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2005 Independent Game of the Year Awards

Posted by Zonk on from the cheap-games-probably-look-good-right-now dept.

cyrus_zuo writes "For anyone looking for something different Game Tunnel presents the 2005 Independent Game of the Year awards. Game Tunnel's list of the Top 10 Independent Games of the Year covers gaming from a different angle, looking at the Independent and the Innovative. The awards also include the best of each genre as well as technical categories. Last year's results are still available."

11 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Only proprietary and commercial games? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Apparently non-profit FLOSS games such as Battle for Wesnoth (released their 1.0 last year) aren't independent enough...

    1. Re:Only proprietary and commercial games? by CowboyBob500 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who gives a flying whatever about how Free it is? These awards are about the quality of the game, nothing else. Look, I'm an avid Linux user, but this kind of zealotry annoys the hell out of me (it's no wonder us Linux users get branded as nerds with posts like this). Wesnoth is an OK game, but it hardly breaks any boundaries does it?

      Bob

      --
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    2. Re:Only proprietary and commercial games? by grumbel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      FOSS games seldomly fall into a single year and almost never get a final release, so its hard to judge them together with commerical games which do have a final release.

  2. HUGE increase in Mac/Linux representation by Burz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I just compared the 2004 list with the one from 2005:

    For 2004, only ONE title (Gish) was listed as supporting Mac and Linux. In 2005, there are no less than FOUR.

    I wonder if this means that more titles overall are being released for these platforms.

  3. Re:why do people bother with nyud.net? by iamdrscience · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Usually when the original site is dead, nyud.net is just as dead. Why do people bother with Coral?
    This is a valid point, but it's only true if the Coral link is linked to afterwards. If Slashdot or any other high traffic site with a link to breaking news puts up a Coral cache link instead of a direct link, then it'll be cached.

    But yeah, that is a big practical limitation of Coral because you don't know which sites are going to go down and so you don't know which ones should be linked through Coral!
  4. Re:exciting? by ClamIAm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    early games.

    Oh, you mean when games were fun?

  5. I really liked by rsilvergun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Thomas and the Magic Words. It's one of those game ideas that's so simple and cool I wish I'd throught of it :).

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  6. Re:Bogus list? by eyepeepackets · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, I played it this year as usual and so I suppose, umm, yes!

    I have a high quality jones for this Rogue-type game.

    --
    Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
  7. Re:exciting? by ergo98 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh, you mean when games were fun?

    Zzzzzzzz...

    Everyone crystalizes a certain era of their life (usually early/mid teens) as being the most fun period of time in the history of the universe, to all people, over all time. Of course this is complete B.S. - Like you I had this foolish notion that earlier games were much more original and enjoyable.

    Then I booted up MAME, and several other emulators. Boy did I have my rose-coloured memories shattered. The Pitfall of my memory turned out to actually be some trivial, ridiculous repeating set of boring stages infinitely cycling, for instance.

  8. Re:Darwinia by HD+Webdev · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why they changed their distribution method, I don't know, unless it was somehow actually cheaper to use Valve as their US vendor rather than doing it the other way. Or maybe Valve is giving them promotional opportunities (i.e., advertising) that they couldn't get before.

    They changed because they couldn't afford the money to get shelf space. This way, they can't lose money if the game doesn't sell.

    With Steam, they save bucketloads of money and get a virtual box in the shelf-space on every of the millions of computers that have Steam installed. Every user sees that advertisement every time they go to pick a Steam game to play unless they've changed that option in the Steam settings. They can play the demo in just a few minutes on any computer that they want to since a Steam account can be used on as many computers that the person want to play those games on.

    I run LAN servers and notice that very few people shut off the advertisements because the target audience is the correct one, the ads don't take any extra time to load, they can be disabled, and the ads aren't obnoxious. Instead, people are more likely to talk about the new games that show up in the advertisements or news.

    --
    This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
  9. How about top ten open source games? by Yartrebo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    These games are all or mostly non-gratis and non-free games. I'd be far more interested in the top 10 list of free-software games. Even if they're not stellar games, at least I can play them for free and without having to deal with the ever tempermental WINE. Having source code adds much more potential fun too once I start getting bored with the game (loads of cheating and modding opportunities).