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Xbox Arcade Crystal Quest Maker Interviewed
Xbox Live Arcade is, so far, the easiest thing to point to as a complete success for the Xbox 360. The number of excellent games (some of them quite original) released for the service since the system's launch is very impressive. Gamecloud has an interview with Patrick Buckland, founder of Stainless Games. Stainless created Crystal Quest, the most recent addition to the Xbox Live Arcade. From the article: "Gamecloud - How did using the Xbox 360 Live Arcade to distribute the game come about? Patrick Buckland - It's a marriage made in heaven. We are going to do a downloadable PC version as well, but you get into the whole piracy issue again. Xbox 360 Live Arcade is just SO perfect for classic games - and for new games as well, as you'll see in the future from Stainless."
It's mostly an easy game... or at least the achievements are easy. I got the game the night it was released, and by the next morning, had all 12 achievments. Only a few were even any real effort. All I had to do was camp the levels on standard difficulty, and got most achievements that way.
Going for high scores isn't that much fun either, since you camp again, just on the hardest difficulty.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I'm the author of XQuest. I've been tempted several times to do an up-to-date port, but (a) I've got a family and hence no time, and (b) the original was written in a mixture of Turbo Pascal and assembly language, so it would have to be more like a complete rewrite rather than a port. The source is available, so if anyone wants to port and/or rewrite it I'd be more than happy to let them do so under the GPL or similar.
It's probably worth mentioning that the original doesn't work under W2K or XP, but works fine in a DOS emulator (such as DosBox).