Yes XNA Express studio + Visual Studio Express Edition is totally free to develop game for Windows based, but have to pay license fee to develop game in Xbox 360 which is quite reasonable lah i think. Develop game in XNA can be done using C# .NET which is quite good for game development because u dont have to worry about pointer and garbage collection for unnecessary memory usage and it is fully object oriented. .NET have better memory management and a lot of features compare to C++ to speedup the game development life cycle. Since my current job as a .NET Programmer, i can say that .NET and XNA is the good starting point to develop good game with less development time.

This post has been edited by ron4: Feb 21 2008, 12:45 PM