As of May 16th 2am PDT Microsoft is offering Aegis Wing for free via the Xbox Arcade. This is a side scrolling space shooter that allows up to 4 players to play together, locally or on Xbox Live.

Anyone who has Xbox Live can qualify to download this for free, even Silver members. This is a 46MB download. To see it go to the Xbox Arcade screen and look for new games.

Apparently this title was conceived by 3 interns at Microsoft. The 5.1 speaker musical score in the introduction screen is quite good and lends a professional air to game as a whole, and while gameplay is simple you can't argue with the price ;). Definitely worth checking out.

“Aegis Wing” is a 2-D side-scrolling space shooter that combines epic space combat with fantastic visuals, and is set to a rich symphonic soundtrack. It is set in the year 2105, when humanity must flee a dying Earth for the distant world Europa. But this new home is soon threatened by a powerful alien race, the Araxia. With stolen Araxian technology, the Europa fleet develops an experimental star fighter and assigns four ace pilots to test it. The Aegis Wing is born, and it becomes your mission to wield this new technology as humanity’s last hope for survival.

Up to four players can play together either locally or over Xbox LIVE to defeat waves of nefarious Araxian ships and bosses, and can even combine spacecraft in two-, three- or four-ship formations to access powerful Super Weapons.

Game features include the following:

* Amazing environmental art
* Full symphonic soundtrack
* Up to four-player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer gameplay, either locally on the same Xbox 360 console or over Xbox LIVE*
* Ability to attach your ship to your wingmen’s spacecraft to gain the “turret” ability and increase the firepower of the Super Weapons
* Four Super Weapons: the Hades Beam (wreaks total destruction), the Gorgon Burst (wipes out incoming fire and disables enemy spacecraft with an electromagnetic pulse), the Arcus Missile (a heat-seeking missile) and the Lambda Shield (deflects incoming fire back at enemies)
* Six epic missions and several memorable boss encounters to fight through

Redemption via gamerscoreblog.com »