XBLA: XNA Community Games - What You'll Be Playing On Day 1, Part 2
Today we bring you the second set of XNA Community Games that are gearing up for tomorrow's release of the New Xbox Experience.
There's 10 more games to look through here . It appears that over 30 games will be available on Community Games at NXE launch now - so think of these posts as a helpful shopping guide when searching through every single Community Game available.
The next update will include not only the final selection of XNA Community Games, but GamerBytes' top games that you should really consider buying. It's going to be a very big market - get ready to swim through it all.
Poker Ball
Creator: MarkcusD
Genre: Card & Board
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: Poker Ball takes the essence of Arkanoid and plugs Poker hands into the mix. The last 5 cards you've hit pop up in the side bar and you get an additional score based on the hand you get. Sounds good in theory, but Arkanoid is such a random game that even attempting to make a decent hand out of your cards isn't that achievable without a lot of chance on your side.
Weapon of Choice
Creator: MommysBest
Genre: Action & Adventure
Price: 400 Points
Trial Play: Feel like blowing stuff up? Than Weapon of Choice is for you. A hark back to the days of Contra and Metal Slug, WOC is perhaps the most game-like game out right now on XNA Community. Run around, blow stuff up, several different routes through the game, several different characters with their own unique weapons. Definitely give it a look.
Beat IT!
Creator: MonsuneMoon
Genre: Family
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: A multiplayer only game in which you play "Simon" with an Xbox 360 controller. The screen will tell you to do something - actions like twisting the analog stick or pressing the trigger buttons, and you've got to do it just before the timer runs out and the highest possible score value - it will also randomly tell you to switch players, while also getting faster and faster. Looks like the kind of game that'll get you laughing while you and your friends are drunk and barely comprehensible.
DUOtrix
Creator: Mo
Genre: Puzzle & Trivia
Price: 400 Points
Trial Play: Think Tetris, but playing two games at once. Single blocks drop from the top and bottom of the screen to join up in the middle, but they could be different colors, causing all sorts of confusion. It's a little limited, it only has single player, but what's there is pretty decent.
Organon
Creator: DarthCheesiest
Genre: Shooter
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: A time based 3D-Space shooter where you've got to hit all the coloured squares in the level as quickly as possible. Not bad looking, but I felt the controls were not very well suited to the Xbox controller. I'd rather be able to move around like other shooters, and use the triggers to push forwards and backwards with thrust.
Bad Atom Episode 1
Creator: kstrat2001
Genre: Action & Adventure
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: Bad Atom has you flying around a sphere, where you're always aiming towards the middle. You've got to maneuver your ship around the environment to shoot the red baddies with the blue and the blue with the red. It's pretty difficult to understand what's going on, but they've attempted to put in a bit of a story in there.
Abstacked
Creator: lutas
Genre: Puzzle & Trivia
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: Abstacked is another drop down puzzle game where you connect objects together. The hook is that you cannot remove the stars normally - you can only do so by putting two of the same shape on opposite sides of the stars. Nice idea, but the presentation is really poor on this one. Drab, stretched presentation with little or no audio makes it a fairly ugly game.
Endless Swarm
Creator: Andrew Thayer
Genre: Shooter
Price: 400 Points
Trial Play: Think Missile Command meets Desktop Tower Defense. You set up your laser and other cannons at the bottom of the screen, point them in a certain direction, keep them alive by healing them, and make sure the oncoming swarms don't take down your two factories. An interesting take on DTD games. Give it a go and see if you can get your mind around it.
Tail Gun Charlie
Creator: Duckocide
Genre: Shooter
Price: 400 Points
Trial Play: Charlie Chatsworth must shoot things in order to win. Plays like you're playing Space Invaders from looking at the bottom. Aiming seems to be pretty difficult and honestly did not have a lot of fun with this.
UAV Wars
Creator: Some Call Me Tim
Genre: Action & Adventure
Price: 200 Points
Trial Play: You are a space ship shooting other space ships. The aiming is difficult as you need to judge vertical space as well. You also hear the sound of a lawnmower the entire time of playing. Just not really that much fun.
Comments
Thanks for the coverage of Community Games titles - we need more of it to get people to play our games. I'll have a game out early next week that is a party game/collection platformer called Adventurer Pets, and a few others will have games out after the launch as well. It would be appreciated if every once in a while, more gaming sites would give small features of our upcoming titles as they trickle out.
Posted by: arrogancy | November 18, 2008 6:07 PM
Thanks for these previews, vids, and honest impressions!
Some devs might get choked reading your impressions though, you didn't seem too impressed with a lot of them. But I think honest feedback will only make their second and third efforts even better.
Posted by: nrXic | November 18, 2008 6:29 PM
Admittedly it's hard to keep yourself completely satisfied when there are 30+ games going up in one day and half of them are space shooters :)
Not to say they shouldn't try, but a lot of them feel like tech demos as they were a part of the Dream Build Play competition. Even a game like Lines, which I really liked, pale in comparison to Lines EX, which he was working on at some point which expanded dramatically from this simple demo. Hopefully that does come out later on.
Posted by: Rlan | November 18, 2008 11:02 PM
Thanks for reviewing Beat IT! You seem to have understood exactly what it was deigned for "Looks like the kind of game that'll get you laughing while you and your friends are drunk and barely comprehensible". Its great to get positive feedback.
Posted by: MonsuneMoon | November 23, 2008 9:29 PM