Well, I tried these, or more accurately, the 5 of the 7 which I had any interest in. They're a mixed bag. Not exactly news there. They all feel a bit rough around the edges, and certainly very indie.
Jelly Car feels like playing with simple drawings on paper come to life, with physics similar to Gish. Get the car from point A to B. You accelerate right or left with the corresponding trigger, and you can morph into a much bigger vehicle for a short time with a button. The courses get progressively insane. It's buggy. In one course, you can get the car spinning in place so fast that it deforms into what looks like helicopter blades. It takes off, making it seem like it's part of the design, but then it sort of goes haywire, and you end up in some place where it all stops working right. Good potential. Needs work
Little Gamers is a 2D platformer with comic-strip characters. They're all little kids, or maybe it's supposed to imitate the Japanese super-deformed art style. Punch, club, chainsaw and shoot your way through the levels. It has an interesting original style, and it's hard as nails. I lasted about 3 stages.
The Dishwasher is another 2D violent platformer, except this one is much more gory, with a dark art style. You hack your way through the mob-looking bad guys with what looks like a cleaver. In between levels, comic strips telling the story scroll through.
TriLinea looks like a puzzle game played on a board against an opponent which can be the computer. You select 4 spells to start off, and I guess the object is to get control of the board. I don't know for sure because I could not get past the spell selection process without coming close to puking my guts out. The entire time you're working out the game start in 2D, the 3D playfield is spinning around like a runaway carousel, impossible to ignore while choosing options. I had to pass or get ill.
Culture is probably the most innovative of the bunch. The idea is simple. Encircle weeds with flowers to kill them. Weeds spread out with increasing speed as the levels progress. You get more different color flowers as the game progresses, but this is not a good thing. The flower circles you "paint" in need to be a single color to work. You get a "tank" with different color layers as an indicator of how much of the current color you have left, and which color comes next. Red flowers (roses) are special. You can trample weeds with those. The playfield is a sphere, like a miniature planet. The art is very pretty and 3D-looking. Unfortunately, as the game goes on, and more things are happening at once, the frame rate drops into the weeds.
I noticed framerate issues in several of the games, an I'm wondering if whatever high-level tools these guys get for their $99/year are optimized enough. There is no good reason for anything this simple to chug on the 360.
For some reason I can't fathom, all of this is scheduled to go offline in 4 days (originally on Sunday). Anyone wanting to try this needs to get on it. The games themselves are playable for another 2 weeks or so, but not if you don't download them and the launcher by the 26th. Then they become dead weight on your HDD. Go
here for details.
