January 2009 Indie Game Round-Up

cyrus_zuo writes with this month's round-up of independent game reviews by the folks at Game Tunnel. The top rated game this month is Defense Grid: the Awakening, a tower defense game which "does not revolutionize the tower defense genre, but is solid in every aspect with a few interesting twists." Also scoring highly were cloudphobia and The Tales of Bingwood: Chapter I. "Bingwood is a very clear and unabashed homage to The Secret of Monkey Island. It succeeds because it manages to reference and mimic the style of the original with a fresh and engaging story and a consistent, clean presentation."

Questionable Content

[Anonymous Coward]

How does a game that doesn't run on half of the reviewers' machines not get last place?

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's based on the Torque Advancd engine by GarageGames.

They have been known to pay for placement on various sites.

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[Anonymous Coward]

What, people still use that piece of crap?

Somehow, I'm not surprised that the game is crash-happy.

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[cliffski]

No way in a million years did torque pay to be listed on gametunnel. The reviewers are probably just understanding of the fact that PC's being PC's, there are sometimes cases where a newly released game might have issues on some peoples computers.
The reviewers at gametunnel are just indie developers, not people with a bank of 10 PC's they can try a review copy on.

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[KDR_11k]

Because it's sorted by scores and "can't run it" gives an n/a score instead of 0?

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[renegadesx]

For PC? The Braid port is March release.

Tower Defense

[AKAImBatman]

If you're a big fan of Tower Defense, go check out http://www.towerdefence.net./ [www.towerdefence.net] They catalog nearly every variation of Tower Defense known to man. You can easily waste days on that site. So click through at your own risk! ;-)

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[aCC]

Arghhh! Thank you very much for stealing 45 minutes from me. Me reading your comment and thinking "what are tower defense games? Let's click on the link." Good idea! Then wasting 44 minutes on playing Onslaught instead of working...

It is fun though. I can recommend it. Just not when you're meant to be working.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[electricbern]

If you are a Windows user, you had it coming.

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[Dolda2000]

Damn you! You just made me waste hours on that site. Why didn't you warn me?!

Oh...

Monkey Island!

[troll8901]

You fight like a diary farmer!

(In the meantime, Elaine Marley is lying on the bed, sweat glistening from every pore...)

Innovation!

[Goaway]

So two out of three games mentioned are good because they're just like some other game?

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[Chris_Jefferson]

Yes, why not look for something original, like (I believe), my iPhone game :) iTune Link [apple.com]. While there has been a lot of real problems with apple and the iPhone store, I believe it is a great place for indie games, providing a way of getting some money out of small, fun games.

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[Goaway]

Thanks for walking in and taking a big shit on my comment. ":)" indeed.

Cloudphobia?

[KDR_11k]

I remember getting a version of that from HOTU ages ago, I guess it got expanded and made retail or something like that?

I found the game too hard BTW, having to worry about your health AND the health of the mothership AND the time limit was too much for me.