independent games
News
2K Play Brings Indie Games To Live Arcade
2:20AM Mike Fahey | Forget Xbox Live Indie Games. 2K Games is bringing independent titles to Xbox Live Arcade directly, with The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and Axel & Pixel due out next season. More »
Space War Commander Launches With New Year
4:00AM Mike Fahey | Who said there would be no new games this week? Pish, and possibly posh. Independent PC developer Dreamspike has announced their real-time strategy title Space War Commander will launch on New Year’s Day. More »
Artistic Saturday Timewaster: Estamos Pensando
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Kotakuite Daniel Novais sent me an email this past week, asking me to take a look at his “little short artsy game” called Estamos Pensando (Portuguese for ‘We Are Thinking’). Inspired in part by Jason Rohrer’s Passage, Estamos Pensando is a sweet, sad, and polished little game. Daniel said that he’s now trying to work on something a little happier, since one comment on Rohrer’s Gravitation noted that these ‘artsy’ games are usually depressing. There are Portuguese and English versions of the game, and gameplay is quite simple. The game has apparently gotten some nice initial reviews since its submission to the Brazilian symposium SBGames 2008 festival, and it’s worth a little bit of your time. More »
Sunday Timewaster: Meat Boy
8:30AM Maggie Greene | Edmund McMillen (of Aether, Gish, and the game that shall not be named) is back with Meat Boy, a challenging little game that involves the titular blob of meat trying to rescue Bandaid Girl in a variety of levels. It took me a while to actually look at the game, since the designer woke me up a few nights in a row via IM asking me to take a look at it — I hold a grudge when it comes to my sleep being interrupted — but I’ve spent some time with it and it’s worth a looksee if you’re in the mood for a challenge on a Sunday afternoon. Controls are simple, the game is difficult, but you can skip two levels per group — so if you really get stuck, don’t despair. Meat Boy More »
Big Bang Mini – Indie Game Success Story?
8:00AM AJ Glasser | Developer Arkedo Studio got off to a rough start in their career with Nervous Brickdown – the game scored well enough but nobody really played it (except in Japan). With their sophomore effort, Big Bang Mini, Arkedo is hoping to get more support from publisher SouthPeak Interactive than it did Eidos, says CEO Camille Guermonprez. He believes Big Bang Mini will appeal to more than just the casual DS crowd and stand on its own merits as a hardcore shooter. Shooter? Fireworks? It makes sense in practices, trust me. In arcade mode, you appear as a little ship on the lower screen. You shoot fireworks at targets floating around in the upper screen. Hit the target, and a star-shaped power-up will drop. Miss and the firework will explode, raining down fiery projectiles that your ship has to dodge. You need to collect as many power-ups as you can to fill a gauge on the left hand side of the lower screen in order to get to the next level. There are two dominant strategies for getting through arcade mode – a careful target-and-shoot approach and the all-out firework blitz. Target-and-shoot takes way longer and leaves more opportunities for the targets in later levels to hit you with their own projectiles that they drop into the lower screen. The blitz creates even more havoc down below as the bounce-back from the exploding fireworks will kill you as easily as it kills the targets you’re trying to hit. In total, there are 90 levels in the whole game – 10 per world, 10 boss fights total. The worlds range in theme from Hong Kong to underwater; completing each grants you a special tactic such as a whirlwind that sucks in enemy projectiles, a charged-shot firework, or a homing missile firework. The design for each world is pretty detailed – even the music creates a distinct sense of atmosphere (I particularly liked the Paris rooftop level). And bosses like the Mohawk-sporting walrus or the secret last boss? I haven’t seen stuff that funky since Ren & Stimpy’s Powdered Toast Man. More »
The Best World of Goo ‘Review’ Yet
5:30AM Maggie Greene | I stumbled across this “review” of World of Goo courtesy the boys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and nearly ruined my laptop while reading, as I spewed my morning cup of coffee all over the screen. Andrew Doull, IT manager and occasional GameSetWatch columnist, wrote an homage to the game in the form of EA CEO John Riccitiello fan fiction. Yes, fan fiction. Which includes ninjas, an evil plot against our own Brian Crecente, and much raving about those damn ‘little guys’ who keep managing to pull out big hits: He knew the capabilities were there. The early iterations of Spore in the EA Advanced Weapons Labs had showed the way. But the cost… they’d had to nuke an escaped Brian Crecente on the corner of 4th Avenue and Broadway. Only a clumsy Gawker clone and a Sims expansion pack which wiped the knowledge of that intersection from the public mind had ensured the cover up. His favourite noodle house had been on that corner. Really great noodles …. He wondered if he should arrange another attempt on Stephen Totilo – the wounds from the Desktop Tower Defense debacle were still fresh. But it was the little guys who were causing the real problems: penetration attacks from TIGSource were getting more common every day and Stallman still lived, protected by the Dckx mafia, despite that outrageous price on his head. He could feel the sand slipping through his fingers like goo through a pipe. How could he identify the next big thing if he couldn’t even see the potential in his own staff? As Doull says in a comment below the ‘review,’ “Despite what I wrote, this isn’t a specific dig at EA or the game industry. It was more a ‘isn’t it a great opportunity to be an independent developer, because the tools are now out there to not have to worry about the low level stuff anymore’.” It’s worth a read just for the mental image of a clone Crecente and a destroyed corner in New York City. Long live the indie game. Review: World of Goo [Ascii Dreams via Rock, Paper, Shotgun] More »
Inaugural IndieCade Celebrates Independent Games
4:00AM Mike Fahey | IndieCade cordially invites folks who’ll be in or around Bellevue, Washington in October to come celebrate independent gaming as they launch their first stand-alone international independent gaming event. Running October 10th through the 17th, IndieCade kicks off with a two-day preview event leading into a week-long exhibition open to the public. The launch event features talks from speakers such as Jenova Chen of flOw fame and Jeep Barnett from the Portal team, who’ll be discussing the path from indie to mainstream, along with master classes, preview screenings of upcoming titles, and an awards ceremony where five top games will be selected from a field of 26 finalists. Once the show opens to the public it’ll be hands-on all week long. Yum. The festival takes place at Open Satellite in Bellevue, Washington. Hit the jump for more details on this much-deserved showcase for independent game developers. More »
News
The Maw Devours PAX 10 Audience Choice Award
3:20AM Mike Fahey | The results of the inauguaral PAX 10 indie games showcase are in and the audience has spoken. 10 games won spots on display at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo, where convention goers were asked to cast secret ballots selecting their favourite of the lot, and Twisted Pixel’s XBLA action platformer The Maw came out on top. “The intense sense of purpose and camaraderie amongst The PAX 10 was astonishing,” commented Michael Wilford of Twisted Pixel. “We feel extremely lucky to have been chosen from such an august group and grateful to have been a part of the PAX experience.”
