Welcome to TWiXNA.
What is TWiXNA?? No, unfortunately it’s not a delicious new new candy bar. TWiXNA is a weekly roundup of Xbox 360 Community games. Many of these community games are often overlook, ignored, or just plain unknown. In these weekly posts, we’ll take a look at recent Community Game releases.
This edition will cover community games released between Monday, April 20th and Saturday, April 25, 2009. The games are (Click on the game title for Screenshots):
- StrikeForce-Psi , by Starlit Sky Games (200 MS Points)
- Awesome Tank, by UberGeekGames (400 MS Points)
- BluePrint Racer 4D, by ECHS BACHS (200 MS Points)
- Retro One- Part 2, by CoderSys (200 MS Points)
- A Great Easter Egg Hunt, by Projector Games (200 MS Points)
- JigDoku, by Wiley (200 MS Points)
- Wordzy, by supps (200 MS Points)
Picks of the week:
StrikeForce-Psi and Wordzy
This game has the potential to be the XNA version of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, or Earth Defense Force 2010(a.k.a fun, but you just don’t know why). You are a presumably a badass StrikeForce-Psi agent, whose mission is to “infiltrate” enemy bases, retrieve gold, and return the gold to a console at the end of a level. Although “Psi” is in the title, there appears to be no psychic phenomena in the game.
The game is similar to a platformer with twin stick shooter controls (think Contra, on easy difficulty, but with manual aim). Your godly silenced pistol seemingly floats in front of your body as you plow through rehashed enemies with the same death animation. The game is simple, but solid.
Try, Buy, or Skip?
Everything works together in such a way that the game can turn out to be mindless fun. Definitely try the demo.
This game is basically Bomberman, with tanks.
Guide your tank around a checkered battlefield, and either destroy all enemy tanks or collect pellets strewn across the battlefield to advance to the next level. Powerups are placed throughout the level, and range from giving your tank more speed, to firing your ammunition faster. The frame rate struggles at times, which can cause some frustration.
Try, Buy, Skip?
If you are a fan of Bomberman, download the trial. Otherwise, consider another game this week. At 400 points, this would be a hard sell, even for fans of the genre.
Blueprint Racer 4D is a simple time-trial arcade racing game. Players chose from three available tracks, each signifying a difficulty.
You drive your car through 3 laps on narrow roads as blue and white scenery passes by (the tracks themselves have the visual aesthetic of a blueprint). The times you must beat to claim to claim certain positions are conveniently displayed in the HUD, so you know exactly how well you’re doing.
Though the game controls well, the racetrack seems a bit too narrow at times, making turns more difficult than necessary on the more difficult tracks. Oddly, there is no pause button. It is also important to note that the community of developers have noticed that this game is a re-skin of a XNA Starter-Kit game.
Try, Buy, or Skip?
It’s worth taking a look at the game to see the unique visuals.
A shump that goes from mind-numbingly easy, to moderately difficult. When you load up the trial, you are given 4 levels to try, each with progressively harder difficulties.
In the “medium” difficulty level, I found myself shooting at rocks for two minutes. On the hardest difficulty level, enemy ships and their bullets moved quickly across the screen, but in comparison to more popular shumps, the action was fairly tame.
Visually, the game is pretty stale. The only way to tell one level apart from another is by the color of the fog in the background. There isn’t much of a variety in enemy types, so much of the game feels like deja vu. Despite these minor complaints, everything is discernible, so you won’t get lost in the action of the game.
Try, Buy, Skip?
If you’re looking to play a shump, there are much better alternatives out there.
What should be a simple 2D puzzling platformer is complicated by unnecessary controls. In this game, you control a rabbit that must push eggs into “targets” to advance to new levels.
One of the things that sets this game apart from other games is that you can control the rabbit’s arms, angling them to do different things. This can end up being annoying. For example, when you move up a slope, you must manually angle your arms to match the slope so that you can move up the slope. Really, moving up a slope should be automatic.
Try, Buy, Skip?
Though the mechanics are sometimes annoying, it is interesting to see how they are incorporated into puzzles. A trial download would be worth you time if you like platforming puzzle games, but otherwise, move on.
If you can solve Sudoku puzzles, you might as well do the real thing. JigDoku takes solved Sudoku puzzles, breaks them into sections, and makes you put them back together. In the easiest setting, each of the 9 s 3X3 squares of a Sudoku puzzle are broken apart. The middle section is already placed on the board, and you must place the remaining 8 sections. Putting them back together requires much less thinking than doing a standard puzzle, because it basically is just guess and check. Harder puzzles on the other hand, are much more difficult. Pieces aren’t just 3X3 grids, but are assorted shapes and sizes (see screenshots). It becomes more like solving a Sudoku the regular way, but you get hints from the pieces that are already in place.
Try, Buy, Skip?
Fans of Sudoku variants will want to give this a look. If Sudoku puzzles frustrate you, don’t even bother with this one.
Wordzy is a word puzzle game that closely resembles old “password” games. You begin with the first letter of a five letter word, and must guess the next four letters of the word. Once your first word guess is submitted, chances are, you’ll be wrong. Don’t sweat though, because the game will tell you if any of the letters were right, and if they were, if the letters were in the correct spot.
Though the core of the game play is always the same, different scoring modes change the way you play. One mode is a race against the clock, where quicker solves result in more points, while another mode rewards those who use the least guesses.
Try, Buy, Skip?
If you are into these kind of puzzle games, Wordzy is a for sure buy.
And that will do it for the week. Please feel free to leave any comments and suggestions for upcoming editions!
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