I'd buy that for a dollar!

Technically around 68 pence in the UK, I bought an Xbox Indie Game named Little Racers STREET at the weekend. I was vaguely aware of it beforehand but I decided to take the plunge and purchase it when a couple of friends invited me to play it online. Thankfully I have Kinect so I was able to say "Xbox Bing Little Racers Street" to find it, as it's no longer on the first page of indie games (if you can even remember how to navigate to that page). The multiplayer component of it is a recent update as it was initially released as a single player only game at the end of January. I think it is the first Xbox Indie Game I have played with online multiplayer and that's not to say that it's a poor early attempt either. It supports up to 12 players with pre race lobbies and handles host migration pretty seamlessly (where the host leaves and someone else is chosen to take over). There was lots of fun to be had, even though I struggled to compete being chucked straight into a class D race and only having enough money to buy a slightly upgraded class E car to begin with.

You may have guessed from this talk of classes that it follows a Gran Turismo/Forza like Career Mode where you can build up a garage of different classed cars. After the multiplayer game broke up I found myself going back into the single player career for quite some time, building up a better selection of cars for the next online session. It does a very good job of keeping you hooked, not only is there the desire to upgrade your cars with your race winnings but even if you come last place you won't feel like your time has been wasted. In addition to totalling up your winnings at the end of a race you can also see your progress towards completing a huge amount of in game challenges. These work well as a substitution for standard Xbox achievements but they also give a tangible reward, from a useful lump of credits early on, to higher classed cars than you would have been able to afford for a long time.

I couldn't really find much to complain about on the whole, there was a little bit of slowdown occasionally but even LaserCat suffered from some slowdown in places and that was only trying to recreate a Spectrum style game. When you are working with the .NET family of languages, which are abstracted a long way away from the hardware of the machine, I imagine you may often come up against poor performance that is very difficult to optimise. They are already working on another update for it though, so it may still improve in this area. I also found that it could get a little bit dull from a track point of view as each race is set on a specific part of one large city and there can sometimes be little to differentiate one race from another.

I really felt in a way that I wished I could pay more for it than 80 Microsoft Points, which is kinda rare for me as I probably even felt a little sting paying 240 MSP (gasp!) for Blocks That Matter (another great indie game that could almost have been a Live Arcade game). And while It's largely becoming accepted that the best price for games on iOS and Android is around $1/59p, those platforms can easily support adverts and allow you to buy additional in game currency. Xbox Indie Games have no other revenue stream available once someone has bought your game, so you're purely trying to judge whether more people will buy it at a lower price. Whatever your feelings are about buying in game currency with real money, I think it would have suited this game and have been a good additional source of income for the creators. They could have taken the approach that Eutechnyx have with their online MMORG Auto Club Revolution, where real money usually only buys things that don't have much affect on the gameplay, to avoid any complaints that you could just buy your way to the top of the multiplayer mode.

Sadly I don't think we're likely to see any changes to the way XBLIG works, so short of sending a cheque in the post, writing about it feels like the only way I can show additional support. So if you can spare the points, please give it a try.