Yay

Explosionade - 80 MS points. Explosionade is the third game from Mommy's Best Games, and might be their most controlled and focused game yet. Both Weapon of Choice and Shoot 1Up had a massive sense of scale, whereas Explosionade focuses on combat in small enclosed rooms. This actually works in the game's favor, because by keeping the action in a focused area more attention was given to balancing each weapon and tool at your disposal. You control a mech suit through a series of challenge rooms filled with aliens, gold, and destructible walls. To help you with those destructible walls your mech's primary weapon is a grenade launcher that can either fire sticky or bouncing grenades depending on whether you tap or hold the right trigger. In addition to the versatile grenade types, you have a machine gun assigned to the right analog stick and temporary shield that can protect you from enemy fire. And while the grenades are a lot of fun, it's the shield that steals the show in the end. Not only does it block enemy fire, but you can also use it to bounce, either to reach higher ledges or just to bounce on an alien's head. Making defensive tools just as fun as offensive ones seems to be a common trait for Mommy's Best Games, and Explosionade continues in that tradition. There's a very tongue in cheek story tying the game's 40 levels, and customizable difficulty down to the game's speed (I've found 175% to be a good speed). If you like action games, then download Explosionade right now.

Coral's Curse - 240 MS points. Coral's Curse plays like no other game I've ever seen. The story goes that you're a mage whose spell backfired, turning you into a half-snake creature. You control the head and torso with the left stick, while the tail is controlled with the right stick. It takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it's actually a remarkably intuitive controls scheme. With it, you can perform actions like balancing on the tip of your tail to reach higher platforms or grabbing onto ledges with your tail to use them as pivot points. The game is very exploration-based, as you'll spend most of your time sliding through underground caverns and flooded tunnels looking for keys to unlock the next area. It's very hard to get lost though, thanks to a map on the pause screen that highlights your next objective. To defend yourself from enemies you can cast both fireballs and an ice attack, both of which are effective against different enemies. For example, some enemies can only be killed by freezing them first, then attacking with a fireball. I probably should put this game in the Ay category because the controls certainly aren't for everybody, but I just love how it all comes together too much to give it anything other than my highest recommendation.

Excruciating Guitar Voyage - 240 MS points. I'll admit that I had pretty low expectations for Excruciating Guitar Voyage. Maybe it was the cut-out photographs for heads style or the plot concept that's basically ripped right from Brutal Legend. But this is one of those wonderful cases where my instincts are completely wrong, because Excruciating Guitar Voyage is actually a surprisingly good adventure game. On your journey to restore metal music to the world you'll pick up items, talk to a range of fully voiced characters, and solve puzzle that cause horrible bodily harm to your character. Don't worry, it appears he is immortal, somehow. Puzzles revolve around either electrocuting or setting your character on fire, and using those elements in the environment. Between this and Clover: A Curious Tale, classic adventure games seem to be seeing a resurgence through Xbox indie games. And if the games continue to be this good, I say the more the merrier.

U Want Cookie? - 80 MS points. Don't let the silly title and terrible cover art fool you, U Want Cookie is a challenging game that can give N+ a run for it's gold bricks. In fact, U Want Cookie seems to take a lot of inspiration from N+, between the collecting of gold crumbs to the merciless barrages of missiles. U Want Cookie differentiates itself by playing from a top-down perspective, taking away N+'s acrobatics but giving the player more of a free range of movement. You also have two special abilities that allow you to either sprint or become temporarily invisible, which are both certainly needed to get past some of the more trigger-happy obstacles. And once you complete the game's 100 levels, if you can complete them, there are a handful of multiplayer modes to tackle challenges with a friend. The best of the multiplayer modes, Builders Block, even puts one player in control of building death trap levels while the other players collect golden crumbs and try to stay alive. It's a fantastically done game that really deserves more recognition than it's likely to receive.

Ay

Tank Battles - 400 MS points. Wait a second, this isn't an indie game. Yup, Gameloft has come to the Xbox indie marketplace with their previously PSN-only title Tank Battles. Like most of Gameloft's games, it's a very polished imitation of an existing game, and in this case it's the classic Atari game Combat. It looks great, has dozens of arenas to fight in, and will certainly entertain you and your friends for a couple of rounds. But in the end, the gameplay is just as shallow as the other Combat imitation games out there. Fifty single player missions try to add replay value, but the AI is either incredibly easy early on or remarkably cheap in the later levels, with little in-between. There's nothing really wrong with Tank Battles, but there's a good chance that you already have a much better multiplayer game on your 360 for deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag.

Fruitbash - 80 MS points. Fruitbash is a Bejeweled style puzzle game that takes a little more planning than PopCap's casual classic. Each cleared fruit fills in the tile it was on, with the ultimate goal to fill in the entire board. It's a solid puzzle game design, if not completely original, but should surely satisfy puzzle fanatics looking for more colors to match.

Snake Eyes - 80 MS points. Snake Eyes looks like a simple Zuma clone, but actually has a fairly unique hook. Instead of firing marbles from a central location, you can select any marble along the path and launch it from there. For the most part this works really well, and keeps the game feeling fresh even if you're a Zuma veteran. The downside of choosing where to shoot from is that the controls for doing so aren't particularly intuitive. Selecting which marble to use is harder than it should be, as you'll often miss the marble you meant to select. It was never so bad as to cause me to lose a round, but it was still a point of annoyance while playing.

Nay

RAID - 80 MS points. Once again, Silver Dollar Games has attempted to disguise a reaction test game as something else. This time they pretend that it's a SWAT game where you clear rooms of terrorists, and the illusion actually works for a short time. New elements are added like a sniper to aim and unarmed hostages that you aren't supposed to shoot, but in the end it all still boils down to pressing the right button when it tells you to. If you've always wanted a game that is made entirely of quick-time events, then this is the game for you.

Angry Brainless Bovines - 80 MS points. Angry Brainless Bovines has your Avatar running through mazes trying to steal milk from angry cows. If the simplistic gameplay doesn't bore you too much, then getting stuck on the geometry will certainly frustrate you enough to stop playing.

Superspace 2 - 80 MS points. Superspace was a good concept marred by cumbersome controls. Superspace 2 is more of that. This style of game can be done well, and I would point to games like Gravitron360 and PixelJunk Shooter as examples, however when the controls are this floaty and unwieldy it's hard to have fun with the game's well designed puzzles.

Sniper Defense - 80 MS points. Had enough of zombie games? Well too bad, because here's another one. You move a crosshair to shoot poorly drawn zombies in the head. You can upgrade your weapon and buy more ammo with your earnings from each round, but it's still the same basic point and shoot gameplay that has been done too many times before.

Avatar Kung-Fu - 240 MS points. Finally, a side-scrolling beat-em-up using Avatars! Unfortunately, it's not very fun. You just continuously walk to the left and punch or kick your way through Avatar after Avatar. There's some variation with Avatars that will throw knives at you, but all this does is give you a reason to use the jump button from time to time.

The Tribes of Ursea - 80 MS points. The Tribes of Ursea is a fantasy deathmatch game where you can play as either a flying creature or a centaur. Even though they do less damage, the flying creatures have the definite advantage because of their mobility. Either way though, the poor aiming controls and glitching graphics aren't going to keep you glued to the screen.