Biggest thing to hit XBLA: butterflies?
Take a gander at the image above. No, it's not a shot from the Discovery Channel, it's a new game -- Butterfly Garden -- coming to Xbox Live Arcade. We've certainly seen a jump in the visual fidelity of Arcade titles as of late, but this is just downright pretty. Sure, RoboBlitz has all the right curves in all the right places, but it distinctly lacks flora and fauna of any kind. Mike from the Xbox Domain had a chance to sit down with the developers of Butterfly Garden, Autonomous Productions. The object of Butterfly Garden is not dissimilar to Viva Piñata, in that you want to breed and discover new species of butterfly. The beautiful environments -- much like RoboBlitz -- are all procedurally generated. Autonomous Productions hopes to separate Butterfly Garden from the XBLA crowd by introducing social, non-competitive gameplay to the service. Players will be able to visit each others' islands, trade genes (we're guessing you use these to create new species), or just fly around, enjoying the scenery. Granted, being a butterfly doesn't rate as high on our list as, say, being a badass soldier with a chainsaw on his gun, but we have admit we're intrigued. Unfortunately, all the butterfly dreamers out there will have to wait: the game isn't expected before late 2007.
