Xbox Live Community Watch - 4/24/09

It was a fairly lackluster week for community games, with no real standout title to recommend. There are still some decent games that might be worth a trial download, so the week isn't a total loss.

Ay?

• Game About a Soup Factory - 200 MS points. This is a very odd puzzle game, and not just because of the name. You are in a 4x4 grid and must shoot shapes that come in the screen from all sides before they reach your grid. It took me about 5 minutes to fully get around how all of the gameplay mechanics work, but once you understand the game it can be pretty fun. It's definitely not for everyone, but for me it was the most fun I had with the community games this week.
• Drum Xplosion - 200 MS points. An excellent drum kit tool. It's best played with up to two Rock Band or Guitar Hero drum sets, though it also supports regular controllers. You can completely customize what every drum or button for which part of the drunk kit you want it to play. You can even make one of the drums a cowbell if you want. The only downside is that it doesn't support custom soundtracks, so if you want to play along to music you'll need to have it playing from somewhere else.
• Retro One Part 2 - 200 MS points. Retro One Part 2 is an average side-scrolling space shooter. There is the interesting gameplay mechanic of charging your shots to release energy in every direction, but there just aren't enough enemies to shoot to make the ability worthwhile. Add in a second player and the game becomes a cake walk. If you are new to the shooter genre this might be a good place to start, but there are better shooters already available in the community games section.
• Rotorize - 200 MS points. In Rotorize you need to make your way to the center of the game board, but after every move you make the board rotates. There are traps all over the board, and if a trap rotates onto a square you're standing on, then you've got to start all over again. It makes for an interesting puzzle game that I can see appealing to some, even if I wasn't personally a fan.

Nay

• GraphSpacer Black - 200 MS points. GraphSpacer takes the intense action of Geometry Wars, and then restrains you to only shoot in the direction you are flying. This wouldn't be such a problem if the play field wasn't so small and your ship so large that it becomes impossible to maneuver your ship between enemies like you can in similar games. This is the Black edition of GraphSpacer, which sets the background as a boring gray opposed to the paper style of the original game. Considering that the paper style was one of the most interesting parts of the original, this Black edition just doesn't hold up.
• BluePrint Racer 4D - 200 MS points. A decent racing game with only three cars and three tracks. Unfortunately there is only time trial mode with no multiplayer option, which seems odd to me for a racing game. The tracks are well designed though, and I might have actually recommended this game if it weren't for the blueprint art style. Having everything in the game made of blue and white graphs was intriguing at first, but after one race my eyes were actually in pain.
• StrikeForce-Psi - 200 MS points. A side-scrolling shooter with very stiff controls. There's nothing here that you haven't played before in at least a dozen other shooters. And why would crouch be mapped to the Y button when X and B aren't used?
• Zoom - 200 MS points. Drive as fast as you can in a rocket car. The faster you go the harder it is to control. Fun for a couple of seconds, and then you'll never touch it again.
• Ping Time - 200 MS points. It's a clock that plays Pong. The time is formed by the score of the two computer controlled paddles, with the right side scoring every minute and the left side scoring on the hour. You can also change it between 12-hour and 24 hour time. It's a fun and novel concept, but really not worth paying for.