XNA: Groov is a diamond in a VERY rough rough.

Back when the XNA Community Games section was announced, the general reaction that I saw was one of cautious optimism.  The idea of independent developers getting a low-cost entry into the downloadable games field and actually have the chance to earn money doing it sounded like a noble endeavor, but the niggling doubt in the back of everyone’s mind was that trusting the Internet at large to come up with anything well-made is a bit of a losing proposition.

Enter XNA, with its release schedule of “about 50 games an hour” and its apparent acceptance criteria of “It works most of the time” for games.  The optimism has been replaced with a full dose of apathy, with the combined one-two punch of awful games and a lack of achievement points, which would at least get some of the achievement whores spending 200 MSP on some of these games.

I should be clear, though, some of these aren’t even games.  How does spending 400 MSP ($5 USD) on a TV calibrator sound?  You can do that.  There’s a trial version that lets you figure out whether you like it, but be prepared for none of the tests to be of any use because they don’t fill up the screen.

Feel like dropping 400 MSP on a “game” called xFart that makes fart noises?  Go right ahead!  The trial version for that one gives you a whopping 7 fart noises to choose from, and… 1 or 2 trivia nuggets to look at.  Oh, that’s going to convince me to buy that!

On the other end of the spectrum, you can buy Snake 360, which is… snake.  The cell phone game.  For 360.  For 400 MSP.  If 400 MSP is just too MUCH for you, there’s also Snake 360 Lite, which drops the coop mode and some of the levels and sells for 200 MSP!  Thank you, XNA, for providing me with this cornucopia of choice!

It’s a real shame that the XNA is full of this garbage, too, because occasionally you can find a real gem hidden in there.  The best example of this is Groov, which is a… omnidirectional shooter.  Hear me out, though, hear me out!  Everything in the game is tied to the music, from your shots to when enemies die after being shot (they’ll only die when their instrument would play in the song, leaving them to linger occasionally before they die).  Different enemies make different noises, and as the music moves from section to section, your gun changes speeds.  The music itself is a nice little beep boop trance(?) track that keeps moving and is nice to listen to.

Once you get to the last phase of the song in normal mode, you get a one-life Expert mode and then a Jam Session mode that lets you do whatever without getting killed.  That’s it, sadly, but this is a game that is actually priced correctly.  200 MSP for a game that is fun, well-made, and an interesting take on the horrendously crowded omnidirectional shooter genre is not a bad price, and I personally paid it just so I could send a message, however private, that I support people doing actual GOOD THINGS with the XNA.

You’re never catching me paying for Calculator 360, that’s for damn sure.