Ok. I recently embarked on a journey to delve into the Community Games on Xbox Live with the intention of buying and reviewing one game each week for this here website. If you don’t actually know what I’m referring to, then you’re probably not alone. Buried somewhere within the New Xbox Experience’s vast array of squares (Game Marketplace > Explore Game Content > Community Games, to be precise), you’ll find about 200 titles begging you to play them. You see, these are all indie games. We’re not talking World of Goo levels of indie-ness, oh no, plenty of these are proper bedroom coded, one man and his dog and a tin of uncooked baked beans type games. In a nutshell, it’s essentially Xbox Live Arcade, albeit without the stringent quality assurance policies. Plus it’s cheaper too with games starting from as little as 200 points.

So yes, my journey… I’d played the first batch of XNA created games back when the covers were first taken off the Community Games section. I tried out The Dishwasher, Jellycar and Little Gamers each of which stole my life away from me for as long as each of the trials lasted. Microsoft was onto something good. Opening up Xbox Live to smaller developers would, in theory, be a splendid way of proliferating interest in their inventions. But, somewhere along the line I simply forgot Community Games existed. I vaguely recall the initial run of games being available for a limited period only, and that’s why I never went back to it. Regardless of whether it was my own stupidity or not, I decided to go back to Community Games last night and lo-and-behold almost 200 games were patiently sitting there waiting to be played by someone, anyone.

These games don’t receive much coverage from the usual sites I read, so my intention was to write a regular column reviewing one game every time. I was hoping to uncover a little gem each week and bring it to the masses. At the same time, the devs get some coverage and Another Castle has some page-impression-encouraging unique content. You pat my back, I pat your back. Then we all club together and overthrow Bill Gates so I can jump up and down on his springy four-poster bed like I was a six-year old again.

Last night I set about my task, almost getting through five trials. The trouble was – out of the ones that worked – whilst some were frankly awful, the best were merely painfully mediocre. Here’s what I played:

1. ZP2K9: Browsing the Community Games list reminds me of my Amiga days. I was blissfully naive back then and despite my brother being an Amiga Power subscriber, I often refused to acknowledge the actual reviews, instead I’d just look at the screenshots. Look! Look! Pretty! Pretty! With the Community Games, you’re offered a paltry amount of written information on each game, and actually reading it is somewhat of a chore because Microsoft insists on giving you the game’s age classification ratings before describing the game. So, I had basically screenshots to go on again. And ‘boxart’, or rather the game placeholders on NXE.

The acronym ZP2K9 is about as descriptive and helpful as those idiotic “Page Intentionally Left Blank” messages you used to get on exam papers. Simply put, it’s a Soldat clone. You view the action from a 2D Worms style perspective. You can choose to fight against bots or head online, where you control this little dude and you have to shoot other little dudes. You can pick up a selection of carelessly discarded machine-guns and flamethrowers with which you annihiliate the opposition. So far, so real-time Worms, except the controls are slightly weird. Movement is with the left stick and the right stick shoots in the direction you push it. The A-button jumps, however you can walk up vertical walls and even upside down. The concept sounds like fun, running above someone showering them in bullets, but the execution is just weird. You sort of stick to the walls and ceilings and it feels too rigid and unintuitive.

After a little shooting, dieing, and missing jumps completely, I’d had enough. Little did I know at this point, but ZP2K9 would be the best game I’d play out of the five…

2. SMASHELL: Booting this one up, I was convinced ZP2K9 was just a clone of another game I’d played a hundred times before and that SMASHELL would offer something fresh. The controls helpfully occupied the loading screen. A to jump, left stick to move. LT to shoot. Simple, but one that’s subtly complex at same time – like all the best puzzlers – I was hoping.

In SMASHELL you play what can only be described as Samus Aran when she’s rolled up into a little ball. A small square of land sits in space with these spinning, disc-shaped, mechanical looking things moving about randomly on it. You jump on them. And coins come out. Which you collect. Then some more spawn and you do it again. After a little while you get an EXCITING power-up: the ability to double jump and build EXCITING combos by bopping from one spinny thing to another. Collecting coins each time. Imagine Super Mario 64 stripped of everything except a garden full of Goombas which our Italian friend has to squish. You kill them all, then they respawn. You kill them all again. They respawn… ad infinitum until you punch yourself in the face to break the mundanity. Then some flying things pop out of nowhere dropping things on you, a bit like Boos in Mario, at which point you tell the game to fuck off.

3. FALLDOWN: Ahh… another game that insists upon using capital letters to stand out from the crowd. How well this bodes after the revolutionary SMASHELL, I thought. In fairness, I mildly enjoyed the single game of FALLDOWN I played. I’m never going to play it again, but it was ok for the 2 minutes it took me to finish. Again, you control a little character in a 2D plane. 2 characters in fact, one with each stick, the idea being you can have 2 players on 1 controller. Basically, a big metal spinning blade of pain is located at the top of the screen. It speeds up as you move further and further down the screen. Your little men have to dash left and right, then drop through a hole. This process repeats over and over again until the meat grinder eventually catches up with you. The challenge comes from seeing how far you can get before you become fit for consumption in MacDonalds. Next…

4. Mithra – Episode 1, Chapter 1: Now I was beginning to get really annoyed. Initially, Mithra looked promising. It started off with a first-person view in a proper 3D world. I was stuck in some test tube! Intriguing! An actual team of guys were developing it according to the credits and judging by the “Episode 1, Chapter 1″ subtitle, they wanted to tell me a story. Goodie, I like stories.

Then it broke. “Error Code 3″ or some such message. I rebooted. Error: Family Fortunes noise. I tried two or three more times: nothing. Sigh.

5. Zenhak: Now this looked promising. Judging by the screenshots it had a kind of isometic Fallout slash Deus Ex vibe about it. It looked like some kind of stat-laden RPG set in the future complete with wildly OTT computer terminals so big you need six more eyes genetically implanted just to keep watch on them all.

I fired it up. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do a fucking thing. I could control a mouse pointer and move it round a room but I couldn’t interact with anything. My avatar was in the centre of the screen, on some kind of animated loop, except all that was moving was her swollen arse and her head. It’s like she was at a game of tennis watching something move from left-to-right, right-to-left, left-to-right.

Arghhhhhhhhh! I was ready to break something. I switched off my Xbox and plugged in the PS3, giving the fingers to Microsoft.

So. Community Games. From my limited time with it last night, what’s on offer is either not much fun or simply broken. And it’s a shame because the platform has so much potential. It also makes me realise why Microsoft is so precious about what’s released on XBLA. I’m going to persist with this though. I know games as good as Carneyvale Showtime exist on there, so it’s a matter of digging rather brushing away the cobwebs. I will be back, it’s just going to take some time. Now where’d I put my shovel…

Tags: Community Games, Hype, Indie, Xbox Live
Categories: Hype

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