Post by leunas on Mar 7, 2007 17:22:07 GMT -5
Crowding into hotel rooms 10 sweaty guys at a time to play Xbox Live Arcade isn't foreign to us, but it's nice to finally be paid for it. At the XBLA showcase, we found out that the 512MB Memory Card we posted about yesterday will indeed have Geometry Wars free, but free only for a little while. If you're going to get a mem card, you should get on that.
As for the games they demoed, there was Boom Boom Rocket (a DDR game for your fingers), Jetpac Refuelled (remake of Jetpac), and 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures (imagine Tiger Woods if he were high and eight). All of them were builds, but should be released some time this year.
Although Microsoft's been touting the XBLA as a great platform for independent developers and small-time guys to get their game out there, the average lifecycle of 6 to 9 months and the strict approval process could still be prohibitive. However, XNA's developers kit lets one guy create an actual Xbox 360/XBLA-quality game in 8 weeks. They're even going to release these XNA games' source code, tutorials, and various other assets into the community to help others.
If the games are "good enough", Microsoft's plucking them out of the XNA fray and working with the developers to make them into actual Xbox Live Arcade games. An example is the game they showed three slides of.
There's a "YouTube for games" that Microsoft is working on to develop and share XNA games, which should be out "when it's done".
As for Vista, Games for Windows Live is going to launch a bunch of XBLA games tomorrow (Wednesday). So far it's Halo 2 Vista and Shadowrun. Jason Chen
kotaku.com/gaming/gdc07/gdc07-xbox-live-arcade-and-xna-make-smalltime-developers-big-242087.php