Microsoft's XNA Initiative

So GDC saw some very interesting announcements (beyond just confirmation of Gears of War 2 and "Still Alive" for Rock Band) with the new push of Microsoft's XNA program as potentially the most far-reaching. Microsoft put out the XNA framework a while back, allowing people to create their own games to play on the Xbox. Unfortunately, you could only transfer it via a memory card and it wasn't particularly straightforward. With the new version announced at GDC, you'll be able to create a game and then publish it online for community play and review through Xbox Live (and probably through the Zune Store as well, since they've announced XNA development for that device as well).

To promote and showcase the potential of the platform, they've put up 7 games for free download (though it does require some weird Xbox Live hoops of downloading a launcher first and then downloading through that menu instead of the Xbox Live Marketplace blade). The games are only available for download through tonight, apparently, and are only playable for another week-and-a-half-or-so. So grab 'em while you have the chance.

Their not really full games, though. There's little difference between these offerings and the standard Xbox Live Arcade demo, and it seems pretty clear that's where these games are going to end up once they're fully finished. In that sense, these games could be a bit deceptive - they're less a sampling of what kind of community content we can expect to see down the road than they are a demonstration that XNA can handle producing something with the same polish as a professionally published XBLA title.

I am very, very curious - and optimistic - about how the final community game sharing will be set up, and what this kind of open environment might mean for modding of commercial games - something that has traditionally been the realm of PC gamers only but has begun to creep onto the consoles with stuff like Unreal Tournament III (which is supposed to allow user-generated content on the PS3 but efforts to do the same on the Xbox 360 have been stalled).

There is, of course, the question of how this will all be filtered and monitored. I'm sure that Microsoft doesn't want their webbertubes awash in penis-faced Mario clones swearing up a storm and they've said as much: adult and copyrighted material are off-limits, obviously. How they intend to police that is an open question. I'm not sure that they can afford to take a laissez-faire approach of relying on users to report products for objectionable content, nor do they have staff that could completely play every submission (especially if the service will be free). I wonder if the XNA framework itself has some kind of built-in asset audit that would allow Microsoft to quickly scan art and text for flagrant offenders...

Anyway, the Xbox (and the Zune) have a potentially huge product here. If this can really take off, they'll have more ammunition against both Sony and Apple on both fronts of their war. In the meantime, let's look at what they have up right now. The seven games available right now show a surprising range in both style and game play.

• Culture (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  Very laid back, Culture is almost as much a gardening sim as it is a game. Only one mode really feels like a game, where you plant flowers to combat weeds on a Little Prince-esque planet. The other modes allow you to plant flowers or "paint-by-flowers" (paint by numbers, but with flowers). The game has a surprising charm. It'd idiotic to say that this is just targeted at little girls and gamer wives, but spinning that little planet and seeing your flowers sway and sprout does have a simple beauty that will I would expect to have an appeal beyond the average Xbox demographic. It's a neat little idea - but don't expect a whole lot of challenge from this as a game - there's no final plant-monster boss battle or anything.
  
  
• Jelly Car (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  More of a puzzle than a racing game, Jelly Car is another game with a very non-Xbox look and feel: everything looks hand-drawn with crayon and all the sound effects sound like they were made with a human voice. You drive a bouncy little car around a puzzle, trying to get to the exit, which could require bouncing off squishy parts of the map, getting pulverized to fit through small holes, or inflating your car to push aside obstacles or bounce yourself around. It's very reminiscent of Loco Roco in many ways, minus the wacky Japanese insanity.
  
  
• Little Gamers (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  Very much at home with the Xbox stereotype, Little Gamers is a humorous side-scrolling beat-em-up based on the web comic. Heads are big, there are no mouths and bodies are tiny. The game keeps the same 1337-speak humor (one of the more effective weapons was a long stick to pick people with). Amusing, but I didn't find it particularly compelling and it took a little bit to get a handle on timing and controls.
  
  
• ProximityHD (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  Offering board-game like gameplay, ProximityHD is pretty straightforward: place a numbered hex piece on the board. If it is higher than any neighboring opponent's piece, you take control of their piece. Otherwise the value of their piece is reduced by 2. If you put a piece next to your own pieces, you increase the values by 2. Whoever has the highest total at the end wins. Pretty simple to grasp but with some interesting strategic potential.
  
  
• Rocketball (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  Pretty straightforward - dodgeball but with power-ups and extreme action. Rocketball's controls were very stiff and it was virtually impossible to get any real handle on the game as I flopped back and forth between the two characters on my team.
  
  
• The Dishwasher (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  This is likely to be the most popular XNA game in the gamer crowd, combining side-scrolling action with Jhonen Vasquz-esque art. It's only listed as The Dishwasher here, but it's got the subtitle of "Dead Samurai" everywhere else, so the tongue-in-cheek humor should be pretty clear. You run around the screen ripping people apart with brief breaks for comic panel cut-scenes. The controls are simple and straightforward, but responsive and pretty intuitive.
  
  
• TriLinea (1up, GameSpot, YouTube)
  By far the most confusing of the XNA games, TriLinea is a virtual board game of laying domino-like tiles on a board to create color combos and damage your opponent. Complicating this are special patterns that can be created by lining up different symbols on the tiles (instead of just colors) and a variety of spells each player can cast - and the fact that there's no turn structure, players just put down tiles as fast as they want. Very poor documentation and no tutorial whatsoever made for an extremely obtuse and unsatisfying game: random stuff happened until I lost, not really knowing why.

If the average gamer out there can make anything that's half as good as these initial samples (even the worst of the bunch, like TriLinea and Rocketball) then Microsoft stands a good chance of tapping into some of that YouTube-combined-with-PC-game-modding potential they're touting here. This should also make it much, much easier for "real" publishers to get product out onto XBLA and that can only be a good thing.

I think what intrigues me most about this, though, is the potential for expansion of non-action games. I'd love to see some people like my buddy Daniel Solis take their weird ideas for board games and translate them into the digital space - especially with the Zune connection, so people can take these games with them wherever they go. Either way, good, solid board game mechanics with a slick digital interface and a computer taking care of tracking the details will be great (that reminds me that I need to play more Catan and Carcasonne). Hell, I'd be very tempted to try to put together some kind of video game RPG that actually has a stat system that makes a goddamn lick of sense, or a good grid-based strategy game for the 360.

Lots of potential here, and I think many people will be surprised when this blossoms into a viable alternative to both the Playstation Store's downloadable games and the Wii's appeal past the traditional gamer.

XNA Creator's Club : XNA Developer Center : Wikipedia