There's a few things popped into my mind about this. This has been a hot-topic recently, especially in mobile, but it's interesting for me to grok the whole idea again when it comes to your living room (which is probably reverse of how most people come to the idea, I'll admit).

Yeah, you can add a lot of eye-candy and effects to these types of casual games, but at their heart, they're generally simple and fun to play, often with surprising depth and don't really require a lot of computer horsepower to play. Multiplayer puzzle games are even better, though just being emailed a link to a high score is pretty good as well, it's almost 'asynchronous multiplayer' (to put new terminology on what is the oldest way of playing video games!). Actually it's the other way around, most of the time I actually prefer puzzle games - Tetris, Lumines, Bejeweled, Polarium, etc. When I'm sick of PGR racing, WWII combat or Halo, puzzle games like Hexic are perfect. In fact, here is Hexic online via MSN Games right now (though you need a Windows machine it seems so I don't know how good it is).Ĭasual games rock. Geometry Wars has a little bit of zing, but the other games are definitely pretty much what you'd see on any web gaming site. Almost all of the games in the XBox Live Arcade so far fall in this lightweight Casual Games category - easy to pick up and start playing immediately. Hexic is really fun, so didn't mind, but it started me thinking.

I was playing Hexic HD last night on my XBox 360 (trying unsuccessfully to beat Diego's high score) and it dawned on me that I was using a $400 cutting edge video game console (plus a ton of expensive extras) to play what is essentially an elaborate Flash game.

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