Details emerge on first wave of XNA Community Games

Microsoft has been slowly working on promoting their XNA Creator’s Studio and Community Games distribution system for some time now. Yesterday, that labor showed a little bit of fruit, as the Big M showed off footage of some of the new independent games at yesterday’s press conference. Now, they’ve provided some details and screens of the first five titles to hit the service:

• Clean Up: An environmentally friendly, third-person action/puzzle game where you maintain your own little biosphere by eliminating pollutants and transforming them into energy.
• Word Soup: Described as a “tactical word hunt”, players must connect tiled letters to form words and try to clear their screen of tiles in this puzzle game with single and multiplayer modes.
• Hot Potato Online: Another dodgeball game for a service that will already have two, this one has an explosive potato with a very short fuse.
• Colosseum: A 3D fighter with cel-shaded graphics. Very little information is available on it at this time.
• Megachile Pluto: This oddly-named title has you racing through solar systems and combining found resources to provide dying planets with the elements necessary to save them.

Of the list, Word Soup obviously piques the interest of my verbose nature but I’m really curious to know more about Megachile Pluto. It looks to be somewhat complex, with an item collection/combination component and gravity effects when navigating the levels. My only question is, what happened to The Dishwasher?