April 2009 Indie Game Round-up

Joseph Lieberman writes with Gametunnel's monthly round-up of quality independent games. Taking the top honors this month is Caster, a fast-paced shooter with weapon upgrades and a partially destructible environment. "The weapons are a nice variety: homing, stun, and charge lasers, along with two lasers that create chasms and mountains in the environment. The last two are personal favorites of mine (screwing with the terrain is great fun). Fighting is sweet, sweet pandemonium, but it can be slightly overwhelming at first. By the second or third level, though, you'll be blasting the baddies like a pro." Also scoring high were Zeno Clash, a fighting game with elements of a shooter, and Geneforge 5: Overthrow (the last in the series of Geneforge games), a point-and-click RPG with turn-based combat.

Re:The origin of the term?

[noundi]

Indie comes from independent, as in not controlled by a major publisher. It would be the opposite of mainstream. Also mind you that the creating process is not the essential here, the distribution is, as the distributer (producer) generally controlls and funds the project. That's the best definition I can give you. But as everything there are grayzones.

Re:Be a King

[KDR_11k]

I guess Settlers can be considered an RTS since it's really about building up a war economy and crushing the opposition, never mind the more recent derailings the franchise got... Maybe many people just don't know about games like Settlers? The genre hasn't seen much attention lately.

Some of these have mac versions!

[FictionPimp]

I'm so glad I read this article. Typically I don't read gaming articles because they are windows only. But now I found 2 new mac games to try: Geneforge and Caster.