Thoughts about setup and deployment issues, WiX, XNA, the .NET Framework and Visual Studio
All postings are provided AS IS with no warranties, and confer no rights. Additionally, views expressed herein are my own and not those of my employer, Microsoft.
Xbox LIVE Community Games (with XNA Game Studio) were announced this morning in a Game Developers Conference (GDC) keynote presentation. As a part of that announcement, 7 games created with XNA Game Studio have been made available as free downloads via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace for a limited time.
The XNA Creators Club Game Launcher and Xbox LIVE Community Games will be available as free downloads from now until midnight Pacific Standard Time on Sunday, February 24, 2008, so download them now if you want to be able to try them out. The games will be playable until midnight PST on Sunday, March 9, 2008.
My colleague Michael Klucher recorded a brief video with Major Nelson (which can be found here) where he walks through how to download the XNA Creators Club Game Launcher and XNA Community Arcade games (it is currently not an entirely intuitive process). To summarize that video and the FAQ items on Xbox.com and the XNA Creators Club, here are the steps you'll need to follow in order to try out the Xbox LIVE Community Games.
To download the XNA Creators Club Game Launcher:
After following the above steps to download the XNA Creators Club Game Launcher, you can use the following steps to download Xbox LIVE Community Games:
The following Xbox LIVE Community Games are available to download:
There are already reviews that have been posted for a couple of the community games:
I really enjoyed The Dishwasher. It combines the basic fun of side scrollers with the fierce contest and actions of more modern games like Ninja Gaiden. I can't wait till it gets released!