Slashdot Mirror
Best Indie Games So Far This Year
cyrus_zuo writes "Game Tunnel has just finished and published its
yearly mid-year article
2005 Independent Game Mid-Term Grades. This article, the mid-year equivalent
of Game Tunnel's year-end Game of the Year awards, captures the best indie games
so far in 2005 while also grading each game genre. The article is set-up just like a school report card, grading genres,
such as action, adventure and strategy, with a letter grade from 'A' to 'D' while
also spotlighting two of the best games that have been released so far this year
in each of the genres and listing what game GT is looking forward to most in the genre."
Your really missing something if you haven't played this one; i'm glad its been recognized by this contest. http://caravelgames.com/ . They didn't forget the linux users, either.
Anyone care to link to some quality free games? My current favorites:
Warning forever: http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index_e.html
Truck Dismount: http://jet.ro/dismount/
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Am I the only one who finds independant games often difficult to get "comfortable" with? I mean, I've been so warped by non-stop playing of games like Quake and Counterstrike or Civilization and Baldur's Gate that anything that doesn't involve running around in a multi-player environment blowing people up, running missions in an MMORPG with other players, building terran forces to avoid another player's zerg attack or building up my party in a single player RPG feels... akward.
And don't get me wrong - there are some wonderful independant games out there. As a recent convert to Mac, I'm almost forced to hunt such games down, because there either aren't a lot of choices of modern games (say, Rome Total War) for the Mac, they won't run well on the Mac or I simply dont' want to buy them all over again just to play them on my mac instead of the PC. Fortunately, lots of neat little independant games are made for (or ported to) the Mac.
It's just that having spent so much time in the last decade on the games I mentioned in the first paragraph, playing anything else feels a lot like playing Mine-Sweeper. Or more - it feels like going without an internet connection for a long time. Disconnected. Seperated. A backup alternative for when you can't play the other games.
Maybe this sounds insane and nobody knows what I'm talking about. It's just been so long since I've played at an arcade and I dont' play console games, so my main experience has been very much as described previously.
I think it also speaks to the lack of unique popular and mainstream publisher games out there, that some of us have become so molded to a single type of gameplay.