XNA Games

[Noyb]

So Microsoft did something really cool at GDC. They opened up the XNA creator's club, the independent gaming version of Xbox 360 development, to a larger audience. Apparently students (in certain countries) who can verify their educational status get a free membership to the creator's club, allowing them to upload their games to the 360 for other members to play. And the games that rise to the top through community voting get published to the arcade as a whole. Now as a gamer, I'm not too keen about the mass market tastes of the average xbox user being a major deciding factor, but this whole pathway seems much cooler than the closed off one Microsoft was using before.

Microsoft also opened up some earlier XNA demos/games for free download. Quick comments:

Culture: Circle weeds with flowers to kill them in a simulation of arboreal genocide. Neat art direction, but I stopped playing before finding out whether the difficulty curve got any steeper than the very shallow beginning.

JellyCar: An Elastomania-type game about maneuvering a 2d gelatinous car through obstacle courses by being compressed and changing your size. Might be fun if the physics engine was tightened up, but it feels a bit too floaty now.

Little Gamers: Only worth playing if you really like poking dead guys with sticks. Gameplay doesn't feel tight, and I didn't like how I couldn't seem to aim separately from movement. Feels like it should have been a mouse+keyboard game.

Proximity HD: Very fun multiplayer puzzle/strategy game. You place numbered tiles on a hex grid, capturing enemy tiles with lower numbers next to you, decreasing the strength of enemy tiles with equal or higher numbers by two, and increasing the strength of friendly tiles by two. Some fun strategy here, although I'm not quite sure whether the random number generator plays too large a part yet.

Rocketball: Dodgeball with dodgy controls. Meh.

The Dishwasher: Very tight 2d action game. Highly recommended.

TriLinea: Competitive non-turn-based match-3 game based on dominos. Might be more fun with mouse movement, since I have trouble placing tiles down accurately as quickly as some of the computer opponents. There's also some nonintuitive rules like placed tiles are stuck in place, but the other halves of matched tiles are affected by gravity.

[miffy495]

If you hold the left trigger in Little Gamers you can stand still while you aim. Takes a minute to get the hang of, but improves the gameplay quite a bit.

I've downloaded Jellycar, Little Gamers, and The Dishwasher as those were the three that interested me most. Kinda liked Little Gamers, if it's $5 I may pick it up if/when it gets a full release. Jellycar was really cool but definitely needs to be tightened up before it gets really fun. I'd also have appreciated an option to view the whole map so I could actually figure out where I'm supposed to be going. I gave up on a level where I honestly had no idea which direction the goal was even in. Haven't had the chance to try The Dishwasher yet, but I'm pretty pumped to. I hope it's not a pay service to just be able to review the games, as I have no use for development tools and just would like to have a say in some good games making it to Live Arcade. You'd think that reviewing things like this would be considered providing a service to XBLA as a tester and wouldn't be something they'd make you pay for.