Last week, I introduced Kodu, the new XBox game editor made by Microsoft. I used the PC version to test it and although it is a very good idea, it very quickly showed its limits.

First of all, the terrain editor system is not very easy to use, and sometimes doesn't work at all. Moreover, using 4 modes to edit the terrain makes it very counter productive, cause you need to go from one mode to another every ten seconds.

Then, about the behavior system in itself, each icon/block is very easy to understand, the names and images are quite self explanatory. But the system in itself is more obscure. Some elements can't work with one another, and you loose parallelism. I tried to make a tron/snake (kind of), so i needed my cycle to always go forward, and only turn when i turned the Joystick right/left. I created three instructions :

1. When joystick pressed towards left, turn object on the left;
2. When joystick pressed towards right, turn object on the right;
3. Always move object forward.

When I only had instructions 1 and 2, everything worked fine, the cycle turned left/right. As soon as I added the 3^rd instruction, the cycle only moved forward, ignoring the two other instructions. I had to change instruction 3 to : When joystick not pressed, move object forward. Then I got the problem of trying to detect a collision to make the game over. And still got no solution as the instruction is ignored...

Finally what's very sad is the limited number of behaviors available in Kodu, some games will be almost impossible to make

Apart from that, the rendering and global look and feel is very nice, although a little too Wii for me, and you can add some effects on objects.

I'm definitely not up-to-date on the high-tech videogame world.

Rachel Dratch