Wired: Xbox Community Games Are Way Better Than You Think

SAN FRANCISCO -- It's time to start getting very excited about the upcoming launch of the Community Games section of Xbox Live.

Microsoft's push to create the user-generated "YouTube of Games" has always been a great idea in theory -- let indie programmers crank out new and innovative game ideas using the XNA development environment, then allow them unfettered (well, not very fettered) access to publish the games on Xbox 360. But while the games in the first beta release of the service were merely interesting proofs of concept, the titles that Microsoft showed at a launch party Wednesday were something more -- actual, fun, awesome videogames.

The highlight of the show was CarneyVale: Showtime, a "vertical ragdoll platform game" created by GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT game lab started by Henry Jenkins et al. It is super fun. You launch a clown into the air, then use "grabbers" spread throughout the playfield to grab him and fling him ever higher. You're collecting balloons, you're racing the clock, you're trying to find secrets, and you're trying to get him to the goal of each stage. I sat glued to it for a good long time -- the gameplay mechanic is just fundamentally entertaining, and the levels are quite challenging right from the outset.

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Weapon of Choice looks a lot like a throwback to Contra, but it's actually quite a complex game. Your warriors can equip a whole variety of different weapons, each of which not only has an alternate mode that radically changes how it fires (one gun has a mode where it floats around on a tether), but multiple uses. For instance, the guy you see here has a super-powered gun that you can use not only to blow things away but to blow him up, down, and all around with the sheer power of the recoil.

This game is also illustrative of the pull that the Community Games business model is having even among the professional designer community. The designer of the game used to work for Insomniac, but quit his job and is now creating this game full-time. We're not just going to be seeing games from weekend tinkerers and amateur schoolchildren on Community Games -- some established professionals are going to be using it as well.

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Community Games, of course, will have its share of utter absurdity. Baker and I played Streets of Fury for a good long time, and still weren't able to figure out if they were being serious or what. It's an old-school Streets of Rage-style brawler that uses the all-but-forgotten technique of taking pictures of your friends doing bad martial arts poses and making them into the enemies of your Streets of Rage-style brawler.

It's pretty much ridiculous, from the way that the big enemies are just normal-sized people that have been scaled up, to the way that the enemies "die" (they gently lay themselves down on the ground) to the fact that one of the enemies is clearly just the same guy who played the main characters, just with a different vest. The super moves are outrageously over-the-top, the gameplay merely okay. It really raises the question: If you're parodying a bad game really well, aren't you just making a bad game? But then, we still had fun.

And that's just scratching the surface of what Microsoft had to show that evening. The Community Games channel will launch on November 19, alongside the New Xbox Experience dashboard update. Make sure to keep it on your radar and check out some of these games -- every one will have a free, timed demo, so you have no excuse.

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