Baby Maker Extreme is the top Xbox Live Indie Game... and more fun statistics

This is the beauty of Xbox Live's marketplace for small, independently published titles - where else would a game that involves slinging babies out between a pregnant mom's legs be able to rise to the top of the charts? We're talking about Baby Maker Extreme, a $1 game that involves rhythmically pushing buttons to shoot newborns out of, you know, a baby maker, with a goal of keeping the child in the air for as long as possible.

Call it sick. Call it ridiculous. Call it hilarious. But whatever you call it, the Xbox playing public made it the most popular new-release indie game on Xbox Live. That is to say, more people downloaded Baby Maker Extreme in its first week than the first-week downloads of any other title on the indie platform.

Aside from a whole bunch of simplistic "Avatar" games (Avatar Paintball, Avatar Showdown, Avatar Onslaught, etc.) which dominated much of the list, the other top 10 Indie games included such groundbreaking titles as Try Not To Fart, Nuclear Wasteland, and Yet Another Zombie Defense.

So if you're trying to make it big on the Xbox Live download store, there's an idea of what people are looking for. No need to become the Ernest Hemingway of game development.

In other news, Microsoft also released the top 10 first-week-sales games on Xbox Live Arcade, and there aren't really many surprises here, although the curious, artistic Limbo made it to number 2. Here's the full top 10:

1. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero
2. LIMBO
3. Perfect Dark
4. Toy Soldiers
5. Monday Night Combat
6. Deadliest Warrior
7. Dead Rising 2: Case West
8. X-Men Arcade
9. Castlevania: Harmony of Despair
10. Plants vs. Zombies

And if you're curious about which Xbox 360 games saw the most online play during their respective first weeks, you should already know that Call of Duty: Black Ops is numero uno. It set a new record for the most logged hours on XBL in one day in the online service's history. But here's the rest of the list:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops
2. Halo: Reach
3. Red Dead Redemption
4. Fable III
5. Battlefield: Bad Co. 2
6. Medal of Honor
7. Mass Effect 2
8. FIFA Soccer 11
9. Fallout: New Vegas
10 BioShock 2

But really, we're mostly interested in Baby Maker Extreme. What do you think of its #1 XBL indie game status? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Feb 4, 2011