Cosmos is a relatively interesting idea wherein you guide your ship around grabbing satellites to lob back at other players. Grab a series of satellites to create larger firepower than your opponent and let him have it.
It sounds far more interesting than it is, unfortunately. With relatively tiny graphics and more than slight rough edges what potentially could have been a fun deathmatch game appears to have completely disregarded the fun part.
Worst of all, when choosing to exit the game and not explicitly choosing the “buy game” option, you’re automatically taken to the purchase screen regardless before it’ll let you exit. Needless to say, this is a less than endearing feature of an already lacklustre trial. Surely this shouldn’t be allowed to get through review with this “feature” ?
This title was 400 points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
Other posts you might find interesting:
- Satellites Satellites is an interesting, if visually rough, board game styled...
- 2win Ghost Five word review: “Ghosts, Hearts, Love, Creepiness, Awkwardness” In 2win...
“Surely this shouldn’t be allowed to get through review with this “feature†?”
The peer review process is not about testing things like this. It’s about ensuring the game doesn’t crash and that gameplay is not impaired.
Yes, unfortunately the peer review process currently just makes sure the game works, and works well. There’s no quality control or even user ratings.
Though if I had to decide whether or not games went through a better process, I’d probably leave things as they are. It’ll allow better developers to shine amongst the junk.
If Microsoft did decide to add quality control, it’d turn Community Games into Xbox Live Arcade Lite.
And actually the best practices released by Microsoft encouraged us to do this.
Dull and boring game and the forced “Buy now” screen is an annoyance. Like if I wanted to quit a game and it forced me to view this screen I would actually buy it. In fact even if this game were any good I wouldn’t have bought it after it forced me to this screen. Some things just aren’t acceptable. And charging 400 points for a game that hasn’t even been tested enough to make sure all possible XBL gamertags fit in the highscore list (mine screws up the ranking) is ridiculous.
It seems an odd thing to not address to me – I fully understand if the review process has your hands tied, in which case the blame clearly lies with MS.
With any software, there’s an element of user trust involved and especially with something like the CC games where you’re inviting users used to a, how can I put this, safe(?) experience with XBLA – then you need to maintain that level of trust in the service.
If enough titles display erroneous behaviour beyond the natural course of bugs, gameplay glitches that can occur etc… then you’re leaving it wide open to erode that trust. It’s one thing having games of variable quality – which is a given on any platform that’s open to letting folks develop on be it mainstream, indie or otherwise and it’s another thing entirely to have titles that deceive the user.
In the long term, it only serves to harm the service and ultimately makes it a mockery for everyone involved. The last thing the CC needs when it’s trying to find its feet is folks pulling stunts like this as the service doesn’t want to garner a reputation. Well, a reputation would be nice – but I’d like to hope it’d be a *good* reputation
I dunno, as a developer I’d be uncomfortable with doing anything like this and it does sort of play against my own personal moral code, but people is as people are – which is why I’d be vociferously arguing the case for some sort of basic check to be put in place.
Mind you, it’s down to Redmond there to sort that I guess. Or folks to stop being silly. The latter is probably the bigger ask of the two.
The MSXBCG Deities recognise that the current review process is a bit broken and are working on shoring it up, along with a million other details.
Personally, though, I would consider pressing the “don’t buy” button and winding up on the payment screen unquestionably to be a BUG, and I’d have failed them for it.
9572AD said: “Personally, though, I would consider pressing the “don’t buy†button and winding up on the payment screen unquestionably to be a BUG, and I’d have failed them for it.”
That would be an effective and legitimate solution in my eyes.
I don’t think this will be a big problem for XBCG because it’s unanimously agreed to be annoying and a turn off. If anyone wants to do it, fine, just don’t expect their game to sell, or to be played. I’ve downloaded nearly every single XBCG title up until a week ago, I plan to do another round this weekend and I can tell you already that I’ll pass on even getting the demo for this one. I got tons of points loaded for purchases and I don’t want my brother or anyone else to accidently purchase a game I don’t want.
I’m the developer of Cosmos and I wanted to respond to the comments I’ve seen in this thread. First off I appreciate seeing feedback on my game, especially regarding problems with the game. This is the first game of any kind I have ever developed and in making the game I was striving to make something I felt was fun. During the review process my original game file did not have any kind of buy system in the game itself, I didn’t consider it necessary to have the option in the game itself to buy the game when that could be done in the dashboard, but several reviewers suggested to me to add that feature when the game is in the trial mode.
After looking at the best practices from microsoft it does suggest adding that when the player is leaving the game to pop up the option to buy the game. Seeing the negative feedback from users regarding this I will be removing this from the game when I update it later this month. I am updating the game to fix a couple minor gameplay bugs I have discovered since the release, including the high scores table user name issue. I will also be adding a help/tutorial section that will educate players on how the game works, what things are, and the goals of playing the game.
I am adding this section due to seeing a lot of feedback from people who can’t figure out what to do and not liking the game, and people who are finding it fun once they get the hang of how the game works and how to play it. As far as my pricing decision I chose $5 over $2.50 because I consider $5 to be a cheap price to pay for a game I like, and if I don’t like a game I won’t buy it, not even for $2.50. Based partly on that factor I did not feel my game would sell twice as many copies if I set the price at $2.50 as apposed to $5, not in a marketplace where people are used to $5 being the cheap price and paying as much as $15 for a game, and there have been at least a couple games I’ve seen at the $15 price point that I felt were garbage and over priced, but that was obviously only my opinion because those games were selling at that price.
If I had the option though I would be open to lowering it to $2.50 under certain conditions, however lowering the price is not an option at this time because microsoft doesn’t currently allow game prices to be changed after being submitted. I do agree that their current review system for xbcg is very flawed, having gotten to experience this process first hand, as well as playing the resulting games available on this new service. This is a new system however and will be a work in progress and microsoft is very aware of that fact. I do like however the freedom of this service to be able to create just about whatever we want. I’m glad there is no system to reject a game because it isn’t fun or some people think it’s a bad game, because people have different tastes.
And just because 1, 10, 100 or even thousands of people think a game sucks, doesn’t mean that their still won’t be people that do enjoy it and consider it a good game. Everybody has their own standards for what is good, bad, fun, etc. One thing I hope to see added soon is some kind of scoring system for games that can be seen in the dashboard so users can see how other people are rating a game before downloading, as well as rate the game themselves after playing to voice how good or bad they thought the game was.
[...] Cosmos [...]
[...] Cosmos [...]