One of the great litmus tests for the capabilities of any platform is how quickly people develop original games for it. I remember 20 years ago when the MSX platform first appeared I got one of my first cheques (yes, in England that's how we spell "check"!) for writing versions of games like Snake (since made popular on Nokia phones!) and Defender for the platform.

So as Silverlight starts to make it's mark I've been waiting to see what sort of games independent developers would start to produce (doesn't really count if they're part of the SDK because that doesn't tell you how, or if, the platform is inspiring people).

The great news is that even in Alpha folks are taking the Silverlight 1.1 engine and producing some pretty cool games.

And they both have a space theme. I wonder if it's a coincidence or related to the cool logo ;)

ZeroGravityThe first is a mental challenge. Can you help the rather clumsy astronaut make his way back to his spaceship in ZeroGravity without getting flung off into the far reaches of space. Great animation, cool sound effects and as a bonus the authors have a fairly frank "behind the scenes" breakdown on what it's like working with Silverlight and Expression.

The second game is even simpler in concept - shooting down aliens over a very realistic ground map. It's strangely addictive and one of the great things is because the backgrounds are being rendered by Virtual Earth you can defend your home town (Millions of dollars spent on satellite imagery of the planet and what do people do with it.... write games!)

Before there are too many games being produced though I hope a few people read Robs comments on fitting the game to the available display. Probably hard when you're dealing with mapping tiles but frustrating if a user has a huge screen and the game only uses a tiny portion of it (and more frustrating if I'm using my old Picturebook and have to scroll to see the full game space!)

Update: Thanks to FrankArr and Michael some more entries on the ever-growing list of Silverlight casual gaming goodness. Will I ever get any work done!