Every year Microsoft hosts the dream build play competition which showcases the best and brightest developers and games using the xna platform.  One of the finalists this year was the excellent Sol Survivor from Cadenza. The game is a hybrid of RTS and tower defence, where spawning enemies (creeps) follow preset paths trying to destroy your bases.  You set up towers of many different varieties depending on the commander you use, but this isn’t the only method of defence, you also have offensive weapons that you can use in real time like artillery strikes, laser beams etc.

The games single player campaign follows a fairly stand progression of increasing difficult missions whereby you gradually unlock more and more upgrades, towers and abilities, but it is in multiplayer that the game really shines. The game features both cooperative and competitive modes for between 2 and 8 players. The co-op mode is fairly self explanatory, but in the competitive mode you control both the placement of your towers but also the flow of creeps on your opponent’s side of the map. This leads to an interesting mechanic where you have to balance the construction and creep flow as they both come from the same resource bank.

I cannot heap enough praise on this game, the visuals are stunning and it’s so feature complete that at a glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a full xbla game. This raises the bar for XBLIG and needs to be supported if we want to see more efforts of this calibre on the service, go and download it now!  The game may feel steep compared to other XBLIG at 800 points, but its definately worth every penny.

This Sunday will see our second ‘XBLIG Session’, when the XBLIG community gets to together to play games together with the developers.   The game that will be playing this time is the stunning Tower Defence game ‘Sol Survivor’, Dream Build Play ’09 runner up.

You can grab game off the LIVE marketplace right now for 800 points, which would usually be a bit steep for XBLIG but this game is in a different league of quality and is more comparable to an XBLA.

Grab the game and meet us all online this Sunday.

This week Cydereal, TheColdEquation and Y2k4Crisis from Cadenza Games (the developers), will be joining us along with the regulars:

RR Oddbob from XnPlay
MarkMD76 from XBLIG.co.uk
Jigsaw HC from XBLA Ratings
duckols from Gay Gamer
Chunkbutter from Small Cave Games
Dhalamar from Wasted Seconds
Exaltedlegions from Exl Studios
AllApologies17 from Indie Game Blog
XboxHornet from XboxHornet

and myself rusted3572

We look forward to see you online and helping to support independent developers!

Do you have children that you need to keep entertained this October 31st?  Then ‘Very Hungry Pumpkin’ may just be the game for you.  You don’t?  Then you might want to look elsewhere for entertainment…

The games premise is very simple; you play as a/the Hungry Pumpkin on a mission to eat as many sweets as possible before they are snapped up by the mindless trick or treaters that mercilessly patrol the streets.  Personally if I were a trick or treater, even if the evening had turned up a meagre candy harvest I would like to think I wouldn’t resort to eating off the floor and would instead let any animated pumpkin go about his business.

The gameplay is simple at heart, but the difficulty soon ramps up, with the numbers and speed of trick or treaters increasing fairly rapidly.  This is where I have a problem with the game.  It seems on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience, with its colourful art-style, but the difficulty ramps up so fast that I couldn’t see a junior gamer being able to progress past the 2^nd or 3^rd levels.

The Colourful art style that I mentioned deserves a special mention.  All of the characters are pre-rendered, allowing them to display a clean, crisp look which makes it one of the vibrant looking XBLIG that I have played.

‘Very Hungry Pumpkin’ doesn’t have a whole lot of depth, but it will keep you and your offspring entertain for a short while.  Personally I would recommend the IPhone version of this game, as it is identical in feature-set to this console version but it is a platform that is more suited to this sort of game, where it can be played in short bursts.

Tonight marks the start of the XBLIG sessions, a collaboration between numerous sites and blogs that cover Xbox Live Indie Games whereby we’ll all go online to play with each other and the community in order to shine the spot light on the best and brightest of the Indie Game marketplace.

Tonights game is the fantastic ‘Little Racers’ (download), the top down 2d racer that is very reminisent of the NES classic Super Off Road, a personal favourite of mine. So download the game and check it out with us tonight, and look out for the following people:

WaaghMan and Soy1Bonus from Milkstone Studios (Developers)
RR Oddbob from XnPlay
MarkMD76 from XBLIG.co.uk
Jigsaw HC from XBLA Ratings
duckols from Gay Gamer
Chunkbutter from Small Cave Games
Dhalamar from Wasted Seconds
Exaltedlegions from Exl Studios
AllApologies17 from Indie Game Blog
XboxHornet from XboxHornet

and myself rusted3572

Hope to see you online tonight!

Gum Drop Celestial Frontier is an original take on the twin stick shooter formula, where instead of having projectile weapons that you fire with your second analogue stick you control the rotation of a mass attached to your space ship.  You hold down the triggers to start rotating the object to get it up to speed and then use it to smash enemies who are trying to attack the mother ship.  Every level follows the same format of having you defend your base-ship from a finite number of enemies, with only the number of enemies and the number of objects available to swing increasing.

Whilst it’s nice to see someone thinking a bit outside of the box for a compelling game mechanic, I am not too convinced by the wrecking ball mechanism.  There is a very random feeling to the combat, which left me with no idea what was actually going on in the hectic action and a feeling that I was only progressing due to random luck factor.

I came away from the game not too impressed overall, I can see that there is a good idea/mechanic there but I am not sure that it’s the best possible execution of that idea.  This is just my personal opinion, but I am sure there is enough there to keep others entertained and at only 80 points ($1) the game is worth checking out, if only for 5-10 mins.

The developers next release looks promising (Link), it’s great to see fresh new ideas on the service instead of the same old retro rehashes and massage simulators.  Keep it up!

Krisotron is a new addition to the Indie Game market place which very closely resembles the arcade classic Robotron: 2084 and features twin stick shooter controls that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Geometry Wars or any of the myriad of twin stick shooters available on LIVE.

In the game you play as “Krisotron” on his mission/quest to rescue a princess from an evil scientist, this is cookie cutter game story by this point, but the story isn’t really important and doesn’t play a big part except to give the levels some minor exposition at the start of each chapter.

The game is made up for 4 chapters, each containing 5 levels, equalling 20 levels overall across which you’ll fight a variety of enemies (including robots, spiders, skeletons etc).

The gameplay visual look nice with an almost 8-bit quality, creating a nice retro look to compliment the gameplay.

Overall I had an enjoyable afternoon with the game, it won’t keep you entertained of any great length of time but its fun in short bursts.  It’s going to have a hard time standing out on the service as it doesn’t really offer anything new or innovative, but at a 5^th the price of the XBLA version of Robotron its definitely worth a purchase if retro shooters are your cup of tea.

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen!  I am here to announce my glorious return to the world of amateur video game blogging.  Whilst In the 3-4 months that I have been gone I am sure that I will have lost any frequent readers that I may have had, therefore making this post of no significance to anyone else but be, I thought I would declare my intentions.

Whilst I will still be covering video games I will not have the same sort of output as previous.  I will no longer be rehashing news stories from other sites, instead I will be producing more reviews of IPhone, XBLA, XBLIG and retail console/pc games along with some editorial/comment pieces in order to give the blog a bit of identity, and hopefully make it stand out.

I hope you enjoy reading in the future, and to any devs out there that wish to have your games review on this site just let me know and provide me with codes where available.

Today I came across this great free game for the iPhone/iPod Touch, ‘Flood-it!’, a simple but very entertaining and addictive puzzle game where you must transform the grid of coloured squares into one uniform colour. 

The gameplay is simple, but may take a few games to get the hang of.  You start by controlling the top left corner square and must change the colour to match on of the surrounding squares to absorb it.  This pattern continues until the whole board is clear, but the challenge comes with doing it within a set number of moves.

It’s a great little game, and for free its great value for money, an important thing in these harsh economic times.

It seems for the next week, until 14th June, Popcap are being very generous it would seem and are offering their hit game ‘Peggle’ for the iPhone and iPod touch for the tiny price of 59p ($0.99).  Just check out the app store for more details and get downloading!

I am sure that there can’t be many people out there that don’t own Peggle already, I personally own it on PC and the iPod classic but this didnt stop me buying it again, I am just addicted.

A Fading Melody

A Fading Melody is a platformer, with an artistic edge, where you play as a coma patient trying to bring light back to her world whilst finding out how you were put into the coma in the first place.

The game has a very sombre tone and a very interesting art style, not to mention a beautiful soundtrack. The gameplay is very similar to the original Super Mario Bros. game, where you run, jump on platforms and jump on enemies’ heads to kill them. The gameplay works fine, but it just doesn’t sit very well with the tone of the game. The subject matter is presented as quite serious and dark but seeing the silhouette on screen bouncing off the top of monsters breaks the mood ever so slightly.

The game is very entertaining whilst it lasts, and I am sure that people will enjoy it, despite its minor flaws. At 200 points, the game is ideally priced but even if you aren’t interested in buying it please check out the demo.

3/5

Trino

Trino is a an action game in a similar vein to Geometry Wars, except that you don’t shoot with the second stick, but instead press A to deploy corners of a triangle trap that you use to trap and destroy the enemy. Trapping enemies (Nanites) releases pick-ups that can evolve your character (Trino) to be more powerful and deadly.

The action takes place over 40 levels, and is accompanied by a really great soundtrack (something that thankfully seems to be happening more frequently in CG).

There isn’t much that I can fault the game for, it was very enjoyable and well made, the only negative thing I could say is that the 400 point price tag is a little above what I would pay for a community game, 200 points is definitely the sweet-spot. Apart from that I fully recommend it to anyone, I have seen much worse games on full XBLA release.

5/5

Puzzwords

Puzzwords is a fun, easy to play puzzle game in a very similar vein to the Mega Drive (Genesis) classic ‘Columns’. Blocks of scrabble-like tiles fall from the top of the level in groups of 3s and it is up to you to shuffle and rotate these groups into place in order to form words at the bottom of screen when they come into contact with the other pieces.

The games concept is very simple, but very engaging, particularly if you have a second person there play 2 players on the same screen. Fear not if you don’t have a friend to play with as the game features Xbox Live multiplayer and online score boards.

The game is great fun, if a bit shallow, but that is more a problem with the genre rather than the game, and at 200 points its a perfect impulse buy, check it out!

4/5

Ring of Fire

Ring of Fire is the Community Game version of the popular card-based drinking game that has been played on many a university and college campus. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, each of the different types of card in each suit are given different properties where embarrassing questions must be answered, certain people must drink or everyone must drink etc. The game generally quickly looses all focus and just ends up with everyone getting drunk.

This CG version replaces the actual cards with digital representations, cutting out on the mess and clearing up, but also in the same move, cutting out the fun. All of the fun of the actual game is setting up the circle and getting all of your friends to sit and face each other. I haven’t tried this out in a party situation, but I can’t imagine people being to up for playing this version instead.

At 200 points, the game is cheap enough to check it out for a bit of a laugh, but I don’t see it being used over and over again, you could just go and buy a pack of real cards for the same money and also have the ability to play any number of games.

2/5

Revenge of the Evil Aliens

Revenge of the Evil Aliens is a vertically scrolling twin stick shooter, with a retro feel to it, where by you shoot at oncoming alien flying saucers whilst avoiding asteroids and the lake. The game is 4 players which is a very nice feature, but strangely the game is only playable in 4:3 which limits the room available to play on, meaning that if you do have 4 people playing it does get a bit too crowded.

The level of the quality in the game isn’t quite up to the standard of other people’s games on the service. There a few a things that really great, particularly the low quality Microsoft SAM voice work and some very rough looking sprites.

The game is fun whilst it lasts and the multiplayer is very entertaining, but I wouldn’t normally expect to pay 200 points for a game of this low quality.

3/5