Care for the Community

Back in November as I’m sure you all know we saw the launch of the New Xbox Experience.  Some of us liked it, some of us hated it and we all made sure everyone knew our feelings on it.  After a while of mucking about with it I have discovered its greatest feature which seems to have had very little in the way of praise.  So here you go: the Community games are excellent. 

In the last few weeks I have been downloading loads of trial games and even buying a few that I felt were worthy of my playing.  Let me explain briefly that before the dash update the community games were known as XNA games, games where people like us could make their own games and share them online.  You had to download the XNA player programme to play the games, but now it’s as simple as downloading an arcade game.  The quality of the games do vary from ‘simplistic but fun’ (Sin Surfing) all the way up to ‘just one more go’ (Petank Party).  Best of all some of the cheapest games start at only 200 MS Points which is a bit of a bargain.

Some of us here at Ready-Up! witnessed what goes into these type of games at last year’s Edinburgh Interactive Festival and believe me, it’s a hell of a lot of work.  Indeed one of the games that I played has just been put up for download called Planet Panic. It sees you guide a planet around the screen trying to destroy your opponents in an Asteroids type manner. Amazingly lots of those games are available to download some of my favourites were Vegemee and Origamee, they really did showcase what can be achieved.

If you haven’t yet looked at the Community games, stop reading this and head on over to your Xbox 360, you really will be amazed at what you find.  Be warned though, the simple start and quick loss of life on your first try at Machiavelli’s Ascent hides the amount of hours you will put into trying to get higher, you’ll soon see what I mean.  Another thing that I have noticed is that the makers of the games are trying out new things, ever used your Chatpad to play a game?  Well you can here with Type Attacks, where you have to type in the onscreen words to be rid of them, it gives me hope for Typing Of The Dead!

You can see the influences of playing games on the people who make the games, some are blatant rip offs but some can also be seen as homages to some great games of yore.  It’s possible that the Community games will overtake the Live Arcade games as the most downloaded, but I really hope they don’t.  At the moment, the games are cheap and playable, they don’t promise anything fancy or modern, they are there for the pure fun of it which at its essence, is why we play games.  So support the small programmers and download some of these games, I need an opponent for Petank Party.