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February's Indie Games Review
cyrus_zuo writes "Game Tunnel has just published
its February Independent
Video Games Round-Up. This article looks at ten indie games from the last month with four different people reviewing and rating each game to provide a variety of insights into what was and wasn't great in Indie gaming in the last month. This month's review is highlighted by Tower Defence, Tube Twist and Wrestling Encore."
What's better than an indy game? A free, open source and cross platform indy game with easily downloadable user created content.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Only one game above 8 and it didn't interest me :-/
the indie games in the accompanying article weren't that great.
...
I'm sorry, there's nothing wrong with making your own game, but I've seen better FlashMedia done by teens on Spring Break
NewGrounds.com has lots of them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Would it have been so hard to include prices with the game reviews?
For a few games there was a direct buy link, but for example for TubeTwist I was absolutely unable to find out any price or way to buy.
For the ones which I did manage to look up, the price seemed too high to be worth it, so I'll just assume the same for the others?
It's worth remembering that if you rail against the reviewing world for giving uniformly good reviews, you should at least be grateful when they tell you that a game isn't so good.
It'd be nice to keep the monthly roundups mentioned on games.slashdot. It gives us a good pointer to what's going on in the indy world. This month, it seems not a great deal, but when the really great ones come along this seems a pretty efficient way to find out.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.
Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.
'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*
*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.
The ______ Agenda
I'm a fan of Jets N Guns ( http://www.rakeingrass.com/ )
Nice horizontal (flying) shooter. Run it off my ipod for play-anywhere action.
Sorry, but I have to plug my own program. PyScrabble is an open source, multi-player game written in Python. Translated in English, French and German.
:)
Come play. Spread the word. Have fun!
haven't looked at the list yet.
What i want to say is that there's a very important game out today. Galactic Civilizations 2, Civ in space. Not just a clone, the first one was pretty different and is a mix of Civ and 4X games. The second one seems pretty awesome too.
There was a clone called Winbolo that some guy wrote, but it doesn't work properly in linux and doesn't seem to be under development. If only there were an open source version of it, we could revive it.
It's amazing how long this little game has endured, largely due to the balance of its arcade and strategic bits. It's also proof that a lot can be done with some 4 -bit graphics and lo-fi sound.
I guess I respect the fact that they're trying to be part of Greg Costikyan's 'alternative distribution mechanism' for games, but I don't really like Game Tunnel. For two reasons:
1) They charge developers for their reviews (they offer free reviews, but warn that they will be shorter and may never get done). Which is sad, because most of the reviews are terrible - a lot of their writers seem to just not get the point of the game under review, or to have spent 15 minutes playing it in a window while 80% of their attention was engaged in scouring real gaming websites for job ads. It's basically a second-rate implementation of vanity publishing for the computer game version of Tarantino-wannabe film students.
2) They get coverage like this, which implies that GameTunnel is some kind of authoritative source of information about 'indie games'. No it isn't, as long as it ignores free/Open Source software or anything written by someone who doesn't have to pay money for any publicity they can get. If you want 'indie games', go to GameHippo (which admittedly has its own problems) or Shoot The Core. There are plenty of other places, too.
PS I have never had a game reviewed by Game Tunnel.
Tower Defense bears a remarkable resemblance to all the Tower Defense maps that came out for Warcraft 3 many years ago. There's even a hidden TD level inside the Warcraft 3 expansion.
I don't know if this is supposed to be about originality or what, but its not original if its a clone of what people were doing with the Map Editor three years ago.
I've mentioned this before on these pages, but I recommend you wander over to www.allegro.cc and download a copy of Overgod, which is a really sweet, retro-flavoured cross between Asteroids (game) and Tron (film). It's one of the few games to have really grabbed me since ye olden days playing games on my Spectrum. :)
I'm more worried about the article headline. They wrote February for crying out loud! Feb - r - uary.
That's ABSOLUTELY, COMPLETELY... correct.
Who is this and what have they done with the real Zonk!?
Since everyone is posting their favorite indie games, why not give Invade Earth a try? It's a Risk clone that can play original Risk, Risk 2210, and (eventually) Risk Godstorm. Oh yeah, and it has network play. http://www.smileygames.net/invade