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February's Indie Games Review 26

Posted by Zonk from the good-games-from-little-guys dept.
cyrus_zuo writes "Game Tunnel has just published its February Independent Video Games Round-Up. This article looks at ten indie games from the last month with four different people reviewing and rating each game to provide a variety of insights into what was and wasn't great in Indie gaming in the last month. This month's review is highlighted by Tower Defence, Tube Twist and Wrestling Encore."
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February's Indie Games Review More

February's Indie Games Review

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  • What's better than an indy game? A free, open source and cross platform indy game [wesnoth.org] with easily downloadable user created content.
  • Only one game above 8 and it didn't interest me :-/
  • the indie games in the accompanying article weren't that great.

    I'm sorry, there's nothing wrong with making your own game, but I've seen better FlashMedia done by teens on Spring Break ...

    NewGrounds.com has lots of them.
    • but I've seen better FlashMedia done by teens on Spring Break ...

      Sorry, but spring breakers' party videos don't count.
    • Odd ... a lot of people would say the complete opposite. If it weren't for the Live Arcade games, they WOULDN'T be interested at all in the 360.

      To each his own. I'm a big fan of options. If you like it, buy it and play it. If you don't, then choose something else. My pet peeve is when people complain about a certain genre of games and how they're not a big fan of them. Sure, fine, whatever, then don't play them! If enough people agree with you, then that genre is going to go niche, or eventually die. (Too b
  • Would it have been so hard to include prices with the game reviews?

    For a few games there was a direct buy link, but for example for TubeTwist I was absolutely unable to find out any price or way to buy.

    For the ones which I did manage to look up, the price seemed too high to be worth it, so I'll just assume the same for the others?

  • Not the best games - But that's a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lerc ( 71477 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @07:20PM (#14772744)
    It's worth remembering that if you rail against the reviewing world for giving uniformly good reviews, you should at least be grateful when they tell you that a game isn't so good.

    It'd be nice to keep the monthly roundups mentioned on games.slashdot. It gives us a good pointer to what's going on in the indy world. This month, it seems not a great deal, but when the really great ones come along this seems a pretty efficient way to find out.

  • Originality? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @07:21PM (#14772755) Homepage
    It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.

    Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade [interactivestory.net], Dada, stagnation in blue [diygames.com], and most everything this guy [ferryhalim.com] does. Heck, subspace [subspace.net] is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.

    'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia [ambrosiasw.com] has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*

    *Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.

  • I'm a fan of Jets N Guns ( http://www.rakeingrass.com/ [rakeingrass.com] )

    Nice horizontal (flying) shooter. Run it off my ipod for play-anywhere action.
  • Sorry, but I have to plug my own program. PyScrabble [sf.net] is an open source, multi-player game written in Python. Translated in English, French and German.

    Come play. Spread the word. Have fun! :)
    • Better rename it because the company with the rights to the Scrabble name (dunno who that was) really hates it when people make free Scrabble clones.
  • haven't looked at the list yet.
    What i want to say is that there's a very important game out today. Galactic Civilizations 2 [galciv2.com], Civ in space. Not just a clone, the first one was pretty different and is a mix of Civ and 4X games. The second one seems pretty awesome too.

    • Re:Not every Indie is crap (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Repton ( 60818 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2006 @11:16PM (#14773967) Homepage

      Interesting quote from the GalCiv2 FAQ [galciv2.com]:

      Q: Galactic Civilizations I got some attention because you didn't have any CD copy protection. Aren't you afraid of piracy?

      Our primary concern is our customers - the people who pay my salary. They're my overlord and I don't want to inconvenience them. Moreover, piracy is really about how many sales are actually lost. What we do is put out free updates after release. We got Editor's Choice Awards from most of the major game magazines for the original Galactic Civilizations, and that was on the 1.0 version in the box. However, we put out tons of updates after release that greatly enhanced that experience.

      So let's say someone got a "warez" copy. If they like the game, they're going to want the updates, and to do that, they have to have a valid serial number that is verified on the server side (i.e., no cracks). So at that point, we're going to get that sale or we would have never gotten the sale.

      I don't like game companies treating me like a criminal. If I'm paying $50 for a game then I better well be able to put it on my laptop and PC and not have to futz around with keeping track of the CD. Besides, I end up losing my CDs anyway.

      (still looking for the system requirements on the website.. <sigh>)

  • Bolo? (Score:2)

    by meese ( 9260 )
    I know this is slightly off topic, but I'm wondering what happened to my favorite indie game of all time: Bolo [lgm.com]. What ever happened to it?

    There was a clone called Winbolo [winbolo.com] that some guy wrote, but it doesn't work properly in linux and doesn't seem to be under development. If only there were an open source version of it, we could revive it.

    It's amazing how long this little game has endured, largely due to the balance of its arcade and strategic bits. It's also proof that a lot can be done with some 4 -b

  • I don't really like GameTunnel (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I guess I respect the fact that they're trying to be part of Greg Costikyan's 'alternative distribution mechanism' for games, but I don't really like Game Tunnel. For two reasons:

    1) They charge developers for their reviews (they offer free reviews, but warn that they will be shorter and may never get done). Which is sad, because most of the reviews are terrible - a lot of their writers seem to just not get the point of the game under review, or to have spent 15 minutes playing it in a window while 80% of th
    • I appreciate the comments, but wanted to clarify a point.

      Developers do not pay for reviews on Game Tunnel. That was something that was done to help pay the bills, but after some complaints here we decided to modify the policy. There hasn't been any review paid for on GT for over a year now. Clearly getting the word out can be difficult ;)

      While not all the reviewers may write in a way that you appreciate, I would certainly disagree with them not spending much time on the games. Most spend many hour
  • I've mentioned this before on these pages, but I recommend you wander over to www.allegro.cc [allegro.cc] and download a copy of Overgod, which is a really sweet, retro-flavoured cross between Asteroids (game) and Tron (film). It's one of the few games to have really grabbed me since ye olden days playing games on my Spectrum. :)

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