Community Games on Xbox Live are hard to locate. Or, at least, they were a week or so ago, the last time I checked. Maybe things have changed since then. If they have, you can skip the next two sentences, because they’re going to tell you how to find Community Games. If you go to the Community Games section of Xbox Live, it only shows you two or three games, none of which are all that interesting. In order to find the rest, you have to go to the “New Arrivals” section.
The reason you’d want to do this, besides downloading and playing In the Pit, the entirely graphicsless game I talked about here a few weeks ago, is to download and Play Swords & Monsters. S&M is a “minimalist” game that you could, literally, beat dozens and dozens of times in the short time limit Xbox lets you play its Community Games for before demanding that you give them money. I was easily able to get all three endings with enough time to spare to call my girlfriend over and show her how to get all three endings, too.
Don’t believe me? Try it. The game boils down the RPG genre to its absolute barest essentials, and I enjoyed it enough to seriously consider buying it, even though doing so is pointless from the consumer’s standpoint, since you can see everything the game has to see just by playing its demo. If only Microsoft let Community Games have Achievements….
Speaking of minimalist games, though, if you enjoy Swords & Monsters, here’s a few other (free) ones you could check out:
Quest for the Crown
You Have To Burn The Rope
And, if you don’t have a 360, here’s Swords & Monsters for the PC: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yhyv2zyzny5/SwordsAndMonsters117.zip