Yay

War of Words - 400 MS points. What happens when you combine Puzzle Quest with Scrabble? If that combination sounds awesome, that's because it is, and the proof is War of Words. In battle, instead of matching colored gems you need to spell words to attack your opponent. This isn't Boggle though, so letters don't need to be touching eachother to spell a word and can be used from anywhere in the ever-rising pit of letters. Longer words and rare letters deal more damage, which will have you either scrambling to get out as many quick, small words as possible or saving up letters to build a high damage 7 or 8 letter word. You also have a repertoire of spells available that grows as your character levels up that can either benefit you or mess up your opponent. All of this on top of a world map, quest structure (though admittedly not as charming as Puzzle Quest), and weapon selection that should be familiar to fans of Puzzle Quest. If War of Words were available on DS or Steam I would have easily paid four times its asking price. Even as one of the more expensive Xbox indie games, War of Words is a steal.

ColorBox - 240 MS points. ColorBox is a puzzle game that throws out the idea of matching colored blocks. Instead, blocks in ColorBox are all various shades of black or the primary or secondary colors. The object of the game is to match lighter shaded blocks next to darker ones to eventually lighten their shade to white. Colored blocks present a unique challenge in that all three primary colors must be mixed to whiten a block. I know that description may sound a bit complicated, but in practice it is surprisingly simple and creates a zen-like puzzle experience. And while there is a standard endurance mode if you just want to match blocks (not to mention a versus mode if you want to play with a friend) but by far the best mode is the seasons mode. In seasons mode the background theme cycles between the four seasons, with the color of the falling blocks matching the colors of that particular season. It's not only beautiful to play, but allows for some huge combos if you plan your block placement anticipating the colors of the next season. If you want a colorful puzzle game that actually brings a unique gameplay mechanic for a change, then definitely check out ColorBox.

Ay?

Word Duelist - 80 MS points. Word Duelist is very close to being a perfect word game. You travel around a university challenging students and teachers to word duels that can take the form of any number of diverse word games. Some may ask you to find a longer word than your opponent, or more words within a time limit, or just words beginning with a specific letter, or dozens of other varieties. With each duel that you win you gain a new type of word challenge that can show up in future duels. The controls make it easy to select letters to build words quickly, so the difficulty of the game is always from creating words and not fighting the controls. But it's that difficulty level that brings up the one issue I have with Word Duelist. The game uses a lot of obscure words, the kind that only a professional Scrabble player would typically know. This would be fine if it was just a matter of the in-game dictionary including those words as an option for those linguistically gifted people who know them, but your opponents have no problem whipping out these oddities on a regular basis. Since several of the challenges in Word Duelist rely on building a word at the same time as your opponent, the fact that they can call upon these words often gives them a seemingly unfair advantage. Setting the game to its lowest difficulty doesn't change the opponent's intelligence either; it just changes how fast the computer types them. This gives you enough time to figure out what they're typing and copy the word before they finish, but it's not actually teaching you the word, just a trick so you can find it faster. For the word guru, Word Duelist will provide a nice challenge and an excellent word game. But for those who don't consider "erst" (as a tame example) as standard word in their vocabulary, Word Duelist may be too much of a challenge.

Masters of Belial - 400 MS points. Masters of Belial plays like a cross between Diablo and an RTS. Ultimately your goal in each level is to defeat the general of the opposing team, but in order to get to him you will need to fight through tons of minions. Thankfully, you have your own army of minions fighting alongside you, although you have no control over them so the RTS similarities end there with the scale of the battles. What you do have control of is your character, which can be one of many archetypes, each with their own specific spells and skills to use in battle. You'll want to use these spells a lot, not only because they're powerful, but because attacking normally is actually quite boring. The control setup is that you hold down the A button, and you character will automatically attack the closest enemy, and keep attacking as long as you hold the button down. While this accurately mimics Diablo's click to attack controls, here it feels too simple and makes combat into a chore. Using a strong magic character and taking advantage of their spell selection remedies this issue to a degree, but playing as a melee character isn't the most satisfying RPG experience.

Space Nuggets - 240 MS points. Space Nuggets is a fun flight game full of gold. You fly your space ship to collect a gold nugget in the level without touching any walls, then fly up into the planet's atmosphere to escape. The tricky part comes from managing your fuel so that you have enough to escape. Fuel burns quickly, so you'll need to be frugal with your engines, and find hidden fuel cans, as you navigate caves to find the gold nugget hidden within. It's a fun game with plenty of levels, but a lot of the levels feel very similar so "a lot" doesn't necessarily mean varied.

Cocktails: shake it up! - 80 MS points. While I don't particularly think that a drink mixing app is the best use of someone's MS points (since most of these drink recipes can be freely found online), I just can't say no to an app called Cocktails with a giant rainbow in the box art. This gives Ballad of Gay Tony a run for its money for the title of "gayest DLC in the Xbox marketplace".

Nay

Ninja Chop!! - 240 MS points.

The Spirit Box - 80 MS points.

Classic FreeCell - 80 MS points.

Updated Games

Iris
Avatar Aquarium
Nextwar: The Quest for Earth
RC Racing 360
Runic
SHOOTING CHICKEN REVENGE
Iris 2.0 - Visualizer Studio
Pass the Pad
Creed Arena
myChristmas
Lethal Judgment
Guardian