Nothing but one-sentence looks at last week’s Indie Games.
A chat room where Avatars perform a random standard action every half second or so, or you can make your Avatar perform a selected standard action at will. 80 Points.
Timed path-finding puzzles starring your Avatar. 240 Points.
Like a non-animated, simplified, slow moving, zombie version of Astrosmash. 80 Points.
Just a couple of random bits and bobs from our mailbox to tide you over.
Harald Maassen dropped us a line to let us know that the XBLIG game we really quite liked, Revenge Of The Evil Aliens is now available as a free download for Windows. Which is nice. As I say, we liked it and at that price it’s a steal.
You all know about the forums over at Xboxhornet, yes? I’ve often contemplated running an xnPlay forum but frankly I don’t have the time to maintain two of the buggers and well, when someone is already doing an ample job of things, no point two of us at it. So, if talking XBLIG games is your bag – go so.
Pencel Games are running a bit of a promotion on Gerbil Physics at the moment. It made us laugh so it gets a place in the sidebar. Give a gerbil for valentines day, why don’t you?
Crosstown is now down to 80 points. I’ve still not gotten round to playing it but I’ve heard good things about it. Can’t really knock it for 60p and I’ll try and take a look at it over the weekend. Stay tuned for further views.
Aaaand finally, next up on my review list (and a foregone conclusion given I adored the game first time round) is Battenberg Software’s remake of Earth Shaker. There’s a lot of things I love about this existing but I’ll save that for the review.
My mother used to have a glob of live sourdough culture she called ‘Herman’. She would add flour to it and feed it and it would grow and balloon into something much larger, but it was still just sourdough. Dirge Game Studio’s Herman is like that as well.
In a world where XBLIndie Games were released last week, one sentence will describe first impressions…
Change colors to absorb blobs while dodging the blobs that can absorb you. 80 Points.
Read a comic book style story, then take trivia quizzes about it. 240 Points.
Nice platformer – much better level design than the XMAS version! 240 Points.
Sometimes games don’t need all the bells and whistles under the sun to be enjoyable. Sometimes just doing what they do and doing it well is far more than enough.
There’s not a whole lot of words you can write about Along Came A Spider, it’s a simple thing indeed. You play a spider (I know, you couldn’t work that out for yourselves at all could you?) trying to negotiate a floaty web in a void thing, collecting flies en route. That’s really about all there is to it. You cling to the web in a variety of different ways, go from left to right and get to the end trying to fall off as few times as possible.
Not that it really matters if you fall off because you’re just placed back at the last checkpoint to try again. It’s a game that wants you to see all that it has to offer and y’know, that’s really cool with me. I like that sort of thing.
As you progress, your little spider pal gets a few new powers to try out, the leaps get trickier and the level design requires you to think a little bit more about your next leap. There’s the odd boss battle along the way but they’re not really anything to get too excited about, the platforming is where it’s at here and this wibbly wobbly web is one to come back to until you get through each and every level.
Lovely, really. 400 Points is perhaps a bit on the pricey side but it’s a spend that you’re unlikely to regret.
There’s been a bit of a dispute going on in the dark underbelly of xnPlay Towers (for those not in the know the dark underbelly is where we keep the pies) over Cavemen Vs Aliens. Well, I say dispute it’s not really much of a dispute per se more a discussion on the levels of brokenness present. In the game, not in the pies. The pies are resolutely not broken pies. You’ll find out my opinion in a moment, xAD on the other hand is far more forgiving than I. So we fought with bricks. If there’s no round up this week, you’ll know why. I used my cursor on him. He didn’t stand a chance.
Ah, this has already done the rounds a bit. Brandon Boyer declared this screenshot to be the best of the week (and I’m inclined to agree) and our friends over at Indiegames.com have already posted it up earlier in the week.
So, we’re late. We don’t care. We’re just happy to post a lovely video from the creator of the rather splendid Gravity Bone for his upcoming PC and XBLIG game Flotilla. Yes, very happy to do so indeed.
Cover me in paint and call me Terry, isn’t that a lovely thing?
To the Flotilla mini-sitemobile, folks. And natch, if you haven’t played Gravity Bone yet – do so, chaps.
There is almost never an episode/volume TWO amongst the Indie Games released in the past week. Still, they all get a look and a sentence.
Reasonably entertaining Pipe Mania variant. 80 Points.
Not sure about the translation (or the intended audience), but the interface is decent. 400 Points.
Four players in an arena shoot balls at spikes to knock them away and into opponents’ walls, like Warlords meets reverse Hungry Hungry Hippos. 240 Points.
To counter some of the negativity, I guess it’s time to run through the XNPlay Best Indie Game releases of 2009. Ah, I’m much more at home and much happier celebrating the good things about the service than dwelling on the bad so rather than waste time on the old introductory text of death, let’s just crack on and get down to business.
“Sure, on the surface we’ve got a twin stick shooter, a take on asteroids that’s very much owes a debt to Geometry Wars and the glowing vector revival that followed in its wake but Echoes+ is its own game. Very much so. And it’s what makes it so brilliant”
“It’s a good thing for creativity, it’s a good thing to encourage folks to believe that yes, they can make a game no matter how simple and no, they don’t need to know diddly squat about floating point numbers or vector maths or anything like that to do so. It’s good to encourage people to push this sort of thing ever further, let’s get more developers and publishers to understand there’s a market out there that doesn’t just want stuff like this, it needs it.”
“Untypeable name aside, ZOMB1ES is exactly the game I’d like to see more of on the Indie Games service: cheap, impulse-buy games which set out to do one thing, and do it well. 80 Points is so easily justifiable, if the game is quite fun, people will have no problem in buying it.”
“The thing that makes this game great, then, isn’t the nostalgic retro-standards for graphics and sound, nor is it the dodge-about gameplay. The thing Bailout! does that would have made it a classic were it released a quarter century ago is the same thing every great game does: it makes the player feel empowered, in control of his destiny, and able to game the system to his advantage – whether or not it’s true.”
“Halfbrick Echoes pretty much does everything right. When it drops I heartily recommend you take a gander. I’ve had immense fun with the darn thing (and swore a few times too after blocking my own route to a crystal like the fool I can be), it’s fast, silly and overwhelmingly fun stuff.”
One of the few games we’ve reviewed that earned its recommended tag after the first review had gone out. Compulsive? Addictive? Pointless? Yes to all 3. Great stuff all the same. Dig deeper little miner man, dig deeper.
The only game in our list that we haven’t actually gotten round to reviewing at any point. Which is a big shame as Arkedo: Jump is not only the best of the 3 Arkedo series of games but a lovely, stylish retro inspired platform game in its own right. It’d make the list on looks alone but a great game too? Oh yes.
“…it’s clear that Ishi understands the genre he’s playing in and understands what’s needed to make that all important fun factor come to the fore. As appealing as the odd masocore platformer has become, you can’t beat a proper old school single screener done well. JPSC is done well.”
“I don’t think there’s been a time before Leave Home came along that I felt like I’d really managed to completely piss a game off. Oh, I haven’t nearly enough fingers for the amount of times a game has managed to piss me off, but y’know, never before have I felt like I’ve done something to really wind the bloody thing up. Such is the genius of Matt James’ wonderful Leave Home”
“Remember all the buzz around fl0w? Remember how you checked it out and harrumphed that it was nothing but a “big fish eats little fish” game with pretty graphical effects? Remember how you played it for hours regardless?
Yeah, Solar is like that.”
Ah, not just my argument this time, ladies and gentlemen. Instead that of the lovely ex-Offworld, all round top journo chap and fine supporter of indie devs worldwide Brandon Boyer over at Boing Boing.
Unlike the not really especially well considered recent IGN editorial declaring the service to be a failure, Brandon’s analysis is one I find incredibly hard to disagree with.
Yes, we can sit back and laugh or gripe over the massage apps or whatever comical/depressing trend hits the service but they’re not really that much of an issue I don’t think.
To pick one part of Brandon’s article that’s relevant to what we at xnPlay do: when the IGN top picks are, for want of a better phrase, without any sort of level of transparency or editorial reasoning (IGN long stopped doing their awfully titled “Communal Shower” round ups) and to my eyes at least, seem quite arbitrary that there’s perhaps something fundamentally wrong with the way the Indie Games service is being treated and presented to the public. But, you can probably already guess that from how many steps it’ll take a member of the public to not only go and navigate to the indie games service on the dash but to actually download a game (comically detailed in the Don’t Be Nervous Talking To Girls trailer).
It’s this and a few more things that Brandon touches on in his piece, not taking the easy targets (“oh, it’s the devs clogging up the service with shit” a la certain journalistic quarters) but instead taking a more considered view. Often, in more recent times, it’s felt increasingly like despite the good and hard work of the XNA team and the developers who are punting out great titles, if anything the service is chuntering along in spite of the lacklustre support of MS:The corporate entity, the same for the successful games (and there are some folks out there who are doing pretty well all told).
From my own personal experience, I’ve been nothing but happy with the way my own game on the service has done. Myself and compadre Andy have had some lovely support from the community, players and from the press. Can’t knock a thing there.
Running xnPlay on the other hand? Well, let’s put it this way. The issues I detailed last year never reached a resolution. I got tired of banging my head against the brick wall of MS, tired of running through their phone support, tired of pissing away most of a day trying to reach some sort of solution that wouldn’t involve me paying £80 just to erm, not get the actual problem fixed and finally lost patience when I got informed that it wasn’t going to go any further unless I took my 360 round to someone else’s house to try it on their net connection instead of my own. Sometimes you just know when you’re onto a loser and this was definitely one of those times. I just ran out of fight.
And the thing is, if it’s a problem for me trying and downloading indie games often then it’s only a matter of time before the problem becomes more serious for the public. As it is, there’s no sign of a resolution or indeed anyone being able to resolve what amounts to a major flaw in the system.
Is the whole “no assistance from MS” a one off unfortunate situation for sites like us? It may well be but it certainly doesn’t come across that the work myself, xAD and the many other sites that cover XBLIG titles (see the sidebar for more) are valued in any way by the powers that be. Which whilst I can understand that to a degree (after all, no-one has a right to expect anything just because they set up a site on the internet), without folks like us and those linked to – given Microsoft’s current record on promotion, well, it’d be a bit of a sorry state without us.
We don’t really ask for anything as a rule, most of us certainly don’t get paid for doing this in any way shape or form unless you count the tokens and y’know, I’m not really asking for anything now with this post, just kinda lamenting that a service with such immense potential isn’t being allowed to reach it and there’s little acknowledgment or support for those of us who help promote the service also.
Anyway, go. Have a read of Brandon’s article and do let us know whether you agree or disagree with any points raised and whether you share our concerns or think we’re mad as hatters.
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