On the XNA website is a great breakdown of the different membership levels. http://creators.xna.com/en-US/membership

In the U.S., a 1-year subscription cost $99. From what I understand, the premium membership is only necessary to have games peer reviewed, and to have the privelage of uploading them to XBOX LIVE. A premium membership is not needed if you just want to create games.

I just had to add my two cents to this topic because of what happened in a game of Halo 3 just last night.

I'm a 43 year old gamer that doesn't play a whole lot of Halo 3, mostly because I'm pretty lousy at it, but partially because of the annoying players. Now, I'm all for trash-talking amongst friends. Hell, even a random stranger throwing out a sarcastic comment isn't an issue. The gamers, both old and young, that are demeaning, rude, and just plain disrespectful, are the gamers I could do with out though. The muting option on XBL is a beautifully simple tool to use in the instances where someone is annoying the hell outta you.

Anyway, here's what happened last night. I was playing with my two sons (18 and 21), one of their friends (17), and their younger half-brother (12, from a marriage after mt ex-wife and I divorced). "Young, 12 year-old, half-brother" is one of those typical 12 - 13 year old kids that this thread was started in reference to. He won't bandy around racial slurs or do a lot of cursing, but he is very active in gloating over kills, laughing in your face, and just generally being rude to the opposing players. Well, the joke was on him last night when I decided to mute him. He was still being rude to me, but because I couldn't hear him, his rude remarks fell on deaf ears. Of course, my two sons got a kick out of it because they knew I had already muted him. My sons took it a step further and muted him too. Then we had the youngster believing that something was wrong with his mic. He eventually joined a party with some of his younger buddies. He realized that his mic was fine, but he never did figure out that we all muted him. As an added bonus, we didn't have to worry about him for the rest of the night.

So, there is always some way around the annoying chatter that is prevalent on XBL. Mute, disconnect your mic, or play only with friends, and enjoy your time.

Co-op levels are different from the single-player levels, and they can be played on or off line. The co-op levels incorporate a lot of teamwork and timed 'splosions. The couple times I played it on-line it suffered from some horrible lag though. As a matter of fact, the lag was so bad that it made some levels impossible to complete. Don't know if this has occurred with many other people, or if it was just a lousy night for me. Local multi-player is a blast though.

kozzy1234 has hit most of the important tidbits about this game. I agree wholeheartedly, this is a great underrated game.

Keep these two items in mind too:

1. The game can be played with bots. So, if you have a friend or two that also have the game, you could all play on the same team against a team consisting of only AI players. On easy, the bots are push-overs, but change the difficulty and you'll get a very challenging game.
2. A little clarification on the multi-player, on-line only situation with this game. There is no single-player campaign, which is what I think killed this title in the popularity department, but it's not 100% correct to call this an on-line only game. There are a handful of tutorials that advance you through the different controls and aspects of the game, and these are off-line, single player "missions". Once you get through the tutorial "missions" though, you'll need to get on-line to play anything worthwhile.

Now your mileage may vary, but I've been telling people that I'm gonna have to get a second job to get all the good games coming out this year:shock:. These are the games that I'm looking forward too:

Alpha Protocol (October 6, 2009)

Assassin's Creed 2 (November 17, 2009)

Batman: Arkham Asylum (August 25, 2009)

Borderlands (September 1, 2009)

Brutal Legend (October 13, 2009)

Dark Void (September 22, 2009)

Darksiders (December 31, 2009)

Dragon Age: Origins (October 20, 2009)

Forza Motorsport 3 (October 27, 2009)

Halo 3: ODST (September 22, 2009)

Overlord II (June 23, 2009)

Red Faction: Guerrilla (June 2, 2009) (just picked this one up)

Splinter Cell: Conviction (October 20, 2009)

Wet (September 8, 2009)

Of course some of these dates might get pushed off, as is known to happen, but 2009 is shaping up much better in my opinion than 2008. That's not to mention some of the games looking to hit the shelves early 2010, like Mass Effect 2, The Saboteur, and hopefully Aliens: Colonial Marines and Blood Bowl. All in all, I'm pretty stoked about the coming year.

If you're interested in the original arcade version of Gauntlet, it's available on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. It'll cost you only 400 MS Points, and you can get 4 players on a console at once. It plays just like the original arcade coin-op version, so if you liked that one you'll have no qualms about this one.

Burnout paradise- 30 Bioshock- 30 Bad Company- 30 skate.- 30 too lazy to put dollar signJustinge3

No hard feelings. I just found it somewhat comical that you were too lazy to put the dollar signs in, but not too lazy to tell us that you were too lazy to put in the dollar signs. It would have been less keystrokes just to put the dollar signs in.8)

Not much to go by, but it does seem like it could be pretty cool. Spring 2010 isn't that far away and could get excited over not having to wait too long to see it hit the shelves, but we know how dependable release dates tend to be.

Great review, and one that may have changed my mind yet again about getting this game. I originally had planned on getting it for the 360, but after the critics' reviews it seemed that it was better to stay away from it. After reading your thorough review, I think I might just pick it up and decide for myself whether or not it's a good game.