Title:

Developer Summary:
She’s the girl of your dreams, but you can’t remember who she is.

What Our Reviewers Think:
To begin with WDIDLN is really more of a strategy/puzzle game rather than action and adventure as listed at Xbox.com.  I enjoyed playing through the demo one time through and had a few good laughs but even within that amount of time began to get bored by the one-note interaction. Though the idea shows promise, the developers could stand to take their idea a lot further.

Essentially, the game takes you through a variety of hints to help you figure out the girl whom you dated last night.  “She was a blonde,” “Her occupation was a model,” “She loved the beach,” “She posed like a model in her picture,” “You met her at the bar.”   By deductive processes you narrow down things down to the last few candidates to match up with the girl of your dreams.  It’s all up to you!   Unfortunately it does not constitute a game, it constitutes a chapter of a game or a puzzle within one at best.   Sad to say the demo doesn’t allow you to find out whether or not you were correct at picking your date.  I wouldn’t spend money on the full game versus playing the demo for free; it’s good for one round but I can’t envision a much richer experience beyond that.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

Title:

Price: 400 Points

Countries: Canada, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English

Publisher’s Description
Save the city… or destroy it! Play as the hero and save the city by calling in tips, surrounding suspect buildings, and running down the bad guys. Or choose to destroy the city by avoiding the patrolling heroes and setting bombs inside the buildings – leveling the city building by building.

What We Think:
Chalked succeeds where so many other game developing upstarts have failed – the basics.  With simple and intuitive controls, wonderfully inventive and beautifully realized black and white visuals (the characters look like faceless Gumbys) and an awesome soundtrack, this seemingly simple take on Simon – that is, matching button combinations, is rather more challenging and multi-layered than it seems at first glance.

The game actually combines a variety of games – the Simon element, a puzzle solving element involving figuring out what buildings to topple in strategic sequence, and then the classic Pac Man – run from the ghosts element.  You see – you play the role of a miscreant with an insatiable lust for bombing buildings to the ground.  When destroyed, a building dissolves into the ground leaving a space where once it stood.  Then the “good guys” come after you for your misdeed.  It’s not an easy game at first, but it’s easy enough to navigate and fun enough to look at that it holds interest long enough to figure out some basic strategies.

We wish all community games merited the 400 points like Chalked does.

Rating: ★★★★☆ 

Have you played Chalked? What were your impressions?

Title: Miner Dig Deep
Creator: Robir
Genre: Action & Adventure
Price: 200 Points
Countries: Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English

Publisher’s Description
Dig and expand your mine to find greater treasures from the depths. Build the deepest mine so you can make your fortune in rare gems and metals from the earth below.

What We Think:
As could be expected, the Xbox Live Games Community’s contributions to the Xbox Live catalog are both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing because they provide fresh, unorthodox ideas that might spark some creativity for the bigger developers who seem stuck on forever improving the textures of First Person Shooters.  A curse, because a lot of sub par, unstable junk just slips through the cracks – likely developers who think that just getting on to the Xbox Marketplace will somehow pay their rent and not realizing that quality stands for a whole lot.  Unfortunately this dilution makes it less and less appealing to wade through the onslaught of new titles not to mention it destabilizes an otherwise rock solid game platform. (Oh don’t start the ring of death is like, last-century news).

For this very reason, when an excellent game does come along, it reminds us that there is still hope.  Miner Dig Deep is a great looking game with excellent sound design and music (the soundtrack sounds like a hip Silverlake indie band) and most importantly: the five-second play cycle is perfectly executed – easy to pick up, detailed enough to sustain interest and very responsive to user input.

Far too many developers fail to understand that if a game doesn’t work at the basic control level, if a user does not “get” or feel comfortable with how to puppeteer their avatar, let alone how it looks when it moves, then the rest is irrelevant.  Too many games, even those with multi-million dollar budgets fail at this basic level.

Miner Dig Deep has a brief but logical learning curve.  It then succeeds at the next flagpole: the five-minute play cycle offers the player opportunities for simple level advancement by virtue of the stickiest game ploy of all – improve your abilities, sell stuff you have found questing for cash with which to upgrade your gear, rinse, repeat – addictive gameplay.  Of course this simple formula in and of itself is not enough to make a great game, but in this case, the blend of Dig Dug, N+ problem solving and Arkadian Warriors simple upgrading systems make this one a winner.

At 200 points this is a steal.

Rating: ★★★★½ 

Have you played Miner Dig Deep? What were your impressions?