Gerbil Physics is a game all about physics… and gerbils. Going beyond the title, it’s a game about using tools to solve puzzles using adorable little rodents as building blocks. Blow them up, knock them over and smash them against things in order to get the job done. It’s as adorable as it is enthralling, and, as many Xbox Live Indie titles, doesn’t get half the recognition it deserves.

So Pencel takes a stab at marketing with this nifty little poster, which can be downloaded, printed, emailed and circulated, hopefully with a link where folks can queue up a demo version of the game for download on Xbox Live, such as this one.

IndieGames have compiled two lists profiling the highest rated games on the service in both the US and United Kindom. Remember: these aren’t the most popular games, or those raking in the most cash. They’re the ones that have the highest user ratings.

As you’ll see, some of the games have had a little media coverage, but others haven’t, so don’t go blaming exposure for the results. Blame the quality.

U.S. Top 20

(1) I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
(2) Inside Lacrosse’s CL2010
(3) Arkedo Series – 03 PIXEL!
(4) Miner Dig Deep
(5) Beat Hazard
(6) ezmuze+ Hamst3r edition
(7) ZP2K9
(8) Groov
(9) Kodu Game Lab
(10) Arkedo Series – 01 JUMP!
(11) CarneyVale Showtime
(12) Platypus
(13) The Impossible Game
(14) Solar
(15) Avatar Wave: Snowball Fight
(16) Square Off
(17) Gerbil Physics
(18) Johnny Platform Saves Xmas!
(19) Avatar Drop
(20) Twin Blades

UK Top 20

(1) I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
(2) Miner Dig Deep
(3) Arkedo Series – 03 PIXEL!
(4) Avatar Wave: Snowball Fight
(5) SFG Soccer
(6) ezmuse + Hamst3r edition
(7) Platypus
(8) Beat Hazard
(9) Johnny Platform Saves Christmas
(10) ZP2K9
(11) Arkedo Series – 01 JUMP!
(12) Kodu Game Lab
(13) Leave Home
(14) Avatar Drop
(15) The Impossible Game
(16) Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp
(17) CarneyVale Showtime
(18) Junkyard Battle
(19) Inside Lacrosse’s CL2010
(20) Gerbil Physics

Top 20 Rated US, UK Xbox Live Indie Games: Dec. 29th [IndieGames]

Or at least offer something for you to point and laugh at. Because that is one tall roller coaster.

Available for 80 Microsoft Points, so leave now before I call the police.

Xbox 360 Game Wants To Help You Talk To Women [Siliconera]

Inside Lacrosse College Lacrosse 2010 hit the Indie Games channel. While it does not feature actual, licensed college lacrosse teams, it does have the title sponsorship of the sport’s top magazine in the United States. The game costs 400 Microsoft points, and lets you choose from 60 teams (or create your own side) in single-play action or in a simulated season of up to 14 games with a two-round championship. It features Xbox Live and LAN support, stats tracking and more.

“In the 12 years we’ve been publishing Inside Lacrosse, there is one topic that’s been addressed in letters to the editor, probably more than all the other individual topics combined: When is someone going to produce a lacrosse video game?” Bob Carpenter, the Inside Lacrosse founder, said in a statement announcing the game. “Producing a multi-million dollar game just isn’t going to happen for a sport our size, so this Indie format – particularly when it can be played online against others – is the way to go.”

The game is the product of a year’s worth of development begun by Dundee, Scotland studio Triple B Games and Carlo Sunseri, a Pittsburgh-area businessman and lacrosse coach. College Lacrosse 2010.

As virtual arts and crafts go, it’s a pretty satisfying experience. There’s spooky music, a lot of freedom with the carving function and a Show Off! mode that features eerie settings in which to view your finished jack-o-lantern.

Having played the demo versions of other pumpkin carving sims, I’ve got to give Pumpkin Chop the top nod for allowing users the most freedom. Other carving sims either make you use pre-made cutouts to makes your pumpkin’s face or just don’t let you savor your lit up pumpkin the way that Pumpkin Chop does.

My only gripe about the application is that there’s no scraping-out-the-insides portion. You could totally turn that into a fun/gross mini-game.

Check it out, if you’ve got 80 Microsoft Points to spare. If nothing else, it’s a lot less messy than the real thing.

Note: A code for this app was provided by the developer for reviewing purposes.

“I threw it together in class,” Le Clair told Kotaku during a phone interview this week. His creation, Rumble Massage, is no game. It’s a program that makes an Xbox controller vibrate on command. It was launched in January through the Xbox Live Indie Games program, which enables amateur developers to sell peer-reviewed projects online through the Xbox 360.

Rumble Massage currently sells for $US1. Earlier this year, a porn star reviewed it on the G4 network, an awkward detail Le Clair has shared with his mum. “Most people treat Rumble Massage like a joke, which it is,” he said. “It’s not a joke like it’s stupid. It’s a joke in that it’s not serious.”

Since Le Clair shook up the Xbox marketplace at the beginning of 2000, there have been five more massage programs. They’ve been made by developers in Boston, Italy and France. They’ve been made by developers desperate to fund projects of which they can be more proud. They’ve even been made by at least one person with a real interest in massage.

The massage apps have also become loathed by a community of amateur game developers who feel the vibrational programs have distracted critical and consumer attention away from the actual video games that are developed and sold in the Indie Games marketplace on Xbox Live.

“I think they really hurt lots of developers who are trying to use the platform as it was intended,” Indie Games developer Nick Gravelyn, told Kotaku. He’s the 22-year-old Seattle-based creator of a couple of Indie games, including the recently-released Pixel Man. He soured on the massage apps once Le Clair’s project spawned successors. “I’ve talked to people who have never been to the Indie Games section ever,” he said. “When I asked why, there was a substantial number who respond with: ‘It’s all sex games and stupid apps.’”

Shiatsu Massage The scorn from the XNA Indie Games community has registered with the massage-makers. Benedetta Sciacca, a 34-year-old artist who lives near the Mt. Etna volcano in Sicily with her husband and a kennel of pets. “I was not interested in fast money,” she told Kotaku. She had tried to make her massage app the best-looking of the bunch and was hoping it could reach the same general audience she targeted with cocktail-making apps she’s made for mobile phones and Xbox Live. Her program presents a series of Shiatsu massages illustrated in an Asian brushwork style. She based the massages on her research in Shiatsu and tested the single-player and couples massage with friends over a three week period.

When Sciacca uploaded the app for peer review, she heard the anger. “I’ll do my best to fail this…if it get[s] into review,” one XNA user wrote on her playtest thread. “Enough with the massage clones!” another wrote, “I’m sure you can make a game that is better and more original than that.” She is set to release a game in a couple of weeks, she said.

Shiatsu Massage made it out of peer review and onto Xbox Live in June. It’s been downloaded 90,000 times. It sells for $US1 and, according to Sciacca, said it has sold through 5000 copies. (Microsoft declined to confirm any download figures for Indie Games projects. A rep said that the company leaves it to the developers to share.)

The common take on all these massage apps is that they’re sex toys. Sciacca excludes hers from that. “It is not intended to be a sexual toy,” she said. “It is a real massager, tested to be effective and with instructions to use it properly.”

Others encourage the sexual reference. The tongue-in-cheek YouTube commercial for Spectra Musical Massage, a massage/music-visualiser app made by Boston-area Pow Studios, concludes with a woman putting an Xbox controller down her pants. That was “a way to acknowledge that, yeah, yeah… we know, we know,” the program’s lead developer, Betson Thomas, 24, told Kotaku.

It’s easy to see why some would assume there’s a sexual intent in these applications when one features a mode to enable Xbox Live users to rumble each other’s controllers remotely. Such a mode is the stand-out feature in Remote Masseuse, the product of a 23-year-old developer who would provide only his or her Xbox Live username, Entrager. His was the second of the massage programs, developed before Rumble Massage and released just prior to Valentine’s day. He said he’s received “a surprising amount of positive feedback, with several couples e-mailing me to thank me for creating it”.

Asked what me makes of the sex toy comments, he wrote to Kotaku, “I developed Remote Masseuse to be used however people wanted to use it. I think it makes a great cat toy. You set one controller next to your cat and make it vibrate with the other.” Entrager said Remote Masseuse has netted him $US15,000. He’s made it for the iPhone as well.

Le Clair, the starter of this trend, said a sexual use of Rumble Massage was not intended back when he hatched the idea. “I didn’t want to pander to that,” he said. But he attributes the success of his program, downloaded as a free demo 300,000 times so far, to two things: 1) His decision to give almost all of its contents except for its highest vibration setting away for free and 2) “Obviously it has to be because of the whole vibrator thing.”

Rumble Massage Whatever made the massage apps popular fuelled some of the later entries in the field. French Indie Game creator Pascal Ginda admits he simply needed the money he thought a massage app could provide. Petank Party, the first Indie game from his team at UFO Games, didn’t make enough money to keep his group going, he said in an email to Kotaku. “So we looked at the best selling apps and two massage games were in the top 10. After downloading them, we thought we could do better.” He made and released one called A Perfect Massage (pictured at the top of this post). It has sold well enough to both enable his team to test a new engine and, Ginda said, to “take a big risk and make a bigger game”. Ginda’s honesty about cashing in has rankled some XNA Indie Game developers.

The massage makers, however, are not completely at odds with the game creators. Etranger, the Remote Masseuse developer, agrees with the likes of Nick Gravelyn that the apps have been too much of a distraction from real games. “I think Microsoft should provide a clear separation of the two so that people that want games can find only games and people that want apps can find apps,” he said. Within the Indie Games section, the massage programs are included in an “other” section, along with virtual fish tanks and birthday-card-makers. That makes them still a sub-set of “games”.

Gravelyn, the one non-massage developer interviewed for this story, admits the confusion has provided some motivation. He said he’d come to think that he’d either have to wait out the trend or “have something so cool that it beat out the massage game fad”. His Pixel Man game has already sold well enough to make it into a Major Nelson top 10 list of weekly Indie Games sales and it’s netted him more than $US1000, motivating the daytime contract developer with a decent profit and level of awareness for a game that took about a dozen hours to make.

So much for separation of massage app and games, though. The massage trend has spawned a new phenomenon: Developers are now including massage modes in games that might not appear to need them. Minneapolis-area stand-up comedian Pat Susmilch got together with friends this year to develop Cold War Commander, a simple side-scrolling action game requiring players to collect jellybeans and avoid Communists. “Towards the beginning of production for Cold War Commander, during a ‘creativity session’, I jokingly said that our next game should just be something that maxes out the rumble so you can put it on yourself,” he told Kotaku. “We all had a good laugh, because that was the dumbest thing ever … A month later Rumble Massage was released and we learned that lots of people were stupid enough to buy that. We included it in the game to both garner more sales and lift a middle finger to everyone who already bought Rumble Massage.”

The ploy failed, and the game has sold just 120 copies so far. Public reaction has been muted. “I usually just get messages on my Live account saying that the game sucks and I should be ashamed of myself,” Susmilch said, “without any mention of the massager.”

Pixel Man The 2009 surge in massage games may be subsiding, not just for those sticking the mode in a Cold War platformer.

The massage programs don’t chart as highly as they did earlier this year, when they regularly clustered near the top of the best-sellers list for Indie Games. Pow Studios’ Spectra Musical Massage, released in August, has been downloaded only 3765 times and purchased 117 times—83 times in the US, three times in Japan, once in Italy—according to its developer. That has profited Pow $US200.

Thomas said his team didn’t sign up for Indie Games to make massage apps, “but we felt it could help us gain some exposure”. He said the app was “de-evolved” from a music-gaming project Pow still hopes to create. “Like everyone else, we were … trying to figure out how to be successful in this environment.” Pow’s true focus is on a musical-based shooter the team is developing called Muzikaze.

That original massage-maker Le Clair is also looking forward to life beyond the trend. He promises he’s done with the genre. In fact, he’s using his earnings to pursue his dream. He and a couple of friends are moving to New York to set up a company called ZXB Games. He wants to make a modern-day pirate-hunting game and the cushion of cash made more comfortable by that well-massaged $US60,000 means something important to Le Clair. “We can bootstrap it,” he said.

To borrow a term from the massage world, that’s one way to get a happy ending.

“Pro studios looking at this marketplace with growing interest,” he said in an email. “I know quite a few French studios for instance (but also some US and Canadian ones), with great track records on published games, who are working on XBL Indie projects right now.”

I don’t think there’s anything “wrong” with a published developer deciding to explore indie venues — but then, I’m not a struggling indie dev with no game titles to my name. Nor am I a middling professional game developer in a savage economic situation. So I can’t really judge if it’s “fair” for a developer with a wealth of professional design experience to put their product out on a platform where it’s in direct competition with products from new-comers.

I guess it all comes down to what you define as “indie.” Is it just that you’re low-budget and off-beat, or is there some unspoken rule that once you “make it big” with a published title on a platform like the Nintendo DS that you’ve “sold out” and become mainstream.

From my perspective, the answer may not matter. All I know is I’m going to start seeing more games on the Xbox Live Indie service, and many of them might benefit from the experience a professional dev. And I won’t have to pay an arm and a leg — so win!

The Arkedo series kicks off with 01 JUMP!, which was developed in 35 days by two guys and is out now. Based on this trailer for it, the game seems to be two parts Indiana Jones to one part classic 2D gaming experience (that’s crazy-hard jumps, mad pickups and plenty of opportunity for camp). The second game in the series, 02 SWAP!, is coming out sometime this month and three more games are planned for the near future.

As cute as the trailer is, what really made me smile is the press release:

Today, we are trying a little experiment, by introducing the Arkedo Series. The concept is very simple (hey, we’re French): we want to make a new game each month.
This will allow us to experiment quite a lot and focus on bite-sized gaming, which is basically heaven to us.

The first game of the series is already there, called “Arkedo Series – 01 JUMP!”. It is available on XBL Indie, and was done by 2 guys in 35 days. We start simple (hey, we’re French) with a good old platformer. The good news is that is is already well ranked: #1 in France and #4 in the US, after 6 days on the platform.

Notice the casual French jokes? And the sarcastic comments in their trailer? Yeah, these guys are fun and their games are, too. So give it a go, if you’ve got the time. Or just watch the trailer over and over again.

College LaCrosse 2010 is on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel and, yeah, yeah, my smirking lede aside, a team sports title on that service definitely deserves some recognition. It carries the sponsorship of Inside Lacrosse magazine, but it does not, however, feature actual universities – for obvious licensing reasons. But some team colours do look familiar. See the video below.

The game costs 800 Microsoft points. Unfortunately, the roster editor only allows you to change players’ names to “Seth,” “Trevor” or “Landon.”*

College LaCrosse 2010 [Site]

* – This is not a fact, it is a cheap-shot.