Creator:

Price: 200 Points

Countries: Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English

Publisher’s Description
“FrogSlayer Studios presents, Go, an ancient Chinese game of strategy now available on XBox Live Community Games. Learn to play with our interactive tutorial and then play against your friends locally or against players at all skill levels via XBox Live.”

What We Think:
I recently read a tattered, vintage paperback copy of the book The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata which revolves around a newspaper journalist’s chronicle and analysis of the last great Go competition with the master of the old school of Go in Japan that took place during the early part of the 1900′s.

While some of it is fictionalized, the book, a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, uses a spare and honest look at the actual plays made during the game and how the incumbent young champion manages to defeat the old Master. It is  a strangely compelling and easy read, but despite all sorts of updating graphic charts of the gameboard, nowhere in the the book is there an actual explanation of the rules of the game.

Deeply curious as to how this simple game could be so devastatingly complex that some tournament matches could drag on for three months, I was delighted to find Go 3D in the Xbox Indie Game marketplace and dropped the two dollars to check it out and see if I could learn something.

The Xbox version comes with an easy to understand and rather comprehensive tutorial that relies on, and even seems to come from the American Go Association.  With hands-on lessons, this alone was worth the price of admission.

The game’s design uses a true three-dimensional object for the black and white stones and game board, so that it can be rotated and viewed from all angles.  The game does not have AI built in, however, and I imagine that trying to create the AI for something as rich as Go would be extremely daunting  as Go quickly becomes as challenging if not more so than Chess, so one can not expect this from an indie Xbox game.  Instead the developer allows you to play both the black and white stones while enforcing legal moves in solo mode.

Everything works out just fine in two player mode as the game has solid implementation for two controllers.

An excellent way to learn and practice the game, with a lovely Zen score and pretty visuals.  A strong recommend from us for this commendable and needed effort.

Rating: ★★★★★ 

Have you played Go 3D? What were your impressions?