I hit XBLA for demos this evening.

Get Chime. Well, obviously, you can play the demo and see for yourself, but you should at least take my word to go that far. The gameplay is strangely compelling (the music is a really nice and rewarding feedback mechanism) in what should mostly be a straight puzzler, but it looks nice, sounds good and generally has a well-rounded whole. And a hefty proportion of the money goes to charity, although I don't yet know what One Big Game does.

I also tried a few others (some new, some old):
  • Lazy Raiders is fine if you like that kind of thing, but I'm unlikely to buy a level-based puzzler on the 360: far too busy with the arbitrarily-replayable kind, like Bejewelled and the like.
  • Marble Blast Ultra gave me 33 seconds of playable demo. Trial version not worth the download: someone didn't read up on endowment effects...
  • Lumines Live seems nice. I don't know how I missed this one for so long. It also uses music as a feedback mechanism, albeit it not quite as elegantly as Chimes and with music I don't like. I'll probably play MP3s over the top.
  • Greed Corp is a strange turn-based, hex-based terrain-destroying game, which seems relatively difficult. That's a turn-off, of course, me being the wuss that I am, although I might give it some more time over the weekend. Very characterful but not quite as charming as Age of Booty, and I'm not sure there's all that much there.
  • The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (which is unfortunately just called Winterbottom in the menus where the character limit is shorter) is a puzzle-platformer with a nice take on the multi-character time-slicing mechanic that I sank hours into on Kongregate, once upon a time. I've kind of had enough of that (and it might be a bit more thinking that I want to do on the XBox), but I can certainly see the appeal and if you liked Braid (which was more thinking than I wanted to do on the XBox) I suggest you check it out.


If you know me (or have some reason to want to) when get in touch and I'll throw you my gamer tag thing.