XNA

This is why I love Xbox. News broke at the GDC a week and a half ago that XNA, a developers kit for Xbox 360, was to be released onto Xbox Live as of that day. This means two things. One, for indie developers, there's a kit that allows them to develop games for the 360. This really is a first. Before, the only chance that a developer had at making a console games was to make a Flash game for PC and hope that somebody picked it up. Either that or spend a lot of cash on buying a less professional dev kit and making bad games that way. Now, there is a fully licenced kit and it's free.

Two, gamers can download these games at no cost. This means cheap, often innovative gaming made by some great unknown developers. There may well be some badly made tat out there but the standards are sure to be high. Indie developers often have some more innovative ideas too because it is ideas like this that gets their games discovered.

Already there are some great games to grab, and while they are only trial versions for now, it is still a great way to see what is to come. One of the games, Dishwasher, is one of the best 2D scrolling fighters I have ever seen. It is games like this and the fun puzzler, Jelly Car, that are going to make XNA a brilliant idea. After all, you can't argue with free games!