Top 10 Free-2-Play Games on MS Live

07. Doritos Crash Course X360

Crash Course has a couple things going for it right off the bat - the first being that it is a video game incarnation of a popular game show format from Japanese TV!

Second, it was created as a finalist entry in a game creation competition that was sponsored by Doritos (the snack food) with the idea being that the winning entries would be given away free to players.

According to the development team, the concept for the game originated with Raleigh, North Carolina gamer Jill Robertson, who envisioned the game as an homage to what are now widely considered to be classic contestant-participation-based game shows in Japan. In particular it was TV shows like Sasuke/Ninja Warrior that inspired it - the same show that inspired the Western homage TV show Wipeout.

Originally conceived as a game called “Avatar Crash Course” the game was released on 8 December, 2010 for free as one of the finalists of the Doritos-sponsored "2010 Unlock Xbox" competition, along with the other finalist, a game called Harms Way, which was also free.

DCC was originally developed by Wanako Games for Xbox Live Arcade as a potential commercial game offering in the side-scrolling platform-adventure genres, but when Doritos sponsored the contest, developer Wanako Games decided to make Crash Course its submission to the contest.

One element that it has going for it that really made the game stand out - and continues to make it stand out - is the fact that it utilized the gamer avatar from their Gamertag as the player-character.

So few games have gone that route - despite Microsoft clearly indicating that they intended for games to make use of that form for character representation, that it certainly factored in its victory,

In Crash Course the player must get their Avatar through an increasingly more difficult series of physical challenges that make up the game play course and environment, while trying to do so in as short a time span as possible,

The combination of the view of the ridiculous that is a mainstay of the TV show genre in Japan and its very clever implementation using the player Avatar helped to cement its place as the Number Seven choice for our list. Well, that and it is wicked fun to play!