April Indie Game Round-Up

cyrus_zuo writes "Take a break from the E3 world and look at what happened in the Indie world in April. Game Tunnel has posted its April Indie Game Round-Up, covering 15 Independent games that were released since the March Round-Up. While there has not yet been an Editor's Choice winner this year, April featured 6 Gold award winners (average score of 8/10), the same number as had been awarded during the first three months of the year combined! As always it is full of opinions from the illustrious panel of Seth Robinson (Legend of the Red Dragon), Mike Hommel (Dr. Lunatic) and Mike Kasprzak (Sykhronics) on each of the games."

Whew

[Reignking]

Well, I was reaching my limit of ways to avoid work by surfing Slashdot, but now Slashdot has found me tons of goofy game, like more mini-golf. FORE!

The Force is Not With Us.

[MiceHead]

Where is everyone? The thread on the 2004 Indie Games of the Year [slashdot.org] brought about hunrdreds of comments! It's Star Wars [rottentomatoes.com], isn't it? Everyone's out watching the midnight showing of Episode III. By God, I blame George Lucas.

Damn you, Sir. Damn you, and such.
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Epidemic Groove [dejobaan.com] - Our casual/action/real-time strategy hybrid about women curing a worldwide epidemic by constructing nanomechanical defenses. You know, the usual stuff.

Obviously not paying attention

[Emerald Gaze]

You know how Indies movies are usually really cool with lots of undiscovered raw talent? Yeah, looks like these game designers must have missed that lesson....

Re:Obviously not paying attention

[syrion]

I'm not sure what indy movies you're watching. I must have missed that, too.

Re:Obviously not paying attention

[Seor Jojoba]

I find the "indie" label appropriate. A lot of indie movies are crap, and you have to watch some bad ones to find a "Primer" or "Run Lola Run". Same thing with the indie games. Did you actually download and try anything there? Or did you just dismiss them by looking at the screenshots? If you compare low-budget indie games at a very shallow level to the frontline retail shelf fare, yeah, they will come up lacking. But occasionally you find the smaller games doing something risky and different because

Not a bad crop.

[Seor Jojoba]

There is some variety in there, and I'll be downloading at least 4 of 'em to try out. I'm glad to see not so much pattern-matching stuff which seems to be the fatal fetish of indie developers. I am tempted to download Horror Squad because maybe it is funny-bad like a B movie instead of boring-bad.

DROD Returns!!!

[p_conrad]

It sure is great to see that DROD is back. I played this back when it was a 16 color game for Windows 3.1. I registered earlier this week. You start getting slammed with new enemies right after you pass the demo levels. The game is just great. The addition of the wandering nephew character really adds some great puzzles.

You can actually get the full original DROD, with level editor, for free. Go visit their site and check it out:

http://www.caravelgames.com/ [caravelgames.com]

They even have a Linux version - such a

Re:DROD Returns!!!

[Seor Jojoba]

They don't make a big deal out of it, but the new DROD is open source. You actually can grab all the source from the game (http://www.caravelgames.com/sourcecode.html [caravelgames.com]), but it is a little difficult to build with the eleventy-three dependencies and the media isn't open licensed. So yeah, you can build your own DROD, but if you wanted to distribute it, you'd need to replace the graphics and sound with something else. Hmmm.

Re:DROD Returns!!!

[p_conrad]

You wouldn't have the levels either. What's the point of having a game engine without any levels?

So far the level design in DROD Rooted Hold is great, so I don't have a problem with paying for it.

Isn't this the a pretty good example of the dream of open source? You aren't being forced to pay for the technology. You are just paying for creative work done with the technology, right? The technology is shared, as if it were a scientific discovery.