I just hate that all games are timed, just doesn't make any sense for the games that actually has a dedicated demo. I really can't play under those circumstances, too stressful. You have like three minutes to understand and learn how a completely unknown game works and behaves. Fucking unrealistic.

Because when the time is up you've get thrown back into the game library. And that really feels like punishment, because it takes like 1-2 minutes for every game to show up in the library menu again (it actually feels way slower than before, difference is that it now also loads in the background if you're doing something else in the dashboard). So that sucks, and I think the XNA developers will suffer from it as well.

I agree. The time limit is to short. They need to make it 3 or 4 minutes. There are a few games I probably would have purcahsed, but I could not try them long enough to tell for sure.

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I agree 100%. Having the each trial be arbitrarially dictated by a single rule doesn't make a lot of sense. With some games I easily "got it" in the time allotted and others not at ALL. And obviously you can imagine which group of games I'd be more likely to purchase.

Hopefully this system is just the growing pains of launching community games. Because if they don't institute a more common sense strategy (like allow the devs to state how long they think the demo should be to allow time for understanding and interest to build) then I would continue to be disappointed.

LunarDuality -- "Indie is where it's at!"

I'm glad the online catalog is there, in case I miss any. I spent like an hour yesterday just searching for all the games just to make sure I had them all and I still think I missed some. And seeing that it'll seemingly be updated daily will make this all the more frustrating.

Anyway, I'm not sure if my expectations are simply too high, but thus far I'm not particularly impressed with most of what I've played. To be fair, I've barely scratched the surface in terms of numbers, but I feel like that's half of the problem.

I'll admit that I haven't played Weapon of Choice yet, but I have 'played' Drift, which as far as I'm concerned shouldn't even be remotely near this area of the XBLM spectrum. The idea of paying for something that's essentially a screensaver with music and basic color contrasting controls is repulsive to me. For five dollars! There are actual games with actual legitimate production values on this system, and the developer is trying to convince me that this is worth that much? (I say 'developer' singularly, because I refuse to accept the idea that more than one person put effort into this)

And then there's In the Pit, while I admit is an interesting concept, is another game that the idea of paying for boggles me. I never thought I'd see the day where a game gets released with no imagery at all. And then of course, there's the whole problem with the game not being all that fun in the first place. And again, for five dollars. I wasn't particularly impressed with the likes of Abstacked and Alien Ambush, but at least they had the decency to be priced at $2.50.

So far my two favorites (or titles that I've had some liking towards, at least) are DUOtrix and sin(Surfing). The former because it's developed by Binary Zoo (who has made some really good freeware games in the past, though this title is nothing like this) and the latter because it was designed for a TIGSource compo, and they always have some great competitions. Hopefully I can expect that kind of crowd to start getting into XNA development.

(Oh wow, that ended up being way longer than I thought it'd be. Sorry guys. )

I tried In the Pit because I like the concept as well, but after sttruggling in the tutorial portion to even find the guy I gave up on it.

I'm really enjoying Poker Ball. It is fun to play because I can be as strategic (or not) as I want.

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