Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Interesting quote from the GalCiv2 FAQ:
Q: Galactic Civilizations I got some attention because you didn't have any CD copy protection. Aren't you afraid of piracy?
Our primary concern is our customers - the people who pay my salary. They're my overlord and I don't want to inconvenience them. Moreover, piracy is really about how many sales are actually lost. What we do is put out free updates after release. We got Editor's Choice Awards from most of the major game magazines for the original Galactic Civilizations, and that was on the 1.0 version in the box. However, we put out tons of updates after release that greatly enhanced that experience.
So let's say someone got a "warez" copy. If they like the game, they're going to want the updates, and to do that, they have to have a valid serial number that is verified on the server side (i.e., no cracks). So at that point, we're going to get that sale or we would have never gotten the sale.
I don't like game companies treating me like a criminal. If I'm paying $50 for a game then I better well be able to put it on my laptop and PC and not have to futz around with keeping track of the CD. Besides, I end up losing my CDs anyway.
(still looking for the system requirements on the website.. <sigh>)
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
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.