Apologies for the cheesy headline, but this news was just calling out for it. Microsoft have announced Xbox Live Community Games, you make them, peers review them and delighted customers pay you (and Microsoft) for them.

"As a Premium member in the XNA Creators Club, you’ll be able to submit any complete Xbox 360 game you’ve created in XNA Game Studio to the Creators Club community at http://creators.xna.com, for peer review. Other Premium Creators will check to make sure your game is safe to play. If it is, you’ll set a price point – between 200 and 800 Points – that people will pay to download your game.

Once the game is reviewed and the price point set, you’re done. The game is listed on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and you’ll get a check every quarter, for up to 70% of the game’s total revenue in your own currency. Depending on your game’s success, you may even have your game advertised on Xbox 360 and other Microsoft online properties."

Although it wont go live until "Holiday 08", whenever that is, there's nothing stopping you from working on your games now.

We had a Show & Tell last week, the turnout wasn't as good as we hoped (where were you all?) but everyone who came along had something to show and it meant more chocolate brownies for us. We had a little technical trouble with the high tech lighting systems in Microsoft's office, they refused to turn off, but after shifting to an auditorium with a nice big projection screen, everything went well.

Gaz and Dan (creators of the award winning Herriman) showed us an early version of their latest venture, a smooth 2D platformer with great character graphics (send me some screen shots!).

Matt of Project Mercury fame, gave a demonstration of the latest version of his particle engine and talked about how easy it was to customise (how'd the competition go Matt?)

Aaron demonstrated the latest build of his WSX GUI system and ran through a couple of tutorials on using it in your own code.

And last but not least, Duncan from the Warwick Game Society showed us his latest Insane Game 3, which looked like exceptionally good four player fun but he only had a Windows build and we didn't have a wireless adaptor for the gamepads. Shame, still what we did see was very smooth, multi-player mayhem with some very clever game design elements that lifted it far above the average 'Ooh, look it's a multi-player Gravity wars' clone.

Our own Nemo Krad was there too and would have talked about his cloud system but we ran out of time, sorry about that!

Afterwards, we visited some of the fine drinking establishments near Victoria Station (for those of you who don't know Victoria, that was meant to be ironic).

Many thanks to all that came along and a special thank you to Ginger at Microsoft for staying late and looking after us so well.

Just to let you know, we've got a concrete date for the next user group meeting. See this forum thread for details and make sure to reply if you're interested in coming along.

In my previous post about Fitba, Fritz, of Triple B Games, commented about the influence of the Amiga games SWOS and Kick Off 2 on their game. Considering that Kick Off 2 was amongst my favourite Amiga games (that game gave me blisters) I had to give Fitba a decent try.

I'm no game reviewer, so I wont write much (find out more for yourself) but I did want to mention that it is a very polished game, no whiff of home brew here. The limbless players are a little odd, but work well when combined with the games "nae arms, nae legs, nae problem" tag line. They also provide all the graphical information you need to play the game and not requiring a mocap studio and armies of artists has to help. The crowd and ambient sound effects deserve a special mention, they are very good. They really give a feel of a small town football game, rather than the 100,000 capacity stadium roar we've come to expect from football games.

Fitz also mentioned that he's planning on putting together a tutorial about their Blender to XNA pipeline, so go hassle him (nicely) for that if you're interested.

Triple B Games have announced a demo of their distinctly Scottish take on football, Fitba "Nae arms, nae legs, nae problem". It looks great but in all their nifty marketing, I notice they don't mention the XBLA version of Sensible Soccer...

Also on their site is a version of the Blender FBX exporter script that has been tweaked for compatibility with XNA. They don't say what the changes are and I'm not familiar with the script but I know that some people have been having trouble with Blender animations.

Gamasutra have an article, from Microsoft I guess, about what the process of creating and reviewing XNA community games will be. It's an interesting read, if only because it makes it clear that the peer review process is only about content, not quality. It will be up to the general mass of Xbox LIVE users to judge quality, which is probably a good thing.

One other point that might be more important to readers of this site in particular, is that it looks like the beta test starting this spring will only be available to people in the US region. I'm waiting on confirmation but it looks like we'll have to wait till the end of the year for the final product.

Just in case there is anyone who reads this who hasn't already read all about this over at the Creators Club site. The next version of XNA Game Studio will include support for Zune devices, including creating multi-player games that work over wireless.

There is a preview release planned for release in spring 2008 and the final version 3.0 release should happen sometime around the end of the year (just the same as versions 1.0 and 2.0 then).

I've never really considered a Zune player, I was given an IPod a couple of years ago and have stuck with it, despite my loathing for being forced to use ITunes. I just want my MP3 player to appear as a removable device that I can copy MP3 files to - simple, easy and works from any computer. It looks like the Zune also requires Zune software to manage media files but at least it supports syncing from multiple computers, something ITunes handles terribly.

One of the announcements from the GDC today is news of Xbox LIVE Community Games. Creators Club subscribers will be able to submit their games to be published on Xbox LIVE for anyone with an Xbox to play, after a period of peer review. I imagine this will attract a lot of people (back) to XNA Game Studio.

Just noticed this mention of EA using XNA (amongst other things) to quickly test out game ideas. 

News is coming from GDC'08 of Microsoft Dreamspark, a selection of software that will be made free for students. Could be very useful for our student members. 

Our chum, Nick Burton has an interesting article up at Gamasutra talking about why and how Rare goes about recruiting graduates. Nick was one of the people at Rare who worked on the early Rare XNA examples and also helped us judge last year's user group competition. He's a lovely fellow and does lots to promote XNA in universities, if you see him, give him a hug, you might get a job out of it...

Xbox/Windows sound guru Brian Schmidt discusses the new cross-platform audio library for Windows and Xbox 360, XAudio2, with much insight into the new audio API.

Our hosting site had some power troubles yesterday, so you might not have been able to connect. We're sorry about that, hopefully it's sorted now.

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The XNA Belgium User Group, has news of a competition (that's how user groups start, don't you know). There's not much there yet but I expect they'll be more to come. Love the name, XNA BUG.

This news come courtesy of Nemo Krad's post in the forums, he's so on the ball that lad.

I updated the Texture Atlas pipeline for XNA 2.0. No new features, it just loads the output of Nvidia's Texture Atlas tool into XNA, useful for sprite sheets and packing multiple textures into one.