XBLIG Escapees: Mommy's Best Games On PC
2D retro shooters
Xbox Live Indie Games has felt like an outpost of PC gaming on Xbox 360. It's a space like Newgrounds, Game Jolt, or Itch, where anyone can make and release small games, which means its library of thousands has everything from scrappy gag games to some really pretty great stuff. And like PC gaming, Microsoft had no idea what to do with XBLIG - they hid the space away for years, and are now planning to close it.
But! Good (and RPS-relevant) news: four games from prolific XBLIG dev Mommy's Best Games - who you might know for the gun-stacking Serious Sam Double D - have arrived on Steam, giving a small peek into the world.
The four games are all retro 2D shooters of various types in bright colours. Explosionade is a bit Metal Slug-y, Shoot 1UP is a vertical-scrolling shmup where you can deploy and control oodles of ships at once (and fight a lady with roboboobs, because shmups), Weapon of Choice is a bit Contra-y, and Game Type... I'm really happy Game Type made it over.
The horizontal-scrolling shmup is perhaps the weakest of the four, but is such a daft artifact of its time and place. Game Type, see, is a game parodying Microsoft's awful new Xbox 360 UI from 2011, which filled the main menu with junk and adverts while also hiding XBLIG away behind a button labelled 'Game Type' with a picture of a parkouring lady in a hoodie. If you're bringing over some XBLIG games, it'd be a shame to leave something like that behind.
Explosionade, Shoot 1UP, and Game Type cost £1.99 apiece, while Weapon of Choice is £3.99. Or they're all in this bundle for £5.59.
