When XNA games were announced originally it was marketed as the “Youtube of games” because anyone can make a game and post it on Xbox Live Community Games. Much like Youtube there is a lot of stuff that you’re probably not interested in up there but mixed are a few great gems that are worth telling your friends about. Stuff like Miner Dig Deep, CarneyVale: Showtime, and Classicard are games that are well worth playing. On the other hand there are tons of games that I do not even bother downloading the trial for. And this is coming from someone who is a big fan of Xbox Live Arcade and Community Games.

I guess I should not find it surprising that, again, like Youtube there are lot of people copying each others ideas and trying to one up each other. It seems that for Community Games the place to try and best each other is with massage “games” that vibrate the controller. First there was Rumble Massage that allowed 1 player to have their controllers vibrate at the speed of their choosing. The graphics are not great, but for this type of thing does it really matter? About a month later Remote Masseuse release and expanded to include vibrating your friend’s controllers over Xbox Live. While I still think both of these are kind of lame I can see where there is some advancement here. However, today A Perfect Massage released, and it does pretty much the same thing as Rumble Massage but with possibly better graphics. However, it does not include support for controlling over Xbox Live. It seems to me that it was released simply to cash in as both of the previous massage titles popularity as they have regularly been in the top 10 Xbox Live Community Games each week. I’m fine with our people trying to make money but if you’re going to release an obvious clone of an existing product at least improve on the original’s features. On Youtube it is stuff like this that keeps me from browsing videos randomly. The only Youtube videos I watch are the ones my friends send me links to, and it is junk like this that keeps me from downloading the demo for all of the released XBLCGs.

It has been a while since I had something to really rant about but the prevalence of stupid and lame titles on Community Games is increasingly annoying. Microsoft does not allow a Community Game to be rejected because it is a clone or even if because it is bad game, but if they did I think the service would be a much. Out of all the Community Games games released less than 30% have a rating of over 6 on XNA Ratings. That does not seem that good to me so I started doing some more digging. Over on XBLCG.info they have an option to specify if oyu would recommend a game or not. Less 20% of all Community Games are recommended by over half of the people who tried the title. That means somewhere between 70 and 80% of the Community Games are not being very well recieved by gamers.

I realize I’m not offering much of a solution here, but I’m hoping there is one. Xbox Live Community Games has so much potential and I’d hate to see the service ignored by the average gamer because they don’t want to deal with all the junk on there.