I've spent some time with arguably two of the most popular arcade titles ever, via Xbox Live Arcade - Pac-Man and Galaga. The games seemed quite complete and are as you would expect, arcade perfect. They both feature XBL Leaderboards, Achievements, and cost 400 points a piece (as of this writing). Both titles feature a limited set of tweakable arcade-style DIP switch settings, such as free lives, bonus points and whatnot. The Achievements, as seen partly in the below screens, are a bit amusing. Eating each piece of fruit in Pac-Man earns you 5 points, for example.

Due to their vertical orientation, both games are surrounded by a nice piece of high resolution art which acts as a bezel to fill in the rest of the screen's horizontal width. Namco provided the ability to scale the actual play area larger or smaller, though I'm not quite sure why you'd want to shrink it down.

Being a long-time classic arcade enthusiast, I have to pick out two small issues which have been bugging me so far. The play area is obviously upscaled from a lower resolution, and in turn, the sprites are a bit soft and don't have that arcade monitor crispness. This is especially obvious when looking at the sharp high resolution art bezel in comparison. The (buffer dump) screens below show off the differences a bit. I would have hoped for high resolution sprites, though it doesn't seem to be the case. And yeah, I know I'm being anal.

The other problem I have has nothing to do with the games themselves, but the Xbox 360's controller. In the arcade, both Pac-Man and Galaga use 4-way joysticks which don't even allow diagonal movements. The Xbox 360 controller's D-pad not only allows 8-way movement, it's also too sloppy. So there were times, in Pac-Man especially, that a quick motion didn't register properly. For example, if you hit up/right instead of purely up or right, the game has no idea if you meant up or to the right, and seems to ignore the input. There's not much you can do about it, obviously, but a more precise D-pad would help a lot.

There's no exact release date for either yet, though August/September is expected. The games are still a few months off, so of course they may change a bit before going "live". Stay tuned for more information.