So, recently I've been enjoying my 360 more than normal. Why? Well partly because I wanna get my gamer score up (I dunno why, it's as useless as the score in Super Mario Bros. 3 on NES), and also because I've been enjoying the growth and development of the NXE. I must say in general it's going good, but there are a few exceptions. I won't go on about them all today because I wanna focus on one.
The Community Games...
Microsoft released a bunch of tools a while back called XNA, this was to allow small time indy developers to make games on their PC then port it to Xbox 360 and if it passed moderation it would be sold on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Awesome huh? Well I think so.
Anyway, with the launch of the NXE came the launch of the Community Games shop, finally everyone could enjoy small time games for the average price of about 400 points. This appealed to me endlessly because I've always taken the view Homebrew causes creativity beyond that of a major games company. Sadly this isn't so.
There are about 20 games on the community shop right now and almost all of them suck. I know these are small time developers with no real budgets, but I used to be part of a small time MMO project, although we never finished our game, by posting for help on sites like Deviant Art we got some decent 3D modeler, some amazing artists, and some good writers as well as some impressive concept and think-tank members all working for free just because they wanted to be part of a game development team. So how come games like this get into the Xbox Live Community Game Shop:
I downloaded this game cause I thought the cover must be a joke...it's not. This is the quality of images you can paint with the tool. I am in NO WAY joking when I say MSPaint that comes with your copy of Windows, or whatever you get with a Mac and Gimp if your using Linux is VASTLY better than this pile of crap and doesn't cost 400 shitting points!
This is what truly concerns me. The game got though the moderation and put online for people to buy...why? It's the kind of thing freeware sites don't even put online. This shows some serious issues with the moderation and rating system which leads me to believe that within a few months the Community Shop is gonna be filled with horribly badly made games with no visual, gameplay, or audio quality at all. If you don't believe me, and have a 360, download the trial of RPaints and try questioning me then.
Seeing that this can make it onto the shop though has made me realise even I should be able to make a game...so, if you can code C++ and your bored, let me know, let's make a game where a stickman has to jump over lines...we'll be freaking rich!
No comments:
Post a Comment