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Japanese XNA winners revealed

JellyCar's foreign enemies.

Microsoft Japan has picked its XNA-developed Live Arcade game champions.

Similarly to the West, the short-list was comprised of student or small-team created titles.

Kotaku spotted them and reckons they look better than ours. See them yourself, if you like.

Demos of the Western XNA-developed games can no longer be downloaded, and all will expire on 9th March.

The one Microsoft got most excited about was The Dishwasher, a side-scrolling platform hackandslash with a gory and satisfying combat system, which it used to show off the concept at GDC.

You can read impressions of them all in our XNA Trials Roundup.

The eventual plan is to have people make their own XNA games, submit them to a peer-review system, and then have them distributed on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Microsoft's John Schappert - corporate vice president of Live, Software and Services for Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business - told us at GDC that the plan was to have a beta this spring and launch in autumn.

This also follows a fresh DreamSpark initiative by Microsoft that offers the full suite of its XNA developer tools to students in Europe and the US.