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[TooMuchSpareTime]

Oh, the page is loading again now. And those screenshots are hilarious!!  :D

[Terry]

Finally played all the entries, and I've voted Man, that was hard. I had nearly 20 games in my shortlist! You people are amazing

[devo]

oh hell yeah

[tenth]

Even narrowing it down to three is very tough, indeed.

With so many entries (and such incredibly diverse ones, at that) it might be nice to have more voting categories. So in addition to "Best Game Overall", you could have things like "Best Artwork", "Best Gameplay", "Best Joke Entry", etc... Some of these games really deserve a reward like that, even if I wouldn't necessarily put them in the top three of a total ranking.

[Daniel Benmergui]

With so many entries (and such incredibly diverse ones, at that) it might be nice to have more voting categories. So in addition to "Best Game Overall", you could have things like "Best Artwork", "Best Gameplay", "Best Joke Entry", etc... Some of these games really deserve a reward like that, even if I wouldn't necessarily put them in the top three of a total ranking.

It would be cool to have something more than the top three, allright

[Gorman]

After the voting finishes (so as not to influence anybody) I can post my scores if anybody cares about a mainstream game reviewer's (with a love for indie games) opinion. ;-)

oh yeah, that'd be somewhat interesting.

[shinygerbil]

Vote'd.

Just went through all 48 games. Took me several hours :O

[DeveloperX]

I've cast my vote. Man there were some interesting games....was tough to vote, but I narrowed it down to three somehow.

[Corpus]

I can't run any of the XNA games, horrifyingly. I keep getting some obscure-sounding error when I try to run them. XNA is installed, though, including all the XNA stuff for Visual C# 2008.

[shinygerbil]

Could it be that you have an old-ish graphics card which doesn't support DX9.0 and some kind of shaders? My card has this problem

[Zedix]

I can't run any of the XNA games, horrifyingly. I keep getting some obscure-sounding error when I try to run them. XNA is installed, though, including all the XNA stuff for Visual C# 2008.

You might be missing some component of DX9. If you haven't already, try running Narcoleptic Soccer Rush's setup file (haha, shameless plug!) and it'll check if you have the right components to run XNA, and install the missing ones if needed. So far it has worked on every computer, unless you don't have a Pixel shader 1.1 card.

[Gressmon]

Voted.
Took me a couple of hours to test them all, but that was fun ! Good job to every one who made those ! 

[Soulliard]

I can't get the XNA games to work either (and yes, I did use NSR's installer). Which is unfortunate, since some of those games looked really fun.

[Gazillion]

I can't get the XNA games to work either (and yes, I did use NSR's installer). Which is unfortunate, since some of those games looked really fun.

That sucks considering Narcoleptic Soccer Rush is the best game there...  :D

All hi-la-rity aside I'm kind of disappointed at how many people can't run it, especially since we spent so many man(ly)hours on it. I think we might have to reconsider how we develop competition games next time, hard to get people to vote if they can't play... 

edit: Having said all that, would it be possible for people who couldn't run the game PM me what video card they have on their machine. I guess that's asking much but if you feel like it anyways... I'd like to see how many of you can't run it because of no shaders 1.1 support or if its something we did on our side (aside from picking XNA)

[Lim-Dul]

I for my part played Narcoleptic Soccer Rush and found it highly enjoyable. +1 for Vista, it seems. ;-)

[moi]

I wish young coders weren't so seduced by the easy path of the Sith Microsoft XNA as a devellopment platform.
I know it's a must if you want to have your game on XBLA -one day, maybe-, but I think having your game on XBLA isn't the ultimate grail.

[Gazillion]

We didn't choose XNA because we wanted our games on XBLA, we chose it because it made developing our game really easy. We chose it for a ton or reasons:

- C#
- lots of resources available (community/tutorials/sample code/great documentation)
- no low level details to consider (device initialization, etc)

I guess any choice made has its consequences. We didn't realize how many people wouldn't be able to run the game when we chose it being one of them.

Suggest an alternative that has points 2 and 3 (I'm opened to using Java) and I'll take a look 

[Chris Whitman]

Honestly, SDL frees you up for a lot of the same stuff. Device initialization is a snap; it's cross-platform; it runs efficiently and natively supports a lot of different media formats. Also, there is a ton of examples and support libraries out there for most anything.

If you can do that C/C++ thing, that is. I found writing something from scratch in SDL was a fair amount of work, but by no means unmanageable for one person with a couple of weeks of time.

[lukipuk]

Actually I used C++/SDL and make my game in one week from scratch, I can't compare to XNA, but i made my level editor in c#, and c++/c# is not so different after all...I think that SDL is good choice, that its easy and well documented with tutorials and everything, but also multiplatform (no compatibility problems, no additional 10-20Mb installation files) and runs on slow computers as well...

[seregrail7]

We didn't choose XNA because we wanted our games on XBLA, we chose it because it made developing our game really easy. We chose it for a ton or reasons:

- C#
- lots of resources available (community/tutorials/sample code/great documentation)
- no low level details to consider (device initialization, etc)

Same reason I went with XNA. My only other experience was with Aleggro, and that was a huge pain. It's such a shame Microsoft have totally destroyed the deployment of XNA based games on non-dev ready machines. I have 2 friends who both have Vista, and only one got it going even though they went through the same steps.