Beginning with Blast Off and continuing with Echoes, the Halfbrick Friday series of Xbox Live Community games will soon see its third entry; Halfbrick Rocket Racing.

The game is a 2D, top-down racing game as is quite apparent from the trailer.

Less obvious is the control system, which uses the left and right analogue triggers to control left and right boosters on your vehicle. One of those systems that sounds difficult but should be easy to pick up and will make shaving precious milliseconds from your fastest laps a lot of fun! Global leaderboards demand this of you.

“After Halfbrick Blast Off and Halfbrick Echoes made their critically-acclaimed mark on the Xbox Live Indie Games service, developer Halfbrick is on the warpath again, showing off its new futuristic multiplayer racer – Halfbrick Rocket Racing. At first glance, it seems to be presented in a traditional top-down format, but there are two notable twists which simplify the learning curve and ensure fun, intuitive gameplay.

Control of each racing craft is actually handled with just two buttons – the left and right analogue triggers. They power the left and right rockets respectively, so movement is simple – press both at once to move forward, and alternate power to each for turning. Players will be able to customise their controls to find the configuration that suits their playing style, including using the left analogue stick.

Gameplay is focused on shaving seconds off your best times, reminiscent of the legendary Trackmania series. Players can upload their best times on over 40 tracks to the Global Leaderboards and see where they rank among the world’s best. Local multiplayer is available with up to four players taking control of a rocket racer, drifting around corners and sprinkling the course with colorful glowing trails – a simple yet incredibly engaging graphical effect.”

Halfbrick Rocket Racing will be released soon (check every Friday!) for a miniscule price of 200

Brier Dudley, writing in his blog for The Seattle Times, has confirmed a 30th June release date for Microsoft’s Kodu project, and a price of 400. The game will be released on the Xbox Live Community Games channel.

Kodu is a games creation interface which has been likened to LittleBigPlanet, but can create games in any genre. Kodu was designed from the ground up with the Xbox 360 controller in mind, using a visual programming language which, it’s claimed, is so simple that even a child could create a game with it.

Using pictures and graphics in place of code, playable games can be created from scratch in minutes, and while it remains to be seen just how good the created games can be, the interface certainly looks like it can offer a huge amount of depth for anyone with the imagination to take advantage of it.

A brief overview of its features is listed on the official project website:

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games.

• High-level language incorporates real-world primitives: collision, color, vision
• Uses Xbox 360 Game Controller for input — no keyboard required
• Runs on XBox 360 and PC
• Interactive terrain editor
• Bridge and path builder
• Terrain editor – create worlds of arbitrary shape and size
• 20 different characters with different abilities

For more information on Kodu, see the official project website, and the developer’s blog.

Adding fuel to an already fairly substantial fire, Clover’s developer has stated that Xbox Live Community Games simply don’t offer a means to make a profit.

Clover is one of few Xbox Live Community Games to have gained attention from the press, and despite a positive response from critics and gamers alike, this attention hasn’t translated into sales.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Daniel Jones of Binary Tweed was adamant that his game wouldn’t be able to turn a profit. “It’s a shame to say that Clover has not sold as many copies as we’d hoped for. As it stands, through Community Games alone, we definitely won’t recoup costs.”

Jones’ explanation for this is certainly food for thought, suggesting that the people that are buying games from the service aren’t interested in games. “In the first week of Clover’s release, the top ten Community Game titles was made [up] of eight applications, RC-Airsim and one edutainment game.”

The continuing success of Rumble Massage (an application that makes your controller rumble a bit) at the expense of games such as Clover shows no sign of changing, and the service will continue to be flooded with this kind of application while there are no quality control measures put in place to stop such releases. Despite a comprehensive peer-review system being in place, games can only be rejected for major bugs or copyright infringement, for example, but not for being a poor product. With it becoming harder and harder to find games on the service, sales are bound to suffer.

Jones’ experience with Xbox Live Community Games hasn’t been entirely without merit, despite his game’s poor sales. “Frustratingly enough, the critical reception to the game has been good. The size of the Xbox Live Community Games market is prohibitively small to be financially viable, so I can only see it being of use to Binary Tweed as an arena for proving concepts.

“Although I can’t talk about specifics at the moment, Clover’s critical acclaim has opened doors to Binary Tweed. If you liked Clover, then it’ll be worth checking binarytweed.com regularly over the next few weeks.”

Clover is available as an Xbox Live Community Game, for 400.

After a very long period of silence in the online space, Dean Dodrill has finally returned with something very new in his Elysian Tale saga; the tentatively titled Dust: An Elysian Tail. Based on his animated feature Elysian Tail which is currently in production, he has decided to expand the universe by developing a tie in videogame using XNA.

He’s now released a teaser video for the game, still in its early stages. For those of you not familiar, Dean (Noggy) Dodrill is a professional animation artist who has previously worked on the Jazz  Jackrabbit series and created Lori Jackrabbit in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 .

This is definitely one to keep an eye one as an announcement is to be made soon – maybe a full pick up from Microsoft to XBLA ? It’s possible since the quality so far is incredibly high.