Posted 10/30/2008 @ 07:01:39 AM by Joseph Molnar Filed under: Games , Xbox 360 , XNA

Tonight I was in San Francisco at the XNA Community Games Party. I had a great time meeting various folks including games developers and designers, the media, and the team who made XNA Game Studio happen within Microsoft.

One of the people I spoke with was Nathan Fouts, the developer behind Dream Build Play 2008 3rd place winner Weapon of Choice. Nathan used to work for Insomniac Games. You can see why he was a good fit within Insomniac when you see the weapon designs in his XNA game. While I jokingly called him a defector (from Sony), it was clear he was impressed with what Microsoft built, and happy that XNA gave him an easy way to start his own gaming company.

While I didn't get to play all of the games, my two favourites were CarnyVale: Showtime and Battle Tennis. I wasn't surprised to hear these were the 1st and 2nd place winners respectively in Dream Build Play 2008. In fact CarnyVale was a game I saw XNA team members having trouble putting down.

What is abundantly clear is XNA GS is an amazing tool that allows developers to build games that rival and surpass games on Xbox Live Arcade. Congratulations and thank you to the XNA team for bringing this to the public and congratulations to the game developers for building some amazing games. November 19th (the release date of the new Xbox 360 User Interface and XNA Community Games) cannot come soon enough.