suggest the brawler genre as a whole that needs some serious reimagining.

A couple months ago a friend and I sat down to play Streets of Rage 2 on the Sega Genesis Collection. I remembered really enjoying the game as a kid, but this time I wasn’t having any fun while playing. For me, Streets of Rage simply didn’t withstand the test of time.

Brawler videogames come out of an era when you would do much of your gaming in arcades, feeding quarters into a machine with some friends. The ability to play on the same screen with a buddy, working together to conquer mutual enemies, was much of the appeal of the brawler genre. Fast forward to present day, and none of that is really all that appealing -- we’re used to it.

So, what else does the Neon offer besides multiplayer functionality? Well, not much. You roam around a small game area, punching enemies in the face, and occasionally there will be a terrain hazard or new foe to change up the action.

The Digital Revolution: Count Me Out.

The PlayStation Vita is coming to a store near you very soon, and with it Sony is saying goodbye to the UMD format. Taking a page from the failed PSP GO, the PlayStation Vita will make all games available through digital distribution, with an additional option to purchase titles on physical Vita game cards. All games can be downloaded from the PlayStation Network store, where they are then saved to proprietary flash memory cards.

There are many reasons why the PSP Go failed, and the existence of the Vita means that Sony doesn't think it has much to do with the digital-only distribution. Sony is putting a lot of money into the hybrid PlayStation Vita, and that means they really believe in it as a viable product. More importantly, it means they are testing the waters to see if a future console that solely features digital distribution can succeed.

The only way to make a portable console even more portable is to eliminate the need to carry around games. Testing the waters of digital distribution with a handheld console is appropriate, but it's likely not going to end there. With the recent rise in sales on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, the message being sent by consumers is that they enjoy having software made available to them on demand. It's very possible that the next generation of home consoles will be digital only, or at the very least feature a much larger digital library than we see currently.

If you're like me, your multimedia life is digital already: my music library is on my PC, I stream movies more often than I watch DVDs, and I have bought my fair share of games from Xbox Live Arcade. The inevitable conquest of the virtual console is at hand, and your game discs will soon sit next to cartridges in a museum display. While this may please some of you, I will be dragged into this dark age of gaming kicking and screaming.