While we've seen some pretty amazing custom levels on PlayStation 3's Little Big Planet, Microsoft's answer to a user generated content game is a bit different.  The toolkit is called Kodu, and it's designed from the ground up to be a visual programming experience.

While there's no way to create the game in a cooperative mode, you can create cooperative experiences and then share them with your friends.  It's incredibly easy to add more players to the mix with the easy to use script language and before you know it you can have a playground for your friends.

Read The Full Article: Kodu Launches Co-Op Friendly Game Creation on the Xbox 360

wow... for $5 its definitely worth a try. hopefully they'll keep improving it and add some more items.

While it sounds tempting, it won't appeal to me until more people I know have it. Other wise, I'll be bored.

The largest disappointment in this game for me was the inability to co-operatively create games. I read that it would be possible, but we weren't able to make it happen when we tried last night. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that I'll spend nearly as much time with it because of this.

I'm guessing, based on Causedawg's comment and the article, that you can't create games cooperatively over Live, but my brothers and I have had no problems making games cooperatively in local play.

Although players can not work independently in this mode, every controller does move the cursor, so if anyone has an idea, they can definitely add it in themselves.

Kodu isn't really up to what I was hoping out of it, being an avid game developer already, but my younger brothers are thrilled to have something so approachable.

I guess that's true Raven. When we played last night I was kinda miffed it didn't give each player control individually, but I didn't think of the group effort kind of thing.

Sounds cool. So do you invite friends to join and play it or what?

Kodu supports network sharing and local coop. We put a lot of design effort into co-op scenarios. Camera is simple but usable, and you can affect it with your script.

Any controller can access the edit UI, but there is only one edit UI - ground cursor, etc.

Where it really shines is inventing new forms of coop - single characters controlled by multiple controllers, one controlling many, etc. You can do powerups and have characters change how they work, so there are all kinds of interesting co-op scenarios.

Designer blog is here: http://community.research.microsoft.com ... fault.aspx

Okay, the time limit on the demo was a little frustrating. I barely made it past the opening tutorial (admittedly I was messing around) when it booted me out of the game. I'll buy this when I've got some time to mess around with it, but a relatively short time limit is the wrong way to try and sell this to someone who's not already sold on the idea.

That said, it certainly looks promising. I can see some interesting possibilities in gameplay given the options.