Kodu Game Studio on Xbox Community Games.  First of all, this was a terrible place to place this as no even knows about community games.  I have a major dislike for the fact that I have to be connected to the internet through Xbox Live, at least initially to run Kodu or any other Community (soon to be indie) game for that matter.  Anyways, yeah I picked up Kodu.  I dont know if you have ever done programming before but this is programming lite and because of that the menus of things you can add, edit and script is overwhelming.  I did the first couple tutorials then I decided to just forget about the rest and go off and make a "game" of my own.
I decided to start simple.  Two dudes in a field, a net and a ball.  Something like soccer or football, or hockey.  Anything.  Just a really bad game that involved two dudes trying to get that ball into a net or something that's considered a net.  This is where the frustration for Kudo starts - the included items to bring into the game world are extreamly limited.  Take the Kodu character himself, he sucks.  He floats, is really slow and isnt easy to control.  Why on Earth could they not have added a simple man or woman to put into your game.  Instead you have to decide on this Kudo thing or a boat, a motocycle (which I assume is the only thing reliable for racing games) and other ridiculous things.

Anyways, so I go ahead and place my things in and like anyone who has any programming experience you now need to code this thing.  Coding is hit or miss.  The game doesnt really tell you how to do things, it really expects you to explore the program and try things.  I think a more indepth tutorial would've been better.  Anyways, so you set your character to move when you move the left analogue stick.  Thats easy.  What's impossible is to have the ball score as a goal when it crosses a ficticious line.

Now it's been a very long time since I've done heavy duty C++ but I am quite skilled at.  I struggled and tried every option available.  Let me tell you, there's no real way to create a net.  You can create a wall with an open area - which is what I tried, but no net.  So I settled for that.  I then looked in the pre-loaded game worlds and lo and behold there is a world with a dummy soccer field but no actual game.  Well that doesnt help me.  I went to look at the rest of the tutorials and I couldnt find how to set as a trigger or a simple if/then sequence of when a ball goes over a certain area to score a point.

I then gave up and tried some of the preloaded games, they arent of the highest quality which is weird.  They are more like tech demos, but really bad ones.  Like, "hey this is the kind of stuff you can do with this program" .  Going onto Youtube after to see if I could anyone elses work was only marginally better.   One huge bummer is that there is no upload server which stays true to Microsofts lame "no public user generated content" policy - you can only share your games with your friends - I think this was a really poor choice as even in Little Big Planet have fun with playing other peoples content and they use this random content made by random people to advertise the game to their friends or get ideas of their own.

The game is 400 points, I bought it along with Battlefield 1943 which I'm feeling a little regretful for buying as there's only 3 maps but I think that regret will go away in the coming days.  I guess we'll finish up with this:

Did anyone else pick up Kodu?  What are your impressions?  Got any games upcoming or released that you want to talk about and share?  Know anywhere someone can get some pointers or join a Kodu community?  Etc.,