"Are you telling me I can play the Marble Blast demo and use Blades for 10$ new!?" - Me, four months ago.

Whatever brain disease I've got has progressed to the point where I'm nostalgic for a specific video game console GUI, and unfortunately there's just no coming back from that. They're going to put me down tomorrow. My caretakers are letting me eat chocolate because it's my last day on Earth.

Alright, alright, my reason for owning this is actually a bit more embarrassing. I wanted to buy that Sonic tennis game and saw there was a two-in-one. I like tennis games! So what! You got a problem with that? You wanna say something about how I spend my money? It was cheap and it was new, and I've arguably done worse things. I got drunk recently and bought a brand-new copy of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and that doesn't even come bundled with XBLA Uno.

This compilation disc is actually pretty neat, though. As mentioned, its interface is designed after Blades, the Xbox 360's launch GUI which was significantly more navigable Metro, and an incalculable degree better than the Xbox One's horrible Windows 8 launch interface. It also comes with the Xbox 360 launch video, which left me feeling quite nostalgic, and video previews for Viva Pinata and Shrek the Third. That's right, we got Shrek, he's on the disc, and there's even a demo for Surf's Up! We feastin'...

The main attraction is the five full Xbox Live Arcade games, which includes Boom Boom Rocket, Feeding Frenzy, Luxor 2, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and Uno. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but to briefly touch on each:

Boom Boom Rocket: A rhythm game where you time button presses to techno remixes of royalty free songs like Flight of the Bumblebee and Ode to Toy. The main gimmick here is that successful button presses cause fireworks to pop off. That's it. It's kind of dull and it seems like the timing is a bit off-beat, but I've mentioned before that I have no sense of rhythm, so this is maybe on me.

Feeding Frenzy: The best game I never played on Candystand dot com instead of doing classwork.

Luxor 2: I played this one the most. Weirdly addictive. I once lost a hundred dollars at the Luxor because I didn't know how to play blackjack. Ace is both a one AND an eleven!? The dealer looked at me the whole entire time like I was insane.

Pac-Man Championship Edition: I prefer DX, but this is pretty good! However, trying to navigate Pac-Man with an analog stick feels pretty bad and the Xbox 360's garbage D-pad is somehow worse.

Uno: This is a really good Uno game, but since I can no longer play it online, it's really missing something. I still had a great time playing against the AI, though.

There's also a few demos but most are nothing to write home about. There's one for Frogger, but it scales horribly, almost to the point of being unreadable, the aforementioned Surf's Up is ok, and I messed around in Viva Pinata for about a minute since I have the full game on my shelf. But Marble Blast... Man. Now that's a video game. It's too bad it's been delisted. Criminal, even. Preservation is incredibly important, and there's value in keeping games - and even old GUI's! - around, even if a scarce few want to access them. But the thing is, people actually want to play Marble Blast. We ARE the silent majority. Rise up, Marble-heads!

I love old demo discs and compilations. At the time, they were invaluable for filtering out which games you did and did not want to buy, and I find them worthwhile today as time capsules. You can also find this one for dirt cheap and I think it's worth the few bucks for the novelty alone. I feel weird rating this given what it is, so I'm not going to do that, but I did have a good time messing around with a lot of the content here and it was nice to relive the glory days of Blades.