toythatkills
Member
Hey GAF. Thanks for having me back.
Hey guys. Sorry for getting banned. But hey! On with the show! Im back just in time for another kind of lame month, after a few pretty good months while I was away. Theres a small chance that Im cursed. I should probably be banned again so that XBLIG turns good. (Please dont ban me. Look at Flappy. Look how happy I am to be back!)
You can buy any of these games via xbox.com by clicking the link associated with each game, or on the Games Marketplace on your Xbox 360. Simply enter the marketplace and scroll up to Indie Games, where you can check the top rated titles, the games that have just come out, or browse to find the games mentioned in this thread. Indie Game trials last eight minutes, which is often enough to establish what you think about it. Even if you dont buy any of these games, at least trial them, tell people what you think, get more people trying them.
Go. Play. Enjoy. Tell us what you think! Tell all your friends! Get them to tell all their friends
HELP! Xbox LIVE Indie Games arent available in my country!
Yes they are! Xbox LIVE Indie Games are available in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. If youre outside those countries you can still play these games by setting up a Gamertag for free for one of those countries. Its incredibly simple, and absolutely worth doing.
The Gold award, for the absolute best game that came out last month.
Picbox is Picross, basically. Umm, theres not really much else to say as far as gameplay goes, other than that it controls really well and has some neat features like a counter that means you dont have to do the counting yourself if, you know, you hate counting.
Where Picbox really shines is in its presentation.
It has great music and great sound effects, and as you solve a puzzle the background (which scrolls) changes alongside the changes you make in the puzzle. Its a nice effect and as Picross games go, this really is as good as its going to get on a controller.
It does commit the cardinal sin of penalising you for making mistakes (instead of just letting you carry on, oblivious) but that just means DON'T MAKE MISTAKES!
For your dollar, you get 100 puzzles with a three-star rating system, and a bunch of awardments to unlock. The puzzles come with varying degrees of difficulty.
(NB: if you downloaded this before and had issues with long loading times, theres an update already out that fixes them; its super-smooth now!)
The Silver award, for games that are great, but hey, only one game can be the Gold award winner.
Grey Infection doesnt look like much, really. It certainly has its signature style but Im not a massive fan of it. It doesnt control that well either. Where the game shines is in its concept.
There are a number of floating orbs in a level, and shooting them makes the level change. Some of them make platforms appear, some of them make platforms disappear. You have to work out what shooting each orb does, then you have to shoot them in the correct order and from the correct place to ensure that you can reach the exit (which only appears when youve shot them all).
And thats why I can forgive its controls, really. Its not a platformer, even though it takes place on platforms. Its a puzzle game at its heart, and its a unique one at that. The platforming it asks you to do isnt something that requires precision so even though the controls are a bit tight, it doesnt cause many issues. No, the thrust of the game here is in working out how to get to the end of a level, rather than getting there.
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UBERZOMBIE USA commits so many sins. Its a twin-stick shooter, of a kind. It has zombies in it. It should surely be fast-tracked to the bottom of the barrel, right?
Weirdly, wrong.
Mainly, UBERZOMBIE USA is a tower defence game. You place various things around your farm during the daytime, landmines, fences, general hazards and by night, waves of zombies come. You can either watch your defences take them down, or help them along by shooting them, which is where the twin stick controls come in. They feel kind of stiff and dont work that well, but the tower defence aspect is quite strong, as is the presentation, and so its easy to forgive it.
The presentation and art style in general is great. Its one of those looks that is incredibly hard to pull off, which is to say that it looks a mess but it looks like its intentionally a mess, rather than just looking like it was made by someone with no artistic talent. Chester gets this right, too, and that looks awesome too.
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a Voxel Action, despite its curious capitalisation, is a great game.
Step one, though, is to change the camera. The default camera is some peculiar 45-degree thing that lets you see basically none of the level and makes it difficult to judge jumps correctly. Change it to the classic camera and youll suddenly realise youre playing a Mario game.
With Link!
Thats not strictly true, really. While the influences are clear to see, theres a lot more going on here. Youve got a huge level, and you can do nothing because you are weak. You have to explore the level, jumping on springs, collecting coins, breaking boxes and finding keys to open chests that award you new skills, and then you can use these new skills to progress. Its MetroidVania, in a way.
The graphics are nice, it turns out that voxels are kinda pretty when youre not looking at another Minecraft clone and smashing your face against the wall until all thats left is a bloody mess.
Any game influenced by Zelda, Mario, Metroid and Castlevania cant possibly be bad, can it? This one certainly isnt.
Bronze Award winners dont represent the best games out this month, but every one of these has some really unique aspect to it that more than makes it worth trying, or is more than good enough to warrant a trial. Its for games that are worth talking about.
ことのね～ゲーム・アセンブル・ガール～ only got a release in Japan, and to be honest, its completely unplayable if you dont know Japanese. Which I dont. As far as I can tell, you have to sort lyrics into the right order in real time, as a singer sings them. You wont be able to play it, then, but it sounds really lovely, and I kind of love it just because the artist put XNA logos into the singers eyes which was adorable.
O.C.D. is a kind of match-three game, you collect gems to level up your character which lets you collect gems for longer. Ive seen Gaspode_T talking about it a fair bit, and I can see where hes coming from. Theres definitely something there, but it lacks something too. For me, it lacks peril. Theres no real consequences to your actions, so you just keep hitting the same buttons over and over. Dungeon Raid on iOS takes this similar concept but contains peril. Im not sure that lose-conditions are the point of O.C.D., but as it is theres just nothing to keep me playing.
Kingdom is the most boring looking game youll ever see. Seriously. Look at the screenshots of it. Asleep much? Its actually fun to play, though. You have tiny grids split into different territories, and you can capture these territories by moving chess pieces onto them. The chess pieces move like traditional chess pieces, and can capture enemy pieces like them too. Your goal is to capture as much of the board as you can which lets you earn more money, and then you can spend that money on better chess pieces which you can use to ultimately capture the enemy. Its a really nice take on chess mechanics that makes it feel nothing at all like chess but yet still really strategic.
Gravitas wasnt what I was expecting. I was expecting a twin-stick but its actually some kind of turn-based shooter thing. You and a few other players are on a screen, and you just have to shoot at each other. There are planets in the way, though, so you have to use their gravity fields to curve your shots. You can also choose not to shoot and warp instead, to really throw someone off. Not great in single-player, but in multiplayer its well worth a look.
Nuage is okay, in a way. I like the concept. Its just a relax-em-up, you control a cloud and collect other clouds, and when you have enough you can make it rain which makes flowers grow and leaves grow on the trees. Its all very Zen. There are some nice graphical touches, like how the screen gets darker the more clouds you collect and the closer you get to launching rainageddon, but overall the game is just ugly. Or, that is to say, its not even close to pretty enough to achieve what it wants to achieve.
Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 3 came out. Youll know already whether this is for you, and if you dont yet know, youll want to start with the first one rather than this one!
LCD Dungeon System is far better than it looks, but its unique presentation goes some way to helping that. Imagine that youre playing a roguelike on a Game & Watch. Thats basically it. Much more depth than there might initially appear, with this one.
Bug Ball is Slime Volleyball, in a very very pretty skin. I dont know what else to say, other than that its much better with a second person rather than with the AI.
Some games are bad. Really bad. So bad that they dont even deserve a functioning link to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Seriously. No links. There are a lot of bad games on Xbox LIVE Indie Games, but this section is reserved only for games so atrocious or fundamentally flawed that they actually anger me.
My favourite bit of Union of Armstrong was when I paused the game and the game stopped, apart from the power gauge which carried on ticking down even though everything else wasnt moving. When I came back, I was playing a tower defence game in which none of my towers were operational because theyd run out of power. Genius.
Cell: emergence was created by one of the minds behind Deus Ex. Development on Deus Ex went something like this: one team of people made the game, and another team of people explained to the player how they were supposed to play the fucking thing. The developer of this game was on the first team.
Instead of playing Angry Fish: Deep Sea, I went down the actual sea and drowned myself in it. I then came back to life to rate the experience of drowning to death two stars. I then rated Angry Fish: Deep Sea one star.
If theres one constant about Xbox LIVE Indie Games, its that twin-stick shooters will never fail to amaze me. They will never get worse than this one, I say every month. Then the next month, Space Battles comes out.
The Never Ending Game 2. Surely pointless? If the first game is still going on, why would we need a sequel? I certainly cant fault the developers claim, though. You control a marble and have to fall through holes to keep low down as the screen constantly rises. I held left, then I held right, then I held left, then I held right. I repeated this pattern over and over again for the entire length of the trial and didnt even come close to losing.
Bullets that are near impossible to avoid? Check! Enemies that are near impossible to hit? Check! One enemy every five minutes or so? Check! Fighter Mission really does have everything.
Octogenarian VIP. Please buy our game based on its silly title, dont worry about the graphics which were drawn by a blind orphan, or the gameplay which was coded by a man who thinks MENSA is that one that sends rockets into the up-high.
If youre going to make a text adventure game, theres one thing you need to be able to do. Write goodly. The developers of The Impossible Dungeon cant write goodly. Literally the very first sentence in the game is this: You are a very sad King that wants to regain his castle. Either Im the object of that sentence or Im not. I am a very sad king who wants to regain my castle. How hard is that?
Fuck Zombie Invasion. You fire a gun for ages, then half way through the trial you change guns, and trying to fire the new gun brings up the purchase screen. This shit should be banned. The purchase button should not be on the only button youre actually using to play the game in a shady attempt to generate accidental purchases. Sorry, but any game that does this is an automatic fail. Fuck Zombie Invasion.
A small section for games that have been updated somehow, either with new content or with a brand new price! This section will only bother with games that are worth buying, so if its in here, assume that its excellent and that you should own it.
- Beat Hazard, a twin stick that generates enemies based on your own custom soundtrack, cut its price from 400 Microsoft Points to 80 Microsoft Points.
- Orbitron: Revolution, a side scrolling shooter with super-pretty graphics (and GAF made) cut its price from 240 Microsoft Points to 80 Microsoft Points.
- Little Racers STREET, a top-down racer, added multiplayer and leaderboards, and then it updated again and added time trials too!
- EvilQuest, an action-RPG, added difficulty modes, as well as a few other tweaks for a better overall experience.
- Growing Pains, a 2D platformer in which the world evolves as you grow bigger, cut its price from 240 Microsoft Points to 80 Microsoft Points.
- Escape Goat, a platformer with a puzzle aspect to it, cut its price from 240 Microsoft Points to 80 Microsoft Points.
- There was an update to BloodyCheckers too, though Im not sure what was updated. I only picked it up this month after hearing a fair bit about it all of a sudden!
The last couple of months have seen some amazing racing games come out on XBLIG, and Ive not been here to rave about them so how about a top five list of XBLIG racing games, eh?
Little Racers STREET is in my top-three XBLIGs ever, so, so easily.
Find out why in its very own thread!
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Magic Racing GP 2 is the sequel to Magic Racing GP, a game that came out for about fourteen seconds before it was pulled due to one of the marketplaces regular crap-outs. So in the meantime, the developer figured hed add a bunch of extra content and turn it into a completely essential top-down Formula One game.
Theres a definite theme in these racing games mainly being top-down, as well. You want to try playing all the proper ones. Every single one of them is awful.
Anyway, though, MRGP2. What you get here is an insanely deep, insanely fun, insanely customisable Formula One game, with go-karts. The go-karts are an added extra and to be honest, kind of lame. Where the game really shines is in its F1.
The first thing to do is ditch the analogue controls. This is retro gaming at its finest and it plays better when you just accept that. None of this trigger nonsense, you want A to accelerate, X to brake, and you want steering on the D-pad. Its the only way, and it honestly feels so much better. Compare them, youll see.
You can edit team names. You can edit driver names. You can edit how many points you get for winning a race. You can race seven laps or seventy. You can qualify, or not. You can use KERS, or not. Tyres degrade, fuel runs out, your car falls to bits, or not. You really can play this game however you want. It can be an incredibly deep F1 sim, or it can be a really light race around a few of your favourite tracks, all of which are in here in beautiful top-down.
There are some lovely graphical touches, the way you can see the wheels on the cars turning as you steer, for example. Its such a tiny motion that most people wont even notice it, and I love that it happens anyway. Heres a developer that wanted to make the best F1 game he could make, and he has.
The racing, of course, is where it really shines. It feels wonderful. The cars are really grippy, and if you judge the speed well you can sweep around corners in a way that can only be described as beautiful. Seriously, getting through a chicane perfectly in this game is one of my favourite things to do in any XBLIG, its incredibly satisfying. Theres just something lovely about how it feels, how at one with the road the car is. That, or you can misjudge it, fly off the road and have to abort the lap. That happens too.
There are so many tracks and cars and options that this game is basically essential for any fan of F1 or the racing genre in general. Its really that good.
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I wrote about MotorHEAT a few months back; heres what I said:
MotorHEAT is a racing game of sorts, as you can tell from the screenshot. Its not so much about the driving as it is the avoiding, though! You auto accelerate and your job is just to move left and right to avoid traffic.
Of course, theres more to it than that. Avoiding traffic by the smallest of margins will increase your boost meter (RT) and then you can go even faster, scoring more points.
Its a score attack game, this. You just score as much as you can before time runs out, getting extra time for passing checkpoints and points for distance, overtaking cars, using boost, and all sorts.
What I love most is the risk/reward, which is just awesome. You get more boost and more points for passing cars within mere centimetres and with boost activated, but then theres a huge risk of crashing and being penalised ten seconds. Do you dare get closer? Do you dare? Its brilliant.
Also brilliant is the online leaderboard (Gold only and peer-to-peer) which updates your position as you race, telling you how many points you need to move up to another position in the overall leaderboard.
Its just great, this. Totally great.
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Flowrider, as you can see, is another top-down racer, and yet again its completely different to Little Racers STREET and Magic Racing. For a few reasons, too.
First is the obvious one, it takes place on water. This gives a different feel as you have to drift around corners and you never feel completely in control, but in a good way. Like, you have to consider the water as much as you do your own craft. Oh, and that water? Utterly gorgeous. This is one you really want to see in motion.
Second is the track layouts. LRS and MRGP2 have very rigid layouts, where here there are a bunch of shortcuts. Theyre not hidden away but theyre thin and hard to get into (Swiss Toni) and it really makes you race in a different way.
And then theres the controls. Theres no accelerate or brake, here. Instead you just use the analogue stick and point where you want to go. It sounds a bit weird for a racing game, but it feels totally natural and with the way the vehicles react to the water, it feels totally right, too.
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Halfbrick Rocket Racing, then. Maybe a controversial choice as its very different to every racing game youve ever played and it takes a fair bit of time to even become competent at the game, let alone actually good at it.
Halfbrick Rocket Racing, as the name might suggest, has a pretty big focus on rocket propulsion. You have RT to fire the right one, and LT to fire the left one, and pressing either one will spin you around. Press both together to go forwards. The game plays with this some more, by surrounding the tracks with walls. If you thrust against a wall you go even faster, and this is the key to getting gold medals and insanely fast times.
It will take some practice, though. Theres a more traditional control scheme using the analogue stick but for me, if you want the really good times, I reckon youre going to need to master the RT/LT method. The controls are analogue and they give scope for such precision that none of the other control schemes can really compete. Will it be easy? Hell no. Will it be fun? Oh, aye.
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Have fun, and if youre playing an Indie Game you love, dont forget to tell people about it, because its only through you that the service thrives.
