November Indie Game Round-Up 39
cyrus_zuo writes with this month's round-up of independent game reviews. Leading the pack is World of Goo, a popular puzzle game in which you build structures to get blobs of goo from one place to another. "WoG could have zero personality and still be a good game, but on top of the tremendous technical execution, you are presented with a quirky and odd world that teems with character. WoG has a style all its own and the flair and dynamics of the world just add to the pleasure of losing time with the game." Also scoring high were action RPG Mount & Blade and the third release in the Strong Bad series.
Dear gods, what's happened to our Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
the new Indie (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that these days you'll find 'Indie' means 'not controlled by one of the big games companies'.
This could easily include small, multi-employee, well funded companies.
Besides, the days of one or two people with next to no money producing a commercially viable game are pretty much gone.
Re:Dear god, fix the frontpage (Score:5, Insightful)
Please!
If I wanted to see just the headline and the number of comments, I would be on Fark.
Re:the new Indie (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, the days of one or two people with next to no money producing a commercially viable game are pretty much gone.
This argument may be of some merit in the PC gaming scene, but is somewhat ignorant of the emerging game market: cellphones. In this end of the gaming spectrum it is hard for me to even imagine more than a small handful of people working on a title. There's the guy who had the original idea, a few programmers, and a graphic designer if you feel the need. Yet with so few resources, it will be done in a month. Two people working on games on the scale of Crysis, WoW, etc? Yeah, forget about it. But two buddies can still team up in this modern world and make a buck having some fun.
Re:Strong Bad is Indie? (Score:4, Insightful)
I honestly have no idea and don't really care, unless you're allergic to being mainstream. What they do have is very fun, fairly cheap and Linux friendly games. Strong Bad season 1 requires the native DirectX installed, Sam&Max season 1 works out of the box, 2x01 requires an update and entire season 2 needs Windows version set to Vista but they all work flawlessly. To put it quite simply, if my WINE experience was this good with all games I wouldn't need native games. They're not exactly grand epics but I've had a lot of laughs from some of the situtations/dialog.
Re:the new Indie (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, the days of one or two people with next to no money producing a commercially viable game are pretty much gone.
Obviously not entirely. See: World of Goo. Also, even though it's not at all indie, MegaMan 9.
WiiWare, XBox Live Arcade, and PS Network are perfect places to showcase true indie games. Rather than dying, it's more apt to say the face of indie games is changing. In fact, with the advent of these online services, it's become even easier for a low-budget studio to release a console game.