http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZOuDX7hmpk

radiangames Inferno - The trailer pretty much says it all, but in essence you take a twin-stick shooter(like Geometry Wars) and add a 30 level campaign complete with 4 player co-op, upgrades, items, a couple bosses, secret bonus levels, 3 difficulty levels, and a NewGame+. Then combine all that with the developer's high quality, extremely slick graphical style and some excellent music. All for a price of $1. Unfortunately the trailer seems to convey a slower pacing to the game. That is entirely untrue. For the most part you will be blasting away, or shielding yourself from blasts, for the majority of the game. You can explore to collect all of the gold scattered around the level, but it's never annoying or overburdening. There's good pacing to the game as well. New enemies and gameplay elements are spread out nicely and the difficulty ramps up particularly in the last 5-10 levels. The game took me around and hour and a half to two hours to complete(forgot to look specifically) and you can add the New Game+ to lengthen that by double at least. So the trailer may not capture your attention right away, but I think you'll be hard pressed not to spend the $1 to purchase it after you've played a few levels in the trial.

Now that you know what Inferno is and have maybe even played it, you will be able to understand what I am about to say. Xbox Live Indie Games have developed a sort of stigma. If people don't ignore the service outright(which the majority do), the others perceive the service as a haven for wannabe game makers who release shit games with bad graphics and rehashed gameplay. Unfortunately a lot of what is released on XBLIG is of... poor quality. I don't mean to belittle the intent of the individual developers, but some games really don't need to be released as they have been. Obviously quality is a subjective thing and creating a fully realized game is hard work. However, sometimes a reality check is in need. Now, I say this because finding truly great games on XBLIG can be hard. Not just in searching for, which I'll get to, but even in waiting for quality games to release. This is completely pulled out of my ass, though I'm going to venture a guess that out of all the games released in a week(we'll say 20-30 or the sake of having a number), there will be MAYBE one or two worth your time and money. That's a fairly big maybe too(hence the caps). Again, I don't mean to belittle intentions or time spent on a project, they just simply aren't good.

The next issue comes with recognition. Other than the specific Indie Games section in the Game Downloads area on the Xbox, there is absolutely no acknowledgment of the service or the games therein. There is also no chance of advertisement for your game, and that's even true within the Indie Games section. When a game is released, like radiangames Inferno, it is displayed in the Newly Released section up until it gets bumped off by more recent new releases, which Inferno already has. For Inferno, it was released on Sept. 1st and within a week it was off the list. Once a game has fallen off of that list, it is nearly impossible to find unless you are specifically searching for that game. With the time span so short from release to being off the list, you have very little chance to appear in the top 20 because very few have played your game. That said, the Top Rated section only lists the top 20 titles and you have to browse all of the games to find the rest of the list. While very helpful to find the best stuff on the service, you only see 20 of them and the majority are not going to bother(or know) to find the rest of the list. Take radiangames Crossfire for example. It was sitting at around 18, but has now fallen to 22. That means it is not visible in any of the highlighted lists and can only be found by searching all of the games then popping over to top rated or by title, and finding a good game among all of them by title is akin to a crap shoot.

Back to radiangames Inferno, it has been lucky enough to reach #10 on the top 20 list in less than a week since release with 312 ratings(as of this posting). The importance of this is that it is visible on a list I'm going to guess that the majority of people who enter the Indie Games section check. That brings me back to the stigma of XBLIG. If people realize that there are actually quality games to be found on the service, I think they're more likely to test others out. Thus increasing recognition and word of mouth about specific titles. Sure a list of the top 20 rated games helps, but it only helps those games and the same ones tend to sit there for a long time(or forever) and only when something like Inferno comes out, do things change up. I Made A Game With Zombies is the only game that has bucked the trend of people not paying attention to XBLIG. I firmly believe that radiangames Inferno can do the same, if not better, it just has to be found. What's sad is it won't. It won't get the recognition it so desperately deserves and it won't sell like IMAGWZ has sold.

I'm certainly not going to beg you to buy or even play Inferno, but as I've stated in previous posts, there are quality games sitting on the service that most of the time get overlooked and in my opinion, radiangames Inferno is right up there among the top 3 games on the service.

http://radiangames.com/

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/ga...-d80258550638/