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.
Strong Bad is Indie? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not really sure why Strong Bad is referred to as "Indie". Telltale Games is the new kid on the block, but they are a fully staffed and funded studio. Not really the type of company you would think of as small-time "Indie" developers. Given the fact that they made their name by continuing a popular LucasArts franchise (Sam & Max), I'm even less inclined to think of them as independent.
Or is "Indie" destined to be the shareware company of tomorrow? (Anyone remember when Apogee and Epic were the small guys?)
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.
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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 b
Get It Now (Score:2)
This argument may be of some merit in the PC gaming scene, but is somewhat ignorant of the emerging game market: cellphones.
But how does a small game developer manage to negotiate its product into each network operator's catalog?
Localization (Score:1)
Who cares? Outside the US
Slashdot is inside the US. Its parent company is headquartered in California [sourceforge.com], and Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda runs the site from an office in Michigan [wikipedia.org].
That would easily serve the european market
I speak English and a little Spanish, but my Spanish would probably look like Engrish to Spaniards. Are networks in Ireland and the United Kingdom as unrestricted as you claim those on the continent are?
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Being inside the US doesn't mean you must nullify any reference to the world outside. He was talking about releasing mobile phone games to the world - here comes the cluestick - which you can do from inside the good ol' US of A as well. You should try comprehending a sentence in its entirety next time.
Releasing a product for Europe generally requires English, Spanish, French and German translations, the rest of the population can speak at least one of those four. Usually English alone is fine, especially fo
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He was talking about releasing mobile phone games to the world - here comes the cluestick - which you can do from inside the good ol' US of A as well.
I knew that. But then I'd have to bring native speakers of Spanish, French, and German onto my team unless I want to restrict the market to Ireland and the UK, and I have no idea how much money that would involve.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Independent game development studios are not part of company that publishes games. Since they must go to a publisher to sell their games, they are considered to be independent. Independent game development studios are a subset of third party game development studios.
Indie game development studios are small groups that are often poorly funded if they are funded at all. They generally try to make small games that garner attention by being different in a way that seems novel and interesting. Unlike regular
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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.
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the days of one or two people with next to no money producing a commercially viable game are pretty much gone.
Actually that's pretty much the story behind Mount & Blade, one of the featured games.
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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.
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Dear gods, what's happened to our Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dear gods, what's happened to our Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
Click here [slashdot.org] to fix the front page. (If you've been tricked into using that God-awful "beta" front page.) I haven't found a solution for the user page yet. Which is driving me up a *bleep*ing wall. I don't even understand what the new user page is trying to show me or why.
Yes, that's the last comment I posted. I already know that. How about something useful like, I dunno, the list of comments? Nope. Gotta click the right tab for that. Even that interface has been borked.
Please, Taco! Don't make changes just to make changes! The old site worked. Rather than make it work better, you're slowly making things worse and worse. With the forced addition of IDLE, you're even making it embarrassing to come here! (Don't forget to shut IDLE off in your preferences. That's the only category I have ever explicitly banned from the front page view. )
Please stop before Slashdot becomes completely unusable!
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It seems that one of these changes also broke the RSS feed of friend's journals.
I had to remember the /my/amigos URL to eventually find a way to access all the journals complaining about the change.
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How about something useful like, I dunno, the list of comments? Nope. Gotta click the right tab for that. Even that interface has been borked.
For example, the page is unusable at horizontal resolutions less than about 1000px. The floating boxes on the right will overlap the main page content making it inaccessible.
And can someone explain why every third story I go to has a smaller text size than the rest of the site?
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And the tags, holy crap.
Before they weren't that bad.
Now, they look horrible and have a javascript program that takes a long time to run to do... something to the tags.
I can't even turn the tags off. They suck now, use a ton of CPU, lock up my browser, and aren't any more useful than the old tags.
And that isn't even getting into the stupid "story" tag.
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THANK YOU SO MUCH. God, the front page was horrible. None of the extra shit made any sense or seemed to serve any purpose.
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Oh, wow. I hadn't looked at my user page in ages.
I notice if you go to the games user page (i.e. click on your username at the top-left of this page), the tab links are in games.slashdot-purple on a green background. Yeah, purple on dark green -- awesome colourscheme.
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Thanks for letting me know I wasn't losing my mind. I spend a good chunk of time yesterday trying to figure out what I had done to bugger up my user page and how to fix it. I thought it was because - in what I can only assume was a moment of temporary insanity - I had posted a comment to the Idle section. A Google search turned up your comment in this thread.
I agree with your take on the recent changes to the site. Here [slashdot.org] is a comment I posted to Taco's journal about the new metamod system. I'm still not sure
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.
WoG (Score:1)
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It's point and click, other systems don't really use an interface like that.
Mount & Blade? (Score:1)
As this entire article seems to have been hijacked by complaining about the interface, I thought I would comment on a game that I have been enjoying for a couple years now, Mount & Blade. Now while it was only recently 'released', it has been in a perpetual open beta for maybe up to three years now. So I have seen it come a long way. As (most of) the reviewers in TFA point out, the game really shines in the combat and it has been this way since nearly the beginning. Only a few things like AI and the add
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Maybe the easiest way to describe Mount & Blade is Elite on horseback, with an incredible hand-to-hand combat system.
There are several nations at war, and you can work for any of them, or none of them. Each nation has their own unit style, and it takes very different tactics to succeed with viking-style heavy infantry as opposed to Mongol-style light cavalry + horse archers as opposed to medieval English-style heavy cavalry + bowmen.
It's a fantastic game. It's been in beta for years, has been playtested