A JoyRide for the Xbox 360

The bulk of Microsoft's community gameplay has been lately secured by the 1 vs 100 multiplayer trivia game, based on a television show that first aired in the Netherlands as “Eén tegen 100” and was sponsored by their National Postal Code Lottery. Using the Xbox Live avatars, the game pits players against each other for an opportunity to win different prizes. The first season was free to play and had almost 3 million downloads, with an average of 500,000 online users a week.

Now the corporate giant prepares another community game for the Xbox Live in the form of JoyRide. First announced at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, JoyRide is free to play, with a micro transaction featured system, and should be released somewhere during the holiday season. Lately, more and more games seem to be built around the micro transaction system, which apparently supports a financial competition between players and not one of gameplay skills, as games usually do. Though it's free to play, to have an edge against your opponents you have to pay cold hard cash, the only way to access all of the game’s features.

Featuring cartoony graphics, JoyRide will make use of the players’ Xbox Live avatars to let them race and perform an assortment of stunts on various tracks. The game will offer a solid DLC support, with the help of which gamers will be able to purchase cars, tracks, stunt parks, upgrades, events and unique apparel for their avatar racers. According to Microsoft the game will also involve players in “in huge community tasks.”

JoyRide has been given to Big Park for development and will offer online races for up to eight players, while the local matches will be a more direct one-on-one dash to the finish. The game also supports online leaderboards, 1080p graphical display and voice chat.