Windows Phone 7 games will include the ability to unlock achievements on a phone as well as pulling in a user's gamertag, 2D avatar and even let gamer's know when it's their turn to play.

This will all come thanks to an update to XNA Game Studio 4.0 being unveiled at the Game Developers Conference today, Microsoft's Michael Klucher writes on his blog.

The lead program manager at microsoft, Klucher said he will be in San Francisco this week to talk about the things that the latest build of XNA can do for developers and their games.

And that includes quite a bit of cross-Xbox 360 support.

"The other key component of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that we've enabled exclusively for Xbox partners is Xbox LIVE and a premium gaming experience on Windows Phone 7 Series,' he writes. "Through the Gamer Services API's you can pull in a user's Gamertag and 2D Avatar as part of the game experience, unlock achievements on the platform, and leverage notifications for asynchronous turn based gaming."

That's the good news. The bad news?

It sounds like Microsoft still doesn't have a whole lot of interest in pushing the Zune as a gaming platform. In the same blog post, Klucher urges developers to "migrate" their Zune games over the to Windows Phone 7 Series platform. He doesn't, urge anyone to continue making games for the Zune, though.

Check back later today to read about our meeting with the Windows Phone 7 Series folks and what else we learned about the new mobile gaming platform.

Achievement Unlocked: XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone [Klucher.com]

Only 2D avatars?

Bummer on lack of support for my Zune HD...I'll be getting a Win 7 Phone ofcourse, but unless M$ can revitalize the apps market for the Zune, I'm gonna have to bolt.

It is almost certain that MS is only going to be doing at most one more hardware revision for Zune.  They are more concerned about Zune software now.  WP7 will have all Zune functionality built in.

I am really disapointed in the lack of support for the zune hd. Guess I will have a reason to get something new when they release it.

I just got my HTC Tilt 2 with Windows 6.5 from AT&T, and i already can't wait for Windows 7, i see so much potential in the Windows Mobile platform. Hopefully developers take advantage of Win7 gaming just as they have the iPhone. I can't wait to upgrade to Win7 Phone.

Microsoft shows off XNA games running on Windows Phone, full 3D is a go

By Paul Miller posted Mar 9th 2010 8:50PM

Hands-On

Alright, we're going to be straight with you: you're not going to like this. See, Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0, but wouldn't let us nab a single photo or video of the process. What we can tell you is that they exist, they work, and at least Microsoft tossed us some screenshots to wave in your face. The two titles are The Harvest (pictured), a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks, a less impressive one-on-one sword fighting Facebook game by Gravity Bear that's being ported over. We didn't get to see any full motion 3D camera moves, since Battle Punks is just composed of two characters duking it out, and The Harvest has a fixed camera and some pre-rendered elements, but there were indeed some real polygons being crunched before our eyes at a full resolution (no upscaling), alpha-rev, choppy framerate, and we were assured that full screen 3D was possible. We also got to see one of our first glimpses of universal notifications on Windows Phone: Achievement unlock notices (also pictured above) that slide down from the top of the screen in a black bar and then slide back, and can't be interacted with. Follow after the break for some more nerdy details, along with a video of VisualStudio in action, and screenshots of the two games are in the gallery below.

Windows Phone 7 Series XNA screenshots

Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox (though we're under the impression that most of the similarities end there). What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually -- though it's unclear right now if it'll make it into the upcoming XNA release scheduled for the coming month. Other details are up in the air like support for using a device's camera in game, along with that fancy pause and resume cross-platform function we saw demo'd at TechEd. One thing that's clear is that there's no fast track for porting OpenGL games to the Direct3D environment, but that's not stopping regular suspects like Oberon, Sega, Glu, EA, Popcap, Hudson Entertainment, Namco, Konami and Microsoft Game Studios from signing on. We'll have to wait until MIX for more details and hopefully some shareable demos! Below we have a video of that same platforming game we saw from TechEd being demo'd across platforms, though sadly with the save state sending disabled.

So Coool!