Magazine scans hint at Street Fighter and Lumines release dates ...

I don't know what magazine this is scanned from, I don't know who scanned it, but I believe the power of me-wanting-this-information-to-be-true will make it so. US$5 for Xbox LIVE Street Fighter: Hyper Fighting? Yes please. Lumines Live as soon as August or September? I'll take it. The fact that everyone is so furiously looking for these launch dates should tell Microsoft something: bulk up the marketplace.

While there is a lot of good stuff in the works for LIVE Arcade, the release schedule has been slow. It seems like months go by between new releases, and this is the time MS should be selling these games online, especially without any competition from Nintendo's virtual console. What are they doing with this free time to build a robust library? Very little. While I'm as big of an UNO fan as the next guy, it's just not cutting it if that's going to be your only release in the near future. If you go to the store you can pick from any number of collections that have a dozen or more games for only US$20, so why is it so hard to convince people to sell single games for US$5 or more? Why aren't we being given more choices, more classics, more indie games?

On the upside, I'm really looking forward to Lumines Live, and if we see it in August for US$15 I'll be a happy puppy. While that price is on the high side for LIVE Arcade games, the only other way to pick up the game is on the PSP, and that version carries a US$20 price point. Not a bad deal.