Zune XNA Games Preview Coming Soon

We’ve learned some new details on the XNA initiative’s Zune efforts – most notably that the first community technology preview will be seen in early to mid May, so in the next two weeks we should hopefully be seeing more of what the indie crowd has cooking up for the Zune’s currently nonexistent gaming scene.

No matter which Zune you have – the 4, 8, 30 or 80GB models will all be compatible, as you can see in the slide image above. (No, the numbers weren’t indicating a date as I spent three minutes trying to decipher.) Ad hoc multiplayer is going to be cool, assuming you actually know someone else that has a Zune (I know I don’t), but the Zune won’t support any sort of hardware 3D acceleration. As a result, don’t expect to see anything mind blowing on the system, but hopefully developers will be able to manage some interesting games without that support.

Engadget has a video of one of the games Microsoft has running on the system – Zauri – which doesn’t look particularly exciting, to be kind.