Put Yourself in the Game
At A Glance
- Ryan takes a look at the first wave of games to include support for in-game Avatars, including A Kingdom for Keflings, the first game to include your Avatar as a playable character.
Published November 19, 2008
The New Xbox Experience is here at last, and along with new features like Netflix support, the party system, and game installations, comes the much anticipated Avatars. These highly customizable virtual recreations inject a heaping helping of personality as they transform your Gamer Profile from static text to a fully realized virtual YOU tailor-made to fit your style.
Be careful! Luckily,your Avatar knows its own strength.
There's more to Avatars than just their quirky, joyful presence on your Dashboard and Friends List though. From their conception, they've been destined to participate in the games you love, and not just as a stand-in for your gamer picture, but as a key gameplay component to add a personal touch to your in-game experience.
Avatars ignite a spark of connection between player
and character that simply didn't exist before.
It's one thing to watch a randomly selected character in a game celebrate a win, but when it's your own customized Avatar getting busy with a jig of victory while your competitors look on in comic humiliation, the sense of personalized satisfaction is that much sweeter.
Kingdomof Avatars
Chief among the Avatar-enabled games is developer Ninja Bee's A Kingdom for Keflings. This world-building Xbox LIVE® Arcade title is the first game to feature your Avatar in fully playable form. The game revolves around a benevolent giant that guides the itty-bitty Kefling society from aspiring hamlet to thriving kingdom. Your Avatar plays the part of the benevolent giant.
Happy Keflings make for happy Avatars.
You'll hoist towers, platforms, already-fabricated reading rooms and offices and a great deal more besides, and place them together to craft entire buildings. You'll ply giant tools to wrest lumber, rock, crystals, and more from resource points, and even pluck Love (really) from the Town Square and install it in the house you just crafted to give life to new Keflings. From the moment you grasp hold of a Kefling with your giant mitts to carry it gently off to its new task, and it flails its arms in what I choose to believe are transports of joy, you'll be sold on in-game Avatars.
With its slick combination of macro and micro-management, A Kingdom for Keflings is an outstanding game on its own. With your custom-made gentle giant Avatar literally building an entire kingdom around you, the experience is all the more remarkable.
Of course, Avatars exist as much for the community to enjoy as anything else and so A Kingdom for Keflings offers cooperative play with up to three friends over Xbox LIVE as well. This way, you can work together with your friends' own Avatars, creating Kefling kingdoms together in a spirit of giant-sized cooperation.
jy16 is looking good.
Title Updates
In addition to A Kingdom for Keflings, you can expect a series of title updates to add Avatar support for a number of games with the New Xbox Experience arriving November 19.
- Scene It?: The movie trivia phenomenon Scene It?® Box Office Smash will find Avatars invading its trivia couch to battle wits with one another. When you click your heels in victory after a well-played round, your custom Avatar does the celebrating.
- Hardwood time: For all the thousands of Hardwood Hearts players out there, developer Silver Creek Entertainment has integrated Avatar support in place of static Gamer Pictures. Now your animated Avatars add a touch of liveliness to the proceedings. Hardwood Spades will join in on the fun soon, too.
- UNO: One of the most popular games on Xbox LIVE Arcade, UNO®, adds Avatar support to flesh out an experience already supporting both Gamer Pictures and the Xbox LIVE Vision camera. And you'll be able to do the same when UNO RUSH™ releases as well.
The preceding games represent just the beginning of a remarkable new journey on Xbox LIVE as Avatars begin to take on an active in-game role. In short, Avatars ignite a spark of connection between player and character that simply didn't exist before, and their potential for in-game action is just getting started.
Article by Ryan Treit
