TotemBall released for free

TotemBall, the Xbox Live Arcade game designed to make use of the Xbox Live Vision camera, has been released for download - and as promised it's available for free.

You'll need to spend some money on the camera to play it though, as TotemBall - which puts you in control of Pterry the Pturtel on a quest to uncover musical totems - uses a gesture-based system of control.

Along with a story mode, TotemBall promises a co-operative juggling game, pinball, freeplay (infinite lives, no time limit), super challenge (one life, severe time limit) and TotemJam (for mixing and matching totems).

We'll be taking a look at Xbox Live Vision soon, and we'll also be talking to its creators - when we do, we'll be sure to ask more about Microsoft's answer to EyeToy, what else they have planned for it, and how they can legislate against the clever people who buy a web-camera and then get offended by the sight of other people on their screens.

Xbox Live Vision goes on sale this week, and in the meantime you can download TotemBall now - it's a shade over 40MB in size.