Today’s review is about a little Xbox Live Community Games entry called Being. Developed by ThirdParty Ninjas. It was originally a Microsoft Dream-Build-Play 2008 contestant. In it you play a little red dude, and are supposed to save a princess… Or Something. The official description isn’t really much more descriptive.
Unfortunately xblcg trial games are only about 8 minutes long, and that was only just enough to give me a taste. Not enough time to really know the characters or story. Game play is simple, just jump and run. You can’t hurt the bad guys, but they can hurt you. There is coins to collect, and doors to go through. Sometimes you have locked doors which you need different colored keys to get through.
The graphics are a little weak. Even though they’re supposed to be 8-bit color MS-DOS era graphics, they don’t look like really great 8-bit color graphics. As someone in irc said “Colorful but not very creative. Each piece looks like it’s been designed on it’s own, but not much thought has gone into putting them together it seems.” And I agree but it’s not that bad. The sound effects are adequate. The music is not annoying, but sounds more like really good midi instruments, and in a few places like real instruments.
Eight minutes really didn’t really give me enough time to figure out if it had anymore to it than jumping, and collecting coins, however I found that I wanted to continue playing because it was easy just to jump and run around.
The price is around 200 Microsoft points, or about $2.50.
Name: Being
Final analysis: Mediocre although I did want to keep playing to find out if there was anymore to the game.
Price: 200 MSP / about $2.50
Where you can get it: XBox Live Indie Games (On the XBox 360 console)
Tags: games, Third Party Ninjas, xbla, xblig, xbox, xbox live, xbox live community games