Independent Games Festival Finalists Announced 20
GameSetWatch notes that the 2007 finalists for the Independent Games Festival have been announced. The IGF is an annual event meant to highlight and praise the work of independent game designers of all stripes; it's run by Slashdot Games editor alumni Simon Carless. Simon puts the spotlight on the Seamus McNally Grand Prize finalists, the 'best of the best' at this year's IGF. My vote goes to World of Goo: "Building off the concepts from Tower Of Goo, one of Kyle Gabler's projects from the Experimental Gameplay Project at CMU, the first game from Bay Area duo 2D Boy uses the hitherto unexplored structural ability of blobs to make an addictive construction-based puzzle action title. There's no release date or demo for the game yet (aside from Tower Of Goo, a kind of 'prequel'), but there's screenshots and a trailer on the official site."
Tower of Goo (Score:4, Interesting)
It was one of the offspring of the www.ExperimentalGamePlay.com project, an exploration of "starting from scratch, create a unique game in a week". Some of the results were very creative, some were valliant attempts that fell flat, and some were incredibly absorbing and enjoyable with really unique concepts and gameplay.
I've been hoping for versions of those games with the rough edges polished up, as little things like odd/inconvenient window sizes kinda hindered play at times.
Battleships Forever (Score:5, Interesting)
I was checking the forums at the Battleships Forever site and saw that a tournament has been hosted by some folks over at the Penny Arcade forums. (Tournament Rules [penny-arcade.com] and the Tournament Results [penny-arcade.com]) What is cool about that is, they have the results linked to videos on youtube showing the actual battles. Very smooth.
Hammerfall is pretty amazing (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tower of Goo (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyhow, it seems like people are always complaining that games don't do a good job of appealing to women, maybe having more women actually design some of the games is part of the solution.