urgo2 daily xBox talk

This week's lone release for Xbox-related platforms is the long-winded The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II.
it's a real-time strategy game and it's a port of a game that originally appeared on the PC. It'll be an interesting experiment, because we haven't really seen a standard, PC-style RTS game on consoles in quite some time now. Supposedly the game controls surprisingly well, but I'll wait for our review before I make any decisions on that one. Also, it only has like 705 achievement points in it. Why not use the full thousand? My guess is that there will be some sort of expansion content made available post-release that'll have some points in there or something crazy like that. Otherwise, that's just weird.
Xbox Live Arcade has been bone-dry since E3 and I'm starting to get antsy. The second quarter of the year came and went with no sign of Street Fighter II, and there's no new official release date for it, either. Xbox.com is claiming "summer." The official Xbox site for Australia was claiming 7/31 for a few hours, but that's since been "corrected." Either way, I'm going to guess July. With plenty of other games supposedly being very close to finished, I'm hoping that something new posts this week. Could it be Lumines Live? Cloning Clyde? An arcade classic from Namco or Konami, perhaps? Keep your fingers crossed.
Next week is another 360-focused week, as both Prey and Chromehounds are due out. That should help keep things action-packed, though I find myself suspicious of both games. But the Prey points look relatively easy to achieve, so I'll almost certainly play it to completion whether I like it or not. I'm still trying to decide if that's a good or a bad thing, but I will say that if you're on the points train, do yourself a favor and get into renting games. If you're buying everything just for points, you're wasting money. And that's money that could instead be spent on a Japanese 360 for all those hot foreign points.