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Gamescrap's Bad Xbox Live Community Games: Honorable Mentions and Five GOOD Games 

Here we go, the second part of this humungous Community Game wranglefest. I had so much stuff left over from the original article that I even had to cut some of it out for the second part. Come to think of it, who needs to see screenshots and vids of a stupid TV calibration application anyways? Honorable Mentions are for games that, while pretty lame, just couldn't seem to hang with their bretheren that made up the original ten bad Community Games. Page one brings you an assortment of hulked up female wizards, a game that seems more full of itself than its gameplay, and an EXTREEEEME bowling game. Good stuff.

Page two brings you three "games" that shouldn't have even been considered for the XBL Marketplace. We've got an app that shows nothing but ocean scenes, another app by a person who thinks the world only celebrates Valentine's Day and birthdays, and lastly, a friggin' Xbox calculator.

While crab fishing might be the world’s deadliest job, Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm does a great job of turning what can be considered an intense and demanding experience into a fine slurry of tedium with a god amount of boredom sluiced in, and that’s just for starters. After playing the game seemingly for weeks, it’s hard to really know what the developers were aiming for here. Is it a crab fishing sim? Maybe an exaggerated, arcade style take on the prestigious crab fishing industry as a whole? Hell no. Alaskan Storm can amount to what can be considered mind numbing, slightly hypnotic assembly work. Forget your Halos and your Killzones kids; it’s time to take the mantle of the world’s most exiting vehicle of destruction: a 48-foot crab fishing boat! Yeeeeee-haw!

For those who may not be privy enough to have caught the show while they were snowed in over a weekend, the show follows a handful of crews with embedded cameramen as they brave the Bering Sea in search of crab. I’ve always drawn similarities between fans of the show and NASCAR fans. They’re not into the show for the love of seeing who catches the most crab, it’s all about who’s going to go overboard or be killed off. While the show does a great job of casting doubt as to the fate of each crewmember before every commercial break, Alaskan Storm seriously fucks the formula up. If you come into this game with a hard on for danger and excitement, Alaskan Storm will only leave you flaccid and doubting whether you can trust another game again.

Enter a fully immersive fantasy world of menus in a indie RPG that literally takes seconds to beat!

If you put a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters in the same room, eventually they will come up with the world's greatest novel. If you put a thousand kids in a room with XNA express, well, you get community games. Before you fly off the handle, let it be known I'm a huge supporter of indie games and indie developers. What I hate, however, is when Microsoft gives the power of charging for these little abominations on an unsuspecting public.