Author: by Staff

Microsoft revealed the winners of its Dream-Build-Play competition, which invited students, hobbyists and amateur designers to submit Xbox 360 games created using XNA Game Studio 2.0. The four winners will divvy up $70,000 in prizes, and each receives an invitation to release their title on Xbox Live Arcade -- though many may now choose to stay on Xbox Live Community Games, since it's so close to release. The competition was first announced in June of this year, when it was revealed the creators of the top four games would win $40,000, $20,000, $10,000, and $5,000, respectively. Those top four are as follows:

1st Place: CarneyVale - Team Gambit Prize: $40,000 "CarneyVale: Showtime is a vertical ragdoll platform game. In the game, you play as Slinky, a circus acrobat trying to rise up the ranks by performing acrobatic tricks and death-defying stunts through increasingly complex arenas. Chia even built-in a circus map editor for players to create their own obstacles to overcome, bringing user-generated content to a new a level."

2nd Place: Battle Tennis - Dot Slash Studios Prize: $20,000 "An arcade tennis game with a fighter twist, featuring special moves, powers, combos, counters and a lot of cool features. It also makes for a great party game with up to four players."

3rd Place: Weapon of Choice - Mommy's Best Games Prize: $10,000 "Weapon of Choice is a high-energy, side-scrolling action game with tons of unique weapons and playable characters used to fight a myriad of amazing monsters. "

4th Place: HurricaneX - Hu Ling and Team Prize: $5,000 "Hurricane X is a fighting arcade game.People can control the player to exploit the beautiful oriental combat moves to fight against massive enemies one battle after another or just release the powerful hurricane to kill them all at one move." Honorable Mentions

Save Jack "Save Jack is a bizarre little arcade game where the player takes the role of a little girl who is on a quest to save her older brother, who happens to be an evil genius. Her brother has created little energy critters that power all of his machines, which the player can collect as ammunition."

Blow - vector2games "Effectively, it's a simplified version of The Incredible Machine or bridge builder games like Eets: Chowdown or Elefunk. You need to place fans around the environment in order for a 'King' bubble to fly around and collect the rest of the bubbles."