The Gunstringer Message Board

"The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles," the bizarre full-motion-video episode originally released as downloadable content for The Gunstringer, has been uncoupled for standalone release on Windows 8 PCs and tablets.

The Chronicles, which feature both a "Troma Team" credit and an acting role by Troma Studios co-founder Lloyd Kaufman (as "Doc Lloyd"), stars Wiley Wiggins as "Future Buddy." He joins your fight to protect a relatively Old West-ish town from Wavy Tube Man Jr., who has traveled back in time to prevent the death of his father, Wavy Tube Man.

The Windows 8 version will be released "soon" for $1.49, a price low enough that we can just buy it again and confirm we didn't imagine the existence of this thing the first time around.

The Gunstringer: Dead Man Running is a significant departure from the original game. For one thing, it's not a Kinect game for Xbox, but rather a Windows 8 game for PCs and tablets. For another, development is taking place not in Austin, but up north in Canada, at Other Ocean Interactive.

Most significantly, Dead Man Running is now an auto-running game with shooting challenges, in both a Story Mode and three "endless runner" stages. It's free-to-play, with customization items available through in-game currency and unspecified content available through in-app purchases.

Dead Man Running will begin its marathon across Windows 8 devices in November.

The Gunstringer is bringing the heat to the West with its new DLC installment, El Diablo's 'Merican Adventure, available now on Xbox Live for 240 Microsoft Points. The 'Merican Adventure has players inhabit the body of El Diablo, as is suggested by the title, to hunt down his perfect pinup queen through four levels.

The release of El Diablo's 'Merican Adventure in part celebrates The Gunstringer's launch on Xbox's Games on Demand, where it's currently holding other titles at gunpoint for $30.

Rayman Origins
If you asked what my favorite game of the 2011 was, I would tell you it was Dark Souls, which made the number eight slot in our prestigious top ten. If, however, you asked me which game instilled me with the most pure, unbridled joy, I would say it was Rayman Origins without a moment's hesitation.

Providing both a fresh experience and an invigorating jolt of nostalgia for the days when platformers were king, Rayman Origins is a must-play.

Dan Teasdale is a game designer at Twisted Pixel, whose credits include The Gunstringer, BioShock, and the Rock Band series.

He's also Australian, but we try not to hold that against him.

Man, writing about video games is hard.

Before I get to the Top 10, I have to call out my honorable mentions: TrackMania 2: Canyon and Driver: San Francisco. Trackmania is brilliant and fun, but not on the list because it’s still essentially the same game I thought was brilliant and fun years and years ago. Driver was unexpectedly the best adaption of the TV series Life on Mars I’ve played, but there were too many other games that were better this year. So, they didn’t make it in. Here’s what did:

10. L.A. Noire

Goddammit, Brendan McNamara.

I didn’t want this to be Top 10 worthy. It’s responsible for huge quality of life violations during development, involved in the collapse of the Australian game industry, and the “groundbreaking” facial mocap is basically a brute force trick that can’t really be applied to pushing forward character performances in games.

The problem behind hating how L.A. Noire was made is that there are parts of it that are great to play. Piecing together a case and having failure be something that you have to live with feels really satisfying. You get really sucked into the idea that you’re actually a detective with consequences - at least, right up until the point where you have to go to an abandoned lot to kill 50 bodyguards, or until you get to the end of the game and things go off the rails. Those small bits where everything works though are enough to edge it into my Top 10.

9. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

[Spoilers ahead!]

I was a little slow getting through Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A bunch of people I follow on Twitter started talking about how the most visceral moment in the game was when Malik is killed. I was really annoyed that I had such a huge plot point spoiled for me--right up until the point where I finished the game and this never happened for me. That is why this game is in the Top Ten.

It’s a miracle that Eidos Montreal managed to evoke that turn-of-the-century PC gaming freedom while bringing in modern day accessibility. I had more fun breaking into offices and unravelling office politics in the first hour of Human Revolution than I did in any scripted sequence from Battlefield 3’s story campaign.

(A side note: I had an awesome bug in Battlefield 3’s final scripted sequence where the final boss was invisible. It looked like I was fighting myself Fight Club style, implying that I was stopping myself from destroying New York. If this had been intentional, it would have improved Battlefield 3’s story so much that it would have entered the Top 10.)

8. Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal is basically an in-development Bridge Builder, but with a pile of rocket parts that you need to assemble into a rocket that can manage to leave the planet’s atmosphere, and an unwitting crew that’s almost assuredly going to die because of your terrible rocket-making skills. Since you’re always just one more tweak away from possibly making it into orbit, it’s almost impossible to start playing without losing track of a few hours of time.

The real reason Kerbal shines? Jebediah Kerman. Throughout all of my terrifying spaceship disintegrations and one way trips into space, he was always grinning the grin of a flight commander with nothing to fear. Facing certain death yet again, he’d ride that rocket Major Kong-style into the ground with a smile from ear to ear. If I was picking Character of the Year, he’d be in the running.

7. Star Wars: The Old Republic

My World of Warcraft kick in 2005 was pretty brutal. I spent a year doing some “design consulting”, which basically meant that I worked for a couple of hours in the morning, then spent the afternoon doing Molten Core for gear. My will broke around the time Burning Crusade came out, making my months of work irrelevant with a simple fetch quest.

It turned me into a casual MMO player. I play for a few hours a week with my girlfriend for story and cool things that won’t be irrelevant like mounts and pets. With that in mind, playing The Old Republic beta was basically crack for me. I honestly couldn’t care less about min/maxing my dark and light side points, getting gear, or poopsocking raids, because this game is essentially persistent Mass Effect where I get to pretend to be Han Solo. If BioWare can keep pumping out story, I’ll keep shovelling them money.

6. Rayman: Origins

There was a time that “social” meant that it was a game you played in a living room with friends. I still like to live in this world, even though the term has been perverted by Zynga to talk about the concept of selling your design and gameplay morals in order to make the most money possible from your userbase.

In my much nicer world, Rayman: Origins wins Game of the Year. Everyone goes to their friend’s house to play some games, fall in love with Rayman’s ridiculously lush graphics and great couch multiplayer, then buy their own copies. People rightly cheer Ubisoft’s bold move to bury Assassin’s Creed: Revelations in order to promote such a masterwork as Rayman: Origins. President Nolan North declares November 15th to be Rayman Day. Outback Steakhouse is closed down. All is well in the world.

5. Jetpack Joyride

I’ve been a closet fan of SFCave for a long time, so the core mechanic of one button jetpack dodging was enough to sell me from the start. Adding in things like comparative distance leaderboards, upgrades, goals, and the ability to kill scientists with my jetpack turned this into the only game I bother playing on my phone with any kind of regularity.

Another side bonus is that while it does have in-app purchases, the game doesn’t have a crippled progression curve that forces you to use them. Because of that, I ended up buying an in-app purchase because I was enjoying the game, not because I was bored or impatient. Thanks for still caring about designing good games first, Halfbrick!

4. Stacking

There have been many attempts to jumpstart adventure games as a genre, but Stacking was the first game I played that took everything great about adventure games and put them in a new format that made sense for a 2011 game.

It’s actually pretty surprising that things like direct player control and secondary collection through puzzle solving haven’t been tackled earlier. The “Here are the ways you can solve this puzzle, collect them all” UI alone gets my award for inspired design this year. Inject some Double Fine characters and class, and you have what I consider Double Fine’s best title ever.

3. Portal 2

Out of all the games that came out this year, Portal 2 is probably the closest to perfect execution.

Valve’s focus test-based iteration process is a given, so seeing something mechanically polished isn’t really a surprise anymore. Seeing pitch-perfect voice acting, separately designed co-op, and extending a concept that was considered to be “good for a few hours” to a full game without any padding is brilliant. Nice work, Valve! Now release Half-Life 4 already.

2. Saints Row: The Third

There’s no real way to talk about how great Saints Row: The Third is without spoiling parts, so just skip this if you haven’t played the game yet.

Saints Row: The Third is a game where you can play as a badass female zombie who calls up Burt Reynolds to fight alongside you while you explode people with taunts by wearing a wrestler’s mask. Volition finally gets why people play sandboxes--to be dicks to everyone around them. It doesn’t matter that the story content is rushed, or that an entire act seems to be phoned in with side mission introductions, or that those side missions don’t feel as fresh as Saints Row 2’s missions like the sewage truck. Saints Row: The Third is still something that needs to be experienced, enjoyed, and celebrated.

1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

While writing this, all I’ve wanted to do is play Skyrim. After a few hours of withdrawal, Jeremy Soule’s Skyrim theme starts playing in my head, looping the “Dovahkiin” chant over and over.

Part of this is probably because I’m a big system design nerd, and seeing dozens of interlocking design systems work like clockwork gives me professional boners. But it’s something more than that. It’s the concept that separates games from other media--freedom of choice. You can tell that Skyrim is made by people who love building worlds, not movies. In a world where “follow this guy for five hours” nets hundreds of millions of dollars and “social” means you need to pay every day to play, Skyrim reminds us that there is still a world where gaming and design can be pushed forwards for the better.

In the future, Skyrim will no longer be known as a fantasy game, but as the day when game developers declared in one voice “We will not follow Soap quietly into the night!”. We will not vanish when going outside the bounds of an encounter! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive!

Today, we celebrate our independence day.

Twisted Pixel has officially raised the curtain on the latest Gunstringer DLC, first announced via Major Nelson yesterday. The "Real Big Shootin'" DLC pits players against 'Mad Dog' McDog "who is out to slander your good name as the quickest draw in the west." What that boils down to, apparently, is four acts of gameplay more akin to a midway shooting gallery than the narrative found in the main game.

Real Big Shootin' will be released on Xbox Live tomorrow for 240 Microsoft Points ($3).

In addition to Joe Danger's Xbox Live Arcade debut, this Wednesday will host a handful of new DLC for several titles, Major Nelson reveals. In addition to the previously revealed "Vengeance and Virtue" DLC for Pinball FX2 ($10) and the "Lost Adventures" DLC for Orcs Must Die! ($4), we also have some heretofore unknown DLC for The Gunstringer, Fruit Ninja Kinect and Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012.

For $3 each, The Gunstringer will receive "Real Big Shootin'" DLC, while Magic will be dealt its second expansion. Meanwhile, Fruit Ninja Kinect players can grab the Holiday Pack for free. We don't have details on any of the DLC, though we're really hoping the Fruit Ninja Holiday DLC includes sliceable fruitcakes.

The Gunstringer had seen many a strange thing in his life, but this took the cake. As he stared through the batwing doors of the local Best Buy general store, he thought he spied his own face glaring back. He took a closer look - turns out some folks in Texas made a vidya game out of his life story. What's more, seems that the store's proprietor had marked it down to two sawbucks. Perhaps most perplexing of all, the box also proclaimed to include something called Fruit Ninja Kinect.

He didn't know what a "fruit ninja" was, but he didn't like the sound of it.

Microsoft is currently shipping a Kinect sensor bundle for the holidays, which includes three games for $150. The included games for North America - though they "may vary by region" - are Kinect Adventures, Fruit Ninja Kinect and The Gunstringer, from Microsoft's newly acquired studio Twisted Pixel. Considering the $40 Gunstringer retail box contains a free Fruit Ninja Kinect, it might be easier to think about this bundle providing a $40 savings.

Microsoft has been playing it close to the chest regarding Kinect sales this year, recently reiterating that the device had sold 10 million units, a statistic it already promoted in March. We'll get another update after this year's bundle-boosted holiday sales have been tallied.

Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Twisted Pixel, the studio behind Splosion Man and The Gunstringer. Twisted Pixel is based in Texas and first formed in 2006 as an independent studio. With the acquisition by Microsoft, it will "develop the future of game and entertainment offerings on Microsoft's Xbox 360 platform." The company will become a part of the Microsoft Studios brand, along with Rare, which Microsoft purchased in 2002, and Lionhead Studios, acquired in 2006...

After developing games exclusively for Xbox 360 and PC, it's fair to say that indie dev Twisted Pixel has been going steady with Microsoft. Today, the two have finally tied the knot as the Redmond corporation announced that it has purchased the Austin studio.

That may be terrifying news for fans of the dev, which has built games like 'Splosion Man and The Gunstringer around its scrappy DIY aesthetic. But Matt Booty, general manager of Microsoft Studios, told Joystiq it's exactly that character that the company hopes to preserve after the sale.

If there's two things Joystiq is all about, it's antiquated puppet technology and indie-development studios, so naturally The Gunstringer tickled our fancy in an incredibly specific, thoroughly satisfying way. Had we known that Twisted Pixel would soon be releasing its own Gunstringer Mini Marionettes, however, we probably wouldn't have spent all last week building our own out of clothes pins and yarn.

The 16-inch Gunstringer Mini Marionette, available to pre-order on Twisted Pixel's site, is a replica of the marionette seen in the western's FMV sequences, will set you back $100 ($110 for an autographed version), and is expected to exit pre-order status before the end of November. Shoot past the break for a full look at the little guy's prototype.

"I'm going to go to the restroom," said Microsoft's Cherie Lutz, "but when I get back I really want to hear this new idea."

"Oh yeah, it's awesome, can't wait."

Twisted Pixel chief creative officer Josh Bear had responded with abounding confidence, if only to mask the truth. Because the fact of the matter, the fact that he and CEO Mike Wilford were all too aware of, as they sat in Redmond, WA Tex-Mex restaurant The Matador, was this: The idea wasn't "awesome." It was nonexistent.

The developer had scored a major meeting with Microsoft to pitch a new game developed exclusively with Kinect (then "Project Natal") in mind. It needed to be big, it needed to be smart and -- most pressingly to Wilford and Bear at that exact moment -- it needed to exist.

#beards Like many folks, I've got a complicated relationship with pre-game splash screens. On the one hand, I like that series of middleware introductions, publisher logos, and various other graphical preamble that flash across my screen, largely because of how I savor them the first time I'm playing a game that I'm excited about. I watch them roll by, enjoying the build-up to the "start new game" menu, to diving into an entirely new, exciting experience. More »

#thegunstringer If you're a fan of video game soundtracks, you can pick up a hefty 27-track compilation for free right now from The Gunstringer. Twisted Pixel just made it available on the game's official page. Head over there, click on "Downloads" atop the page and you'll see it. More »

Look, we don't like giving ultimatums and we know you don't like hearing them, but we can't be friends anymore if you don't download The Gunstringer's phenomenal soundtrack. Aren't you into indie music? Don't you like feeling joy?

Straight up, Matt Cheney's spaghetti-samurai score is a bone-chilling, tonally perfect masterclass in atmospheric storytelling through composition, and you'd be doing yourself a criminally negligent disservice by skipping it. So much so, that we couldn't stand to be around you, knowing what a hollow shell your life had become.

It's also entirely free, and at fewer than 100 megs, Twisted Pixel's fat pipes will have you swimmin' in tunes in no time. Hit the source link and click on the "Downloads" tab, and save our friendship.

The only thing more charming and out of place than an interactive, full-motion video addendum to a game about an undead marionette cowboy is free DLC. "The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles," an anachronistic add-on to Twisted Pixel's Kinect debut, The Gunstringer, is currently free only to Xbox Live Gold subscribers. Man, what a bunch of withholding assh --

"So right now DLC is free to gold members only but don't let that discourage you (or call us assholes yet ;)," tweets Twisted Pixel. "It goes free to Silver next Tues."

On the other hand, if you want to hurl obscenities at Twisted Pixel over an agonizing World 3 level in Ms. Splosion Man, we'll join you in a foul-mouthed chorus.

4 out of 5

Riding a rocket into the mouth of a dragon? There's an adventure metal song in here somewhere.

In the past two years, Austin, TX-based developer Twisted Pixel has gone from a no-name indie to one of the top purveyors of video-game silliness. A penchant for absurd songs and incorporating deliberately cheesy FMV has lent character to past releases, though these charms have occasionally taken priority over playability. Simultaneously Twisted Pixel’s most sophisticated and ambitious game, as well as its most amateurish and home-spun, The Gunstringer stitches Wild West handicraft, enthusiastically low-budget live-action, and simple, tactile Kinect controls into an experience that’s gleeful in its ridiculousness.

While Twisted Pixel’s incorporation of live-action video has previously been relegated to the outer edges, it’s the beating heart in The Gunstringer, which opens with the Twisted Pixel crew and a theater audience of extras preparing for a puppet show. It’s a framing device that’s weaved into the very fabric of the game, with giant, powerful, yet surprisingly baby-soft hands regularly intervening in the action, deliberately stiff and/or hammy audience reaction shots, and boss fights that are regularly viewed from the audience’s perspective. It’s not The Gunstringer’s only trick, and the game’s DIY aesthetic is as defined by a world seemingly crafted out of found household clutter as its pervasive use of FMV.

Credibly narrated by a salty fireside storyteller who is both true to the Wild West motif and in on the joke, The Gunstringer spins the tale of an outlaw marionette brought back from the dead to bring two-fisted, skeletal revenge to the gang that betrayed him. This includes a voodoo priestess, a kung-fu master carved out of jade and appropriately named The Beardmaster, a balloon-busted brothel madam, a literally pot-bellied oil baron, and the barely justified Wavy Tube Man.

The Gunstringer celebrates Dia De Los Muertos in his own, special way.

As the Gunstringer, whose squinty, slant-jawed grimace and ragged poncho more than suggest Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, you’ll perform in a series of stage plays, each taking you to a different, somewhat fantastical corner of the Wild West, and each ending in a confrontation with one of your former compadres. That the Gunstringer is a marionette isn’t just for quirkiness’ sake. It's a concept that extends to the game’s fundamental controls, which provide a little lateral movement, plus the ability to hop over certain obstacles, to what is essentially an on-rails shooter. Using your left hand to guide his movements, and your right to guide a targeting reticle that lets you paint up to six targets before kicking back in mock-recoil to trigger the shots, the controls are elegant, intuitive, and responsive--or, at least, they can be.

As with any Kinect game, it seems, The Gunstringer can require a little living-room tweaking to optimize the responsiveness and accuracy of the controls. More than lighting, or whether you’re playing the game standing or sitting, The Gunstringer seems most affected by the player's distance from the Kinect, with six to eight feet of clear space representing the sweet spot in my experience. Your mileage, of course, may vary, but once I adjusted my furniture accordingly, I found the game to be as snappy as any Kinect experience I’ve had, and the ability to play the game while seated--a significant rarity for Kinect games at this point--makes The Gunstringer more flexible than just about anything else available on the platform.

Though it represents the bulk of the action, there’s more to The Gunstringer than just running and gunning, breaking up the action with chase scenes, cover-based enemy encounters, and sequences that have you brandishing a pair of auto-firing six-shooters, a shotgun, a flamethrower, a sword, or just your bare fists. Homage to classic games like Donkey Kong, Galaga, and Duck Hunt also abounds, and though you’ll definitely see these tricks a few times over, with the boss fights feeling the most conspicuously recycled, a jaunty pace keeps the whole experience moving forward.

"You're not funny!"

For the majority of its development cycle, The Gunstringer was destined to be a downloadable Xbox Live Arcade title, and that history kind of shows in the game’s scale. You can see just about all of the sights in roughly four hours, and the guided, linear nature of the game limits the replay value somewhat. There are definitely some gags you’ll want to see more than once, and achievement hunters have good reason to revisit previous levels. That said, Twisted Pixel and publisher Microsoft have gone to pretty great lengths to ensure that there’s still plenty of value in this $40 package.

The Gunstringer brims with unlockable bonuses, including mods that can affect gameplay and aesthetics, commentary tracks from the Twisted Pixel team, the Red vs. Blue raconteurs at Rooster Teeth, and Xbox Live community czar Larry Hryb, to name a few, and behind-the-scenes videos, some of which are arguably more magical than the video that made it into the game itself. The Gunstringer also comes bundled with a download code for Fruit Ninja Kinect, a $10 value and a decent Kinect game in its own right.

The biggest bonus, though, comes in the form of the free, day-one DLC, The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles. I am not speaking in hyperbole when I say that I would pay the full price of admission here for The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles on its own. Then again, my appreciation of Mad Dog McCree, the primary source of inspiration for The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles, as well as Troma Entertainment schlockmeister Lloyd Kaufman and Dazed and Confused star Wiley Wiggins, probably runs deeper than it does in most people. Still, as a love letter to the kitchy mid-'90s FMV games to which Twisted Pixel, and The Gunstringer in particular, owes a good deal of its ironic flair, The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles is unmatched in its reverence. It’s so accurate to the source material, in fact, that it’s not that much fun to actually play, though that’s kind of the point. The only real negative I can level is that I don’t know how Twisted Pixel will be able to top this pure live-action masterpiece.

Perhaps this speaks somewhat to the overall weakness of the Kinect library at this point, but The Gunstringer is one of the most essential Kinect games I've experienced so far. It sees Twisted Pixel in top form, capitalizing on its unhinged zeal for inanity that it seems to barely be able to keep in check while deftly handling the challenge of working with the Kinect.

Today, I'm breaking one of the biggest rules of criticism:

Don't attempt to write an objective review if you're personally invested in the success of the product.

No, I don't have an uncle at Twisted Pixel (as far as I know). And no, I don't have stock in the skeletal puppetry biz. But there's a component of The Gunstringer that's so wonderful, so specifically hand-crafted just for me that my continued happiness relies on more of it being made.

This is my review of the The Gunstringer, and I can not be trusted.

Twisted Pixel's foray into the motion-tracking, depth-sensing world of Kinect may not be out until tomorrow, but The Gunstringer's first batch of DLC is already locked and loaded, waiting patiently in the wings for its chance to shine. And oh, how it shines; glinting in the sun like a sheriff's badge at high-noon.

Wavy Tubeman Chronicles is an entirely FMV experience, the first fifteen minutes of which you can watch above via G4TV. To the more ancient astute of you, Twisted Pixel's masterwork may seem a bit familiar, and for good reason: The full-motion adventure was inspired in no small part by Mad Dog McCree, an FMV laserdisc/arcade/3DO/Sega CD western from 1990. We had hoped that watching would somehow satiate our unquenchable thirst for FMV games, but it ended up having the opposite effect.

A sample of Twisted Pixel's next, Kinect-infused project, The Gunstringer, is now ready for your enjoyment -- or your unenjoyment, on the off chance you possess some deep, inexplicable fear of marionette puppets. The run-and-gunner now has a demo available on Xbox Live Marketplace, where you can download it right now instead of reading a news post about how a demo for The Gunstringer is available right now.

The demo supposedly gives a good cross-section of the game's controller-free controls, but we're counting on you to tell us how effectively said scheme works, as we fit squarely into the "irrational puppet fear" contingency.

Twisted Pixel is known for its charming games, but something darker lurks just beneath the surface of The Gunstringer. Namely: there's a secret option on the Kinect shooter that makes it hate you. It's called "Hardcore Mode," and it sounds terrifying. Enemies shoot three times as much, health drops twice as quickly and traps spring from nowhere. Plus, if you die you head right back to the beginning of the game.

Understand that when we tell you that there's a 50-point achievement for finishing a Hardcore run-through in one sitting called Strings of Steel, it's not so you'll go after it. In fact, it's actually so you'll do the exact opposite and pity those those lost souls who delved into the dark recesses of madness to claim it.

Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew.

The first retail release from Twisted Pixel Games wasn't always meant to be. The Gunstringer was intended to continue down the downloadable path, but during development, things changed, and Microsoft worked with Twisted Pixel to transform The Gunstringer into a game inside of a box.

That box will arrive on store shelves on September 13 for $39.99, which is $10 less than the average price for a Kinect game, and bundled with a copy of Halfbrick Studios' Fruit Ninja Kinect.

The bundling of Fruit Ninja Kinect might not mean that much to you, though, since the game arrives on Xbox Live Arcade on August 10.

The Gunstringer will also come packed with the ability to download a free add-on pack entitled The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles, wherein you'll fight off cowboys and future dudes.

Man, I hate future dudes.

When Twisted Pixel announced that its Kinect-based, undead western marionette shooter would gallop past Xbox Live Arcade and ride right into Retailville, we wrote, "Twisted Pixel isn't talking price right now, but considering most Kinect games go for $50, we'd say that's a safe bet." Well ... we were wrong. And we're sorry. And we hope you didn't bet any actual money.

Microsoft just announced that The Gunstringer will be hitting shelves on September 13 in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Asia, and September 16 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Oh, you wanted to know the price? How does $40 sound to you? Oh ... well, how about $40 and a free code for Fruit Ninja Kinect, itself valued at $10?

Still not enough? You drive a hard bargain, friend! How about some free launch DLC titled "The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles" in which you battle "the time-traveling son of Wavy Tube Man." Here, we'll use Microsoft's description: In this add-on, Wavy Tube Man Jr. steals a time machine to prevent his father's death at the hands of "The Gunstringer," and it's up to players to battle classic western cowboys and futuristic warriors to save the world from destruction. Wait a second ... you're still not satisfied? Can you not be sated? Is there nothing that can match your appetite for deals? Fine, if you pre-order the game from "select US and European retailers [...] you'll receive two tokens for a free Avatar Prop from the game." There, that's it. That's all you're getting. We're exhausted.

There's a new sheriff in town!

#speakuponkotaku Did you think there were too many on-rail games at E3 this year? Kotaku reader Ivan Lopez remembers the good ol' days of Time Crisis and House of the Dead. He's staying loyal to the genre and wants to know if on-rail games were always treated this badly or if fans have just moved on and in true on-rail style can't turn back. More »

The phrase "on rails" has something of a negative connotation in the video game industry. It implies that one's game design is lazy, or that it takes freedom away from the player. As developers come to grips with Kinect's controller-free technology, many of its experiences remain on rails, including several of the titles on display at E3.

The Gunstringer does not buck that trend; however, while it doesn't offer complete freedom of movement, it still manages to deliver the most precise Kinect controls I've ever experienced. Coupled with trademark Twisted Pixel humor, it makes a great first impression.

You've seen Nintendo's E3 2011 setup, and you've seen Sony's, but had you considered that they might've been "Better with Kinect?" Microsoft undoubtedly believes as much, but, well, the publisher is only able to outfit its own booth, silly! Don't be ridiculous!

Given that, you'll clearly see in the gallery below that Microsoft was more than happy to outfit its area with dozens of the motion peripherals, showing off everything from The Gunstringer to Dance Central 2. And hey, if you're into people looking especially silly while playing games, this is really the gallery for you.