Top Community Games (by purchases)

This is the list of full versions purchased for the week of 22nd December:

Top Community Games
1 Golden Royal Blackjack (200 points) unchanged 3 weeks
2 Fireplace (400) new
3 Word Soup (400) down 1
4 Snowmans Dilemma (200) down 2
5 Weapon of Choice (400) down 1
6 CarneyVale Showtime (400) new
7 EZMuze Break and House edition (200) new
8 Johnny Platform's Biscuit Romp (200) new
9 sin(Surfing) (200) unchanged 3 weeks
10 Dr. Popper (200) new

Other stats:
- This week the 100th community game was added on Xbox live.
- Golden Royal Blackjack has been in no.1 purchased game 3 weeks running.
- Fireplace demo is currently no 1 downloaded CG (Community Game) for the last 7 days

XBox 360 Fireplace

Enjoy the awesome ambiance of a crackling fireplace in your living room. With realistic smoldering embers and flickering flames it sets the perfect backdrop for a relaxing evening.

Turn your TV into a virtual fireplace.

You can try the free demo by downloading it from here directly to your Xbox 360, or you can find it on the NXE dashboard under Community Games.


XBox 360 Fireplace

Farseer Physics Engine

Farseer Physics Engine 2.0 has been released.

Here is a sample video of what Farseer Physics can do (this is based on v1):



Here is a water demo done in silverlight using Farseer Physics.

New Xbox Experience - Community Games video

Check out all you need to know on the new community games channel which is launching in November on the new XBox 360 Experience.

inDuna

Here is a quick preview of the game we submitted for this years Dream Build and Play competition:

New XNA 3 beta coming early next week!

New Features/Changes:

Zune

Compatibility with the upcoming Zune 3.0 Firmware release.
Improved deployment stability.
Support for Zune deployment on Windows Vista x64 Systems!
You can now use the Remote Performance Monitor for Zune games.

Xbox 360

Xbox 360 project templates (You will not be able to develop on the Xbox 360 until our final release. We felt this was important to include so that you could get projects converted over and look at the system, even if you are not able to run the games, yet).
Support for the Big Button Pad.

Framework & Visual Studio Features

Enumerate and play back media on your Windows computer or Xbox 360.
Simple sound effect support on Windows computers and Xbox 360.
Support for Rich Presence (lets friends know what’s going on in your game).
Support for Invites (ask your friends to join you in a multiplayer game) and Join Session In Progress (after you see what your friends are doing, you can join their current session with just a couple of button presses, even if that’s a different game to the one you are currently playing)
Compress your content and save space with the new content compression features!
ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows.
Upgrade your project from XNA Game Studio 2.0 using the Project Upgrade Wizard!
Take screen captures of your game running on Zune through the XNA Game Studio Device Center.
Support for .NET language features like Linq
Create multiple content projects and leverage cross project synchronization in Visual Studio.
FBX importer improvements: read materials containing multiple textures, and export custom shader materials directly out of Max or Maya.

Full story on the XNA Team blog

More Free Tools

Good news, trueSpace 7.6 has been released for FREE !

trueSpace is a complete 3D Authoring tool, I haven't tried it yet so can't comment on how good or bad it is for helping with making games.

Here is a video I found on You Tube showing animations: