It's only been a week or so since MS released its XNA beta, a game development tool for at students and hobbyists (aka homebrew developers) and look what we have here.

ARogan has released his homebrew 2D vertical scrolling shooter, F14 XNAScroller, which he says is similar to 1942 and Raiden. This is the first release of his game and he says its far from done. But adds that "I had put enough work into it to have something kind of fun to play." One gamer called it "Probably the best-looking (and sounding) game I have seen to date!" so we guess ARgoran did it right the first time.

ARogan says he plans to add a few interesting gameplay mechanics and even turn it into a 3D game but until then take alook at some basic info about F14 XNA Scroller.

Gameplay:
By default you get three lives. Fight off a few waves of enemies and make it to the big boss at the end. If you managed to destory it, the level just starts over again. To change the numer of lives look in the Player class and change total Lives. When you die you are invulnerable for the first two seconds.

Installation

* Requires .net framework 2.0, c# express, and XNA beta
* Fire up c# express, open the f14.sln file, click build, rebuild
* Look under binrelease and run the f14.exe.
* If you want to run it in debug under the IDE just hit F5 in C# express but performance is better if you run the f14.exe directly. It should have no problems runing at a solid 60fps on most machines.

Features:

* One level of play including three enemy types and a boss
* Three levels of parallax scrolling
* Sound
* High score
* Animated sprites, rotation, scaling
* Basic enemy ai, track the player, movement patterns
* Robust scripting engine so making your own levels would be easy.
* "Realistic" graphics (ha! - the ha! is from ARogan not form us!)
* Keyboard and Xbox 360 wired controller including rumble support

Controls:

* Keyboard and X360 wired controller supported
* Movement: W,S,A,D, Right analog stick, D-Pad
* Fire: Space bar, A button, Right trigger
* Restart: Home, Start button
* Exit: esc, back button

Before you watch the game video, please read the readme file. You'll thank us for it.