Microsoft released their Game Room yesterday as part of their “House Party” (or “Block Party” if you live in the USA) event. Apart from some intriguing teething problems its been an interesting experiment. Essentially Game Room is a MAME type emulator of arcade games (currently limited to Atari and Konami cabinets from the late 70s and early 80s) as well as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision consoles. And these seem to be the original ROMs based on the ROM boot sequence some of the games show. The emulation is wrapped up in a customisable virtual arcade for your avatar and friends avatars to roam through. The games are OK, but the brilliance is in the execution. When you first start (provided it can connect to the game room server, that’s where the teething problems lay), you can demo the games, usually for about 10 minutes (or less if you leave … There’s more →