There are quite a few up there. I haven’t had a chance to check them all out yet but I did grab Weapon of Choice which so far is lots of fun. It reminds me of game adaptation of Fantastic Planet done as a Contra clone.
Has anyone found any other notable ones yet?
Yeah, Weapon of Choice was my first buy. I also got Lines (Lumines meets Pipe Mania) and Word Soup. The latter is really basic though. I thought Blow, Biology Battle and Artoon were interesting, but I haven’t bought them yet.
Also be sure to check out xnPLAY and GamerBytes for coverage. Anyone else covering XNA games btw?
Interview with the creator of Weapon of Choice
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/11/qa_from_resistance_to_xna_comm.php
I’ve only dicked around with Weapon of Choice and Colisseum but WoC seemed to be a fantastically ugly game with some really neat game mechanics. 400 points sounds about right.
Weapon of choice is weird, in a good way but I’ll talk about that after the spoiler alert. The gameplay is extremely fun, the enemies weird, and the boss battles so far have been entertaining. It’s too bad the demo doesn’t give you enough time to fight one of the first ones. The death-brushing mechanic results in some high tension moments that most of the time you can survive. Well at least they’re high tension for me.
Spoiler!
In the first level I dropped down and found a hologram that looked like a Spartan, there was some slightly entertaining dialogue and then I progressed to the second area. Where I find what looks to be a mutated monkey like creature with a huge hole in its ass suspended from a bridge. Unfortunately I killed it before it got a shot off so I’m not entirely sure what it shoots, or if it does in fact come out of its ass. I decided to explore beneath the bridge, fell and landed in a desert area. My character experienced some heat stroke related hallucinations that ended up resulting in me fighting the sun, which claimed I was working for the forces of evil. Lets just say some of the attacks were… surreal and leave it at that. Beating it resulted in a cutscene of my character running around the desert firing blindly and then a message saying his body had been discovered with an empty ammo clip, no enemy bodies were ever recovered.
It’s really pretty neat. There are several branching paths and they affect the story. Also, going through the different paths you find other characters that you can rescue and then use later or on your next playthrough, each with their own unique characteristics. The game does some really crazy shit as well.
The first sales charts have been released ( http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/word-soup-tops-ms-community-games ):
[ul]
[li]01. Word Soup[/li][li]02. Golden Royal Blackjack[/li][li]03. Weapon of Choice[/li][li]04. Colosseum[/li][li]05. ZSX4 Guitarpocalypse[/li][li]06. Sin(Surfing)[/li][li]07. In the Pit[/li][li]08. Head Banger[/li][li]09. Snake360[/li][*]10. Swords and Monsters[/ul]Weapon of Choice deserves to be #1, I bought it last night and it’s a blast and well worth 400 points. Biology Battle is very cool as well although not really my thing. The quantity vs quality meter seems to be very weighted towards total garbage.
Would be really curious to see some sales numbers on those. Have any of the developers talked about it?
The community forums are here http://forums.xna.com/forums/ but are pretty threadbare in terms of non-development discussion.
Carnivale Showtime just went up and it’s kind of cool. Also I’d say it’s polished enough to be an XBLA game.
Yeah it was the winner of their little competition awhile back (Weapon of Choice got 3rd). Apparently there is some talk that they’ll eventually move the game to XBLA so buy it now while it’s cheap.
Unless you’re an achivement whore, in which case you’ll want to wait for the XBLA version.
Achievement whores aren’t human.