With Microsoft's Xbox Live Community Games getting a rename, I decided to jump the gun and launch XBLI.net. If you've been to my other site, Red Ring Circus, the look should be familiar.

Prototype's Alex Mercer is not a nice man. After waking up on the wrong side of a cold slab, he finds himself alive but amnesic. Riddled with bullets shortly after, he comes down with a mean case of superpowers. What follows is a murderous quest for answers, and a portrait of the most unlikeable protagonist ever. On the grand scale of evil, his questionable methods put him somewhere between Jack Bauer and Hitler.

A mythical beast looms within the Community Games library: a development holy grail, the console RTS, done right. Philip Muwanga's Hexy Trench is a real-time strategy game that costs less than three dollars, and trumps Halo Wars.

In today's game industry Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram would never get made, and yet here it is, spit-shined and remade on Xbox Live Arcade. It looks like a 3D arena shooter (think 1-on-1 Unreal Tournament) but it plays more like a traditional fighting game. It manages this through an unorthodox control scheme that predates the left-stick-run, right-stick-aim-style that's become an industry standard. Instead, you've got controls more akin to a tank, controlling a robot that is anything but.

>>Community Game Brief

Originally posted at RedRingCircus.com