Our eagle-eyed forumites are one step ahead of me again.  And here I thought that I could refresh Gamerscoreblog every five minutes and beat everyone to the punch.  Wrong.  But that's beside the point.  The real important news is (as confirmed by Major Nelson) that Golf: Tee It Up! and Schizoid will be released this Wednesday (each for 800 MSP).

Tee It Up! looks like a solid and attractive golf game for the platform but my personal interest falls on Schizoid.  The first XNA Game Studio game will finally be released into the wild after months of hype.  Can it hold its own?  Will the totally cooperative gameplay be successful?  Only a few more days till we can find out for ourselves.

Check out the Xbox.com pages and then let me know if either suit your fancy.

• Golf: Tee It Up!
• Schizoid

[via MajorNelson.com]

GamesIndustry.biz dropped the news this morning in an interview with David Edery that the Xbox Live Arcade size limit is now officially 350MB.  With larger titles like tomorrow's Penny Arcade coming out and a 512MB memory card, I think everyone saw this coming.  It will be interesting to see how this new limit will let the developers "focus on innovation".  In addition to covering this revelation Edery touched on how XNA and the community arcade will benefit the Xbox Live Arcade scene and his take on the long certification process.

I won't bore you all with the nitty gritty of the keynote since all you really want is the important stuff.  So here goes:

Community created games are the future of XBLA and the building block here is XNA.  Apparently, the system we've always dreamed of is finally coming to fruition.  Users make games, games are reviewed by peer creators (and screened for offensive content), and then the good games make it into the wild frontier in front of 10 million Xbox Live users.  Say it with me: Community created games distributed over Xbox Live.

Also, XNA games will be playable on your Zune.  You do have one of those, right?

Go right now and test out the trial versions of some examples of this new wave of games right now on Xbox Live.  Yes, go get downloading kids!  (Well, soon at least.)  Included in the set is The Dishwasher, Jellycar, and others.

Major Nelson will have a video up later on Inside Xbox telling you how to download the games.

Also seen at the show were Rocketball, Proximity HD, Trilinea, Culture, and Little Gamers (a zombie slashing XNA game), and more.

If you wanna create games you'll go about getting an XNA Creator Identity which will work like a gamertag and allow you to submit your games.  No word of whether the "Creator's Club" fee is still in place but my bet is on yes.  More info as we find it.

Schizoid was announced back at GDC as the first XNA game to reach XBLA.  Well, it's been more than 5 months since that announcement and the first screens were shown.  Now, Gamefest 2007 is underway and Torpex Games is using the conference to debut the game.  And to calm those who aren't attending we've finally got some video to scour for details.

The gameplay consists of "players [teaming] up to protect each other from a seemingly endless stream of glowing enemies."  Basically, co-op is king here and if you don't work together to take out these mysterious iridescent enemies (which remind me a lot of flOw) that match your color (either red or blue, although it looks like blue and gold to me) you will both perish.  Fight together and die together.  At this point it seems like a mashup of Ikaruga, fLOw, and Mutant Storm with co-op as the main feature.  Sounds pretty good to me.

More useful info via quotations after the break.

Today, the winners of the Dream-Build-Play contest were finally announced at the launch of Gamefest 2007 (a Microsoft-run development conference focused on XNA).  After whittling the field down to 20 finalists the panel of judges have finally selected the winner.  Actually, I should really say winners because the top 4 contestants are all being offered publishing deals with Microsoft to bring their games to XBLA.  So who won and what are the games like?  Read More.

At long last, Microsoft has announced the 20 finalists for the Dream-Build-Play contest. In case you have forgotten, the contest asked for developers to come up with their best game using the XNA framework, for the chance to be offered an XBLA publishing contract.

While they received "hundreds" of entries, the 20 that they did choose, certainly run the gamut of genres. You should definitely take the time to check out some of the screenshots that they have released. Just from the screenshots, and what I've heard previously, my early favorite has to be "The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai"

For those of you shaking your heads wondering how many more months you'll have to wait to see who one, worry not! The winners will be announced on Aug 13th at Gamefest 2007. For those of you who love indie titles, Gamefest should definitely be bringing us some great news. If for no other reason then they will finally start talking about Networking within XNA titles.

Add the ability for Creators Club members to download other peoples games over Live, and to me Gamefest would be better than E3.

 

On his popular blog Jamie Fristrom, who is the technical director of the Schizoid developer Torpex Games, revealed some insight into the behind the scenes working of getting a game on Xbox Live Arcade, the certification process and XNA.  Here's a bit about what he has to say about the process of getting onto Xbox Live Arcade.[quote]To get an Xbox Live Arcade game approved, there's various stages and greenlight meetings you have to get through.  First you've got to get somebody there excited enough to get it into a greenlight meeting in the first place.  We showed a prototype to a manager from the XBLA team and he was excited enough to evangelize it. 

The next stage is the "Concept Greenlight" - they regularly have a group get-together to review proposals and decide whether they want to pass on them or not.  Apparently, at our greenlight, we were the only concept that had a prototype.  So a prototype will definitely help you stand out.  "Don't build it and they won't come."  Our prototype, by the way, was only three man-months of work.

The next stage is a due diligence meeting.  Here, they want to establish that you can actually execute, and finish the game before your launch window.  Any red flags or concerns they have will be raised.  For example, they wanted to know how long we could survive if the game slipped;  they wanted to know if we had a test plan.  For us, I think it helped that everybody on the team has an established track record.

And that's where we are now.  Coming up later is the certification or TRC - the "technical requirements checklist" - all the console manufacturers do this.  And games that have network play have much more elaborate requirements than ones that don't.  It takes two weeks to get through cert - and if you fail, it resets.  You have to take another two weeks.[/quote]I guess we can now better see why there was such issues with a game like Worms, who missed a few of it's release dates.  Sure the Xbox Live Arcade team has been pushing that down our throat for awhile now, but I think it bears so much more weight coming from a vocal third party voice.  It would be interesting to see what the average turn around time is for a game to go from failing certification to the developers fixing the issue to being back in the certification process.  My guess is that first the developer will need a few weeks for fixing the game and then thoroughly testing it on their end before sending it back.  Failing a certification would instantly push you back possibly a month or more for the next release date.

Ok, so this isn't technically XBLA news (Hell if you want to get technical, it's not even Xbox news yet), but it could be a interesting sign of things to come.

Cheeky, the developers of the Blobbit series (you may remember it from the XNA preview videos that were kicking around), have released the first XNA developed commercially available game. While it's not certain whether the game will be making it's way onto the 360, it at least will start to show whether or not the XNA platform could be profitable for commercial opportunities.

Due to the lack of 360 support and the $15 price tag (I'll take Heavy Weapon for $10 instead), I'll be refraining, but if they ever do put it on the 360, I'm sure I'll pick it up.

Here's the complete press release:

 

[quote]

Friday 12th January, 2007. Corfu, Greece and sunny Romford, England.

Cheeky, the company featuring veteran developers Mark Ripley and Stoo Cambridge today announced the release of their latest game in the Blobbit series - "Blobbit Push".

The game also marks the developer's shift of focus away from the struggling mobile market, with the announcement that this is their first game to be released on Microsoft's XNA platform. Indeed, it has just been confirmed, this is the first commercial XNA game release ever. However, mobile phone versions of the game will follow shortly.

Blobbit Push is an arcade puzzle game, combining the strategies of Sokoban with clever roaming enemies, all wrapped up in Cheeky's trademark Blobbit cuteness. Blobbit finds himself crash-landed on a moon, scattering Blobbit Babies everywhere. The marauding Vernimb have captured them and imprisoned them in crates! Some are even guarded by Vernimb, ferocious Homing Vernimb and a multitude of robot guards! Blobbit must travel through 50 levels, releasing the Blobbit Babies before finally returning to his battered spaceship and returning home before somebody notices....

The game is available for download and online play at http://www.blobbit.com. Demos are available in XNA, Java and Mac Widget formats.

The Blobbit Push logo can be found at:
http://www.blobbit.com/pushlogo.png

A screen shot can be found at:
http://www.blobbit.com/blobbitpushscreenshots/pushscr.jpg

Further information about Cheeky can be found at http://www.cheeky.gr

So today is the day all of you budding game developers have been waiting for.  Microsoft has just released the XNA Game Studio Express (GSE) in it's first non beta release.  For those of you who don't develop, but love playing "home brew" games, MS hasn't left you in the cold.  Today also marks the release of the XNA launcher available now on the XBox Marketplace.

You can check out some screen shots of the launcher over at XNA Resources here. 

ARogan, a professional coder by day, has released what may well be the best XNA developed game so far.  F14 XNA Game (maybe he should find something a little more catchy) is available on his blog here. You can also check out both a screen shot and video of the game on his site. 

With games like this already popping up, it seems that the $99 a year to be able to play all of these on the 360 is getting better and better.