>>Community Game Brief

If you paint someone else’s game blue, does it become yours? That’s the question posed in Blueprint Racer 4D, a monochromatic racer that’s a nearly 1:1 copy of an existing game, except that it’s blue. It’s based off of XNA Racing Game, one of Microsoft’s example games, used as a training tool for budding developers.

Oh Mr. Wright, did you think no one would find out?

The high points on Microsoft’s Community Games service are few and far between, but the lows continue to be oh-so-many. Without much quality control, the service suffers from a deluge of unfinished, exploitative, and unoriginal games that are often the result of computer science homework assignments.

But Blueprint Racer takes the cake – if the developer had made even the slightest attempt to differentiate their game from the XNA Racing Game example, there may have been some merits to judge it on. They could have created new cars, tracks, boosters, multiplayer, anything. As it stands, “The blue looks really blue” is about the biggest compliment I can muster.