Well I admit, that looks nice and 4 weeks with one guy to make that...not bad at all!

This idea is kind of cool...Nintendo announced an idea of smaller studios making games first on the VC but Micro$oft rushed to get theirs out first.

Only problem I have with this is...you have to pay $100 a year or $50 for 4 months to play these games. Granted it shouldn't be free but if you are already a Gold member now this...something just doesn't sit right with me with this.

The shadow draw-in is terrible, as is the pop-up scenery. The game looks boring too. Oh, and I don't like how the camera closeup during the loop. I would play it, if it were free, but certainly wouldn't spend points on that.

Someone should port Trackmania to the 360.

First let me say that I think it's absolutely AMAZING that a game of that quality can be pumped out in four weeks.

BUT this really shows Microsoft's stand on the whole thing as of yet - notice how often the narrator points out all the neat graphical effects. What he doesn't touch on is how BORING that game looks.

Here's hoping we see some really unique, fun games come out of XNA. I think there is a HUGE possibility for this, but I would hate to see a ton of cliche racers and shooters with "neat effects" running at high resolutions. While that is neat, I feel the gaming community needs something more along the lines of a revolutionary racer instead of a pretty one.

for $100/year someone had better start making something decent.

I wouldn't use a generic racer which didn't even let you leave the track and had some nasty looking pop-up and only one car on the track to showcase my product, but hell, I don't have a product so I'll shut the fuck up.

And I think he meant 4 and 2 TIMES anti-alaising, not 4 or 2 'X'. Sheesh.

Looks kind of like a slot car racer minus the slots.

don't be too critical of it considering one guy probably threw it together not a studio...its pretty amazing, and while not fully fleshed out as a game it has allot of potential...

i wouldn't mind having my hand in some XNA development my self if it weren't for the harsh criticisms of video games these days...its kinds discouraging.

Well 4 weeks and only ONE guy! I mean give him a break!

But I guarantee there will be a lot of shooters on this XNA thingy. As of right now, a lot of shooter ppl play XBox, that is why Micro$oft's audience is directed towardss them.

After San Francisco Rush, Gran Turismo, and Burnout 2, how much more revolutionary can a racer get?

...TRACKMANIA...

I have a sweet idea for a racing game. The closest comparison would be Geometry wars, but racing. I really want to get it together but I haven't coded anything in forever (and never in C#) so we'll see how that goes. If one guy can get this going in 4 weeks, I'm guessing it can't be too hard to get a game running. If I ever get some free time I can't wait to try this thing out.

D00mM4r1n3 says:
"This idea is kind of cool...Nintendo announced an idea of smaller studios making games first on the VC but Micro$oft rushed to get theirs out first."

What the hell are you talking about? Microsoft rushed this out? XNA was announced in March 2004. Where are you getting your facts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA

Although personally this game is not to my taste it makes an excellent showcase of what is possible with XNA.

The point is that you can get up and running with your great game ideas with little hassle.

Don't like this driving game? It's included as a "starter kit" with XNA. Modify it as you wish.

Microsoft: 1080p is rediculous!!!i

Come on guys, the game is just a tech demo. I don't think any developer would call his game XNA Racer if it wasnt.

This is great, all though the price is way too much. We should be able to buy these games separately on Live Arcade imo.

Come on guys, the game is just a tech demo. I don't think any developer would call his game XNA Racer if it wasnt.

This is great, all though the price is way too much. We should be able to buy these games separately on Live Arcade imo.

(Maybe doublepost sry)

It looks like a great concept (the user community part), but $100 a year is pretty steep to basically be able to access a "forum" of sorts. The fact that one guy could put that together by himself in 4 weeks is pretty cool. It does bode well for future user content, particularly since it was compiled in the beta version of the development software...which still contains bugs and lacks well rounded help files and user support.

Either way, the concept has potential, but for $100 a year, there better be something more defined by the time this rolls out.

Sweet graphics, hopefully the gameplay doesn't suck

XNA Express is free. [wikipedia] The communities that he mentioned aren't Microsoft-affiliated. Express lets you target Windows but if you want to run your games on your 360, then you need to pay.

Anybody remember a game called "Stunts" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_%28video_game%29) from the early 90's? I played it on a 386 in college. Essentially it let you build your own tracks from a variety of canned objects i.e. trees, loops, ramps, boats, curves, etc. We usually created ridiculous jumps and stunts just to see what would happen.

That sounds like the perfect kind of game to develop for XNA.

I'm old.

I'm not at all sure what this complaint over the $100 subscription is. This subscription is not for casual gamers to have access to existing/upcoming XNA games, it's solely to let you place your own game onto your live account to play on your own 360. You can only access the game(s) that you place on your account. This is directed at developers and is very inexpensive compared to a traditional console development kit. There are tons of small time casual games that would never make it to consoles except for a service like this. For regular gamers to play these games, chances are a new Live marketplace section will be set up, or XNA games that pass QA will be placed in the existing arcade.

from http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/
"Q: How exactly can I share my 360 game to other 360 users? Will my game only be available to people with the XNA "Creators Club" subscription? Will it be available to all 360 users that have an Xbox Live account?
A: There is currently no supported way to share binaries on the Xbox 360. Currently, there are four requirements that must be met in order to share a game targeting Xbox 360 which is developed with XNA Game Studio Express.

1. The individual you are planning to share the game with must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club
2. The receiving user must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360
3. The receiving user must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC
4. The game project, including all source and content assets, must be shared with the receiving user. The receiving user then compiles and deploys the game to their Xbox 360"

So the only way to play an xna game on your xbox is to be part of its development.

I stopped watching when he mentioned 1080p...because I thought it was impossible for them to do... hypocrites

But the game looks str8 wonder how many we'll actually see in xbox live arcade though.

Holy sqirrely, motion-sickness, Batman! Just to be critical: I don't know about the swirling camera and the zooming.

However, for game put together by 1 guy with a timespan of 4 weeks, it's pretty damned impressive!!! To be honest, when MSoft announced the XNA dev package, I was anticipating content of a much lesser quality. Here's hoping that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

How long before some one takes source from something like XBMC, or emulators and ports the code over to XNA, then we have MS Branded Homebrew. That's what i can't wait for.. if the XBMC team ports it over to XNA, 100 bucks would be worth it IMO.

For the $99, you get the development kit also, not just to play the games.

Nintendo announced an idea of smaller studios making games first on the VC but Micro$oft rushed to get theirs out first.

Oh shut up. Ps1 and PS2 also had their own consumer dev kits to make games. And dont act as if Nintendo thinks up everything first. Yeah once MS heard they just started working on tools to make games right away in such a short ammount of time. You're so informed.

Also, at some point they plan on making it so the general population can play these. Did you guys not watch the video?

To those who posted early to criticize the game... based on the fact that one guy did it in a month - you must not be programmers.

@ Everyone negative about XNA...

Ok, let's see what YOU can do in four weeks, on your own, with a tool not yet widely used by thousands and thousands of people.

Let's see what you can do with a free or cheaper than $100 dollar game creation program.

If you deplore the fact that there will be 'x' number of generic shooters and 'x' numver of derivative racers, why don't you make an original game, then?

Oh, what's that? You can't bothered? You don't know how? You don't even have a 360? Oh, right. What was the point in posting again?

If XNA means 100 games of absolute tosh, but one absolute GEM comes out of that veritable volcano of drivel, then I reckon it's served its purpose.

Oh, and at Regula Oblique:

Did you miss the whole Autumn 360 update thing? Where they gave the 360 native and upscaling 1080p capability?

@Chuz

Yes I downloaded it, I was referring to a couple months back when microsoft was calling out sony for 1080p gaming and said it was impossible but now all of the suttin their supporting it, because they don't wanna make the ps3 look better to consumers than the 360. (its really not even tru 1080p anyway but thats another matter).

Whatever the case I like the 360 alot and waiting for the Ps3 too, I just hate when these people say one thing about a matter and then do the opposite.

"After San Francisco Rush, Gran Turismo, and Burnout 2, how much more revolutionary can a racer get?"

Not to belittle you, but that's exactly the kind of thinking that makes it impossible for revolutionary games to vanish. I wonder how many people said the same thing BEFORE Burnout came out? I think there's still plenty of room for revolutionary kinds of racing games to come out.

Hopefully this will be the output of XNA: revolutionary games by small developers with great ideas. Hopefully we're not inundated with cliche games pumped out by designers just trying to get their hand in the biz.

@ Regula Oblique

Fair do's.

I disagree on the whole 1080p issue, but this isn't the right thread for that ;-)

Still, stoked to see another guy who's just a fan of gaming rather than a games console...

Hey NoBullet, thanks a TON for closing your italics bracket. Yeesh.

Kotaku + People who can't use HTML properly = DISASTER

What's worse is that I can try closing it all day long but it still doesn't work. :( If I weren't afraid of getting my account revoked, I'd protest by adding a bold and crossout tag right here...

Anyway (that was real italics), this is pretty sweet stuff for a 1-man 4-week project.

crobar - What you call "discouraging" about the games industry, we call "a challenge >:)" We're being pushed for innovation nowadays and XNA gives us the chance to create prototypes much faster and for an actual console! It's pretty awesome stuff.

The point of the subscription is not for fans to get free user-made games. Its so people can create their own game and run it on 360, share it with other programmers who may have ideas to make it better etc. Seems like a lot of ppl are missing the point of XNA and the subscription. I mean shit, how much do you think these kind of tools would normally sell for?

"So the only way to play an xna game on your xbox is to be part of its development."

Not very indie friendly and it actualy helps MS controll the indie scene which will suck.
They should let you set up a some thing on Live that lets you sell directly to gamers that are there.

I hope Nintendos virtual console efforts are more wide open to every one, since they did not pay any of the indie or home brew developers any money to make games for them.

I would rather have a GOW level editor...LOL

Can't wait to see what awsome games people will be creating with the PS3's Linux SDK.

I bet they'll be every bit as good as the Linux games out there now!

Garage games, Shockwave, director, any 2d game creation tool, any level editor, any mod producer pays roughly under 200 to 300 dollars.for the tools that these guyw ill pay a hundred for and still won't have an out let to show the world what you've done.
Ut2007 will give you access to the unreal engine 3 unless epic sells out or makes the breaks the level editor.

Also too sharing code sucks. It's a carrot on a string infront of the creative deal. You show me yours and I'll promise not to steal your code ideas...LOL What ever...

XNA is a code drop tool for organising the builds of your game it seems to me. I found no GUI based tools for content creation or any thing like that.

Also too it seems MS is hacking the same marketing crap to XNA user Ohhh Ahhh your gamne run in 720 what ever... please... As of right now this thing sucks. If you have more info then post it, I would be the first to promot a "good home brew app"

Hey idiot DaveKap , they were closed. Thats not my fault this comment system is broken. Because closing a tag is so fucking hard for me to understand! You master of HTML you.

I'll definitly be dusting off my c# books as soon as I finish my current project. I'd like to play with XNA for the easy windows development. Doing a game for the 360 qould be cool, but the distribution system for 360 XNA games sucks.

Also, what's been going on with our trolls lately? The ratio of noise/signal in the comments has been getting really bad.

While the game itself seems... well, it looks okay, the possibility to what you can do with XNA is really impressive. This is like, miles ahead of any game studio I've seen so far. Imagine the stuff that could be done in the long run O.o PS1 remakes FTW.

I think it's pretty neat someone has opportunity to do this kind of stuff for the 360 via XNA.

Nice demo. I do hope though, that sometime in the future, there will be a means to download these tech demo's/games to a bog standard 360 via Live.

I think this will be really cool. $100/year to put games that I own on a 360 that I own is absolutely stupid, though. Do I OWN the 360 or not? Clearly, MS thinks that I do not, even though I paid $400 for it. Things like this FORCE me to hate a lot of companies that are around these days.

Other than that, the ability to create homebrew applications in a way that is blessed by the console creator is awesome. Nintendo needs to release something like this for the Nintendo DS. And they need to not charge for the damn thing.