Oh damn these do look nice!

I for one am real glad to see finally MS holding a contest to get new developers involved with the system.

Cool stuff!

that grass looks mighty pullable.

.

And there you have it! the wealth of creative tallent in the US is VERY limited...

Wow! just wow at those pics compared to the hash jobs i've seen before.

Hmm. I noticed that as well. The XNA ones for the NA showcase did kind of look like Flash Games. These actually look like Xbox1/PS2 calibur games.

@Father ColdCuts (please donate to my charity event. Link on...: thats pritty offensive saying that most xna games are hash jobs. Most xna devlopers are either just starting out codeing, or lone programmers with little to no art skills. I bought the 2d art from a garage games content pack i use in my xna game engines test apps.

nice

Perhaps this has something to do with the games industry in Japan. From what I've told, there are quite a few otaku desperate for a way to break into the games industry, and XNA might be just what a small team, just starting out, is looking for.

=/ Didn't want to sound pessimistic about the XNA games shown in America. Maybe people approached the idea of XNA in different ways and didn't know what to expect so developed to what they thought would appeal to the masses and deliver within the boundaries of the restrictions that were put upon them.

SExy..

Sweet.

Wow, that kicks the shit out of our games.

Cool! Japan's got it on!

While the Xbox fails in terms of sales in Japan, then there is no denying it does indeed have a small cult following. I'm sure it will be fondly remembered many years from now much in the same way the Sega dreamcast is.

I'd also expect long after microsoft stop making games for the 360 then people will still be coding high quality xbox live style games in Japan.

I want that spider mech game thing. Reminds me of this game I used to have for the dreamcast way back when, with online play and tanks and aliens and stuff.

Yknow, if the Japanese people don't hunker down and buy these games, theres no reason why Microsoft/Sony shouldn't offer a dumpload of cash to bring them/the games to the states to release games.

Those look fantastic. After downloading the 7 XNA games I was a little miffed that they were about average (except the dishwasher ninja game) and none really had any originality that you would hope from a small developer. These however look spectacular, and if japanese x360 owners get to download these instead of the average ones we got, then they are lucky ducks...

Lets hope some of these are fast tracked to XBLA, as I think I could enjoy a fun little armoured strider game..

As an aside, I remember reading that Kenta Cho (of Mazer Mayhem, not to mention rRootage and such) said that he had ha hard time getting a good framerate or something.

Perhaps it is a bit harder to work with XNA, or at least to get used to it...

.

@cubed2D: I'm saying that they are hash jobs by comparison. There is no arguing that, Irrespective of weather or not they are fledgling developers, they are crappy little games. I remember my first painting when I started learning art at school. It was shite. There was no arguing that. But I recognise that this is a first step for budding pevelopers.

I still hold my opinion that Japan has more to offer to gaming than any other nation. Japanese craftsmanship holds it's strengths in perfection beauty and elegance. In the US it's bigger bolder and brash. Like painting an oil painting with a horses tail. All i ever hear is how big the textures are that are used in whatever game, or we used this many polygons in this. The focus is not what they do with it, but how much crap the pumped into it to make it look like that.

Look at Okami and ICO. They are damn fine looking games! it's amazing what was pushed out of that PS2. I still think GT4 looks better than any racer out at the moment. GT4 might not have as many textures or polygons as PGR4, Forza and all the current need for speed games, but it's lighting, over all naturalistic feel and gameplay are light years ahead.

I'm just saying that the US has alot of catching up to do, and that can only happen when the social attitude shifts.

I wonder where did the developers of Armored Strider get their ground textures? I know that grass texture from another successful game series, developed by Bungie.

Looks nice. Hope they go global.

Actually I think the US is by far higher up in development skills than the Japanese the problem is that folks dont have as much free time as they would like to work with the new tools / technology + time required to make 3d models and all the other shit in order to make a nice game as modders / total conversion teams had in the past with the older game engines / tools.

The rise in technology has kinda led to the downfall of the modding game scene sorta.

Plus theres the size restrictions also that make it more difficult. Granted I still think theres a lot of untapped talent in the western market with some of the quality of flash games out there.

---

In Japan there is a huge doujin scene (fan made games / software) and these people are used to working on a small size limit along with doing 2d graphics and other things. While there have been other devs that are making quite a few nice 3d games also.

Heres a vid from a more famous example called "Higurashi Daybreak" its a action fighting game based off of the animation Higurashi. Also the game engine / gameplay is similar to the one used in the Capcom gundam action fighting game.

+ Watch video

Heres an example of the more famous "Touhou" 2D shooting game series.

+ Watch video

So those are 2 examples of what the better fan devs here make.

Theres a lot of untapped talent here also, which is why Im glad to see MS giving them the chance to break out of the fan scene and try to get more into the more professional field.

@Wapanese: I got the ball rolling in my school to start working on an XNA game. It uses C#, which is like Java, if that means anything to you.

@Dekko: Or you get a digital camera and take a photo of grass.

I do hope you were joking since if not you really made yourself look like a blithering ass.

@Dekko: uh, no at all, you can find that stuff just searching on google, also the sky is a free skydome texture. I used that stuff too

yep, XNA is slow

kudos ^^,

@Father ColdCuts (please donate to my charity event. Link on...: If this was the last generation then I would agree, but seeing as how the only japanese game that came out this generation that actually tried anything different or was noteworthy that I can think of was No More Heros, and a lot of the design elements were borrowed from Killer 7.

Eternal Sonata had potential, but it just ended up being another Jrpg with a different coat of paint. As for the American side of things, you have Portal, Bioshock, and Everyday Shooter (DLC counts damnit!!)

I'm not saying that the American market isn't over saturated with "AMERICA, F**K YEAH!!! shooters, because it totally is, I'm just saying that artistically Japan has to try and catch up with itself when it comes to releasing games that blow my mind all over the side of the wall.

I'm waiting for that or the next Digital Devil Saga game. Whichever comes first.

Before hammering XNA games "as large" you guys should check out the other contests and games on the website, there are some with pretty advanced shaders and all, superior to those above.

The ones they pick to sell were mostly based on the amount of content, being games instead of tech-demos.

Check out here:
[www.dreambuildplay.com]

@Witzbold: @0xdeadc0de: It's just my opinion that the ground, water and the way textures are filtered at the distance look very similar to the way Halo CE's engine renders landscape. Why such hostility, I didn't say anything bad about Armored Strider nor did I think anything bad about it. It's just an opinion and I liked to share it but I guess I have to be more careful in the future and use the /friendly_joke and /opinion tags ..

swel!

There is this japanese one, possibly lone-wolf.
[xbox360.qj.net]

This game was there too, not sure where to find the other games from pervious Dream Build Play contests o.O

[img181.imageshack.us]
[img181.imageshack.us]

@Father ColdCuts: "And there you have it! the wealth of creative tallent in the US is VERY limited...". No. That show that theres some talent on the XNA Japan scene.

I don't know what the USA talended indie guys are doing. Maybe webgames, PC games, or using a different framework. Sony has released a _free_ engine that will able people to make games for PC , PS3 and XBox360, maybe some people as on this. Maybe other people use GCC to compile his games, or are creating games for the movile phones. Who know? do you know?. You have to pay Microsoft 100$ for the right to make XNA games. But for everything else, is free. You don't have to pay for use SDL and OpenGL, or Ogre, or something else. Why are these japan dudes making games for a console that is dead in japan, anyway? made no sense :D.. If all you want is eyeballs for you game. I don't know.

These actually look really awesome. Heres hoping something good comes out from them, like XBLA releases.

Proof that Japan is greater than America :(

(sorry, just this mentality that I've carried over from FFXI <_<)

Oh neat. Games that I would actually consider paying for.

.

@Thorax: True, but the big guns are starting to come out. Remember. Japanese developers have not really gone for the whole Xbox 360 thing yet. Although it may seem that we have had a "Next Gen" console since late 2005 the Wii and PS3, which appeals more to the japanese market, will help push the creative talent in Japan and we will start to see some awesome stuff.

@tei: I'm talking rule of numbers here.

For the obscenely small amount of 360s that have sold in Japan a fraction of that decided to get XNA, and a smaller fraction made some decent looking games.

In the US every man and his dog got one, a fraction of that got XNA and i don't see anything that looks as good as this.

That is how I see it.

Amen

Maybe if they position XNA right we'll start seeing more international games -- these look great :)

Uhh... People? The American Contest had a time limit of four months. That's how long you had to make your game, start to finish. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the Japanese contest had a somewhat more relaxed timeframe, if any at all.

Either that, or Japan is raising an army of infant super-coders to take over the (e-)world.

@Moonshadow101: On the contest site my friend helped me look for the information in regards to the J contest and it said that the acceptance for applicants period was 11/15 - 02-15 so 3 months. Although it doesnt state how long they had to work on projects we can assume that some were made within that 3 month period and others who knew about the contest before this date was announced were working on something before.

Asides from that speculation there is no solid info written on the time limit in regards to development.

No idea how long the XNA has been active in Japan so it would be hard to judge if folks actually knew about this contest ahead of time. That and I havent followed on the news of XNA in Japan also all that much.

Are you crazy ! Has anyone played The Dishwasher? He's an American and that game blew me away !

The first game in that list is Mazer Mayhem it's free to dl: [www.asahi-net.or.jp]

Should work in all regions now as I sent him in some bug fixes a week ago.

@Nexus6: No folks here know of that entry, its just that some of the others are a bit "underwhelming" I suppose is what the general consensus seems to say.

@Witzbold: The key difference that seperates the doujinshi titles you've mentioned and games like we've seen created in XNA, is that doujinshi is created to SELL at an event or convention like Comiket. Other varieties, such as fan-comics and erotic manga are made in the same way.

At the same time, some doujinshi is original content such as the Higurashi no Naku Koroni visual novel series. It, and its sequels are sold at Comiket, where-as the official PS2 port was sold in regular electronics stores. It's the same with the Touhou series you mentioned, and Higurashi Daybreak has also been quite a hit and has recieved an expansion. Even the popular Tsukihime and Fate/stay night visual novels that have spawned anime (like Higurashi) and PS2 renditions are doujin games based on original novels, and I don't think I need to bring up Melty Blood.

I suppose you can bring up titles like Alien Hominid or N/N+ that make the jump over to the Xbox Live Arcade, but the doujin market has a hell of a lot more content coming out year after year (probably because of the distances between each Comiket; developers need to make each event count!) and the fact that they're landing not only port deals but multi-seasonal anime series' is a testament to the power behind the genre.

@karmakid: Not if you know what you're doing.

Obviously, the 360 is hardly setting sales charts on fire in Japan (could be a good strategy for getting attention, though).

There are half a million of them sold there already.

Big games can sell 100K copies there.

You couldn't accuse MS of winning or providing serious competition but there are xboxen over there.

Also keep in mind, the American independent game dev mentality seems to be towards being a 'lone wolf', or being the only person working on the game, while Asia in general seems to be more geared towards working as a team, and as such Asian-made games get much better artwork because the programmer isn't also expected to come up with the art on his own.

I and many other developers who work on independent titles have a hell of a time finding a decent, dedicated 3D modeler to work with and stay motivated on our projects (because they have their own projects in mind, usually involving much larger games), and 3D modelers tend to turn to the mod scene so they can focus on the art and not have to worry about the code, as such the only good looking independent games tend to be (not all, but certainly the XNA games in the latest contest) very abstract in style (which makes the art requirement much, much simpler) and done by the programmer himself (flOw, Everyday Shooter).

@Taiyz: There is over 100 doujinshi events a year in Japan, It's true that comiket is the biggest but just so you realize, it's far from the only one.