61 Frames Per Second : indie

Ridiculously Cheap Indie Gaming: The Impulse Weekend Sale

Joe Keiser — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Forget about Steam for a minute. Right now, you need to pay attention to Stardock’s competing online store, Impulse.

Impulse has been, to be brutally honest, not particularly effective competition against Steam. The prices are either at parity or higher, the selection smaller. The one thing the service did have going for it was that most everything being sold there was 100% DRM-free: following purchase, you would only ever have to log on to Impulse to download updates.

Yeah, that’s a big selling point, but it’s always about price, isn’t it? Steam’s weekend sales have been, let’s say, aggressive—just last week they were offering every single X-Com game for five dollars. So it’s great to see Impulse baring teeth here at last. This weekend marks its first weekend sale, and one of the gems available is indie charmer Gish—normally $20, now just $4. And it’s not even the only good deal.

There’s also Kudos 2, the ambitious casual life sim that might have been too expensive at $20. But now that it’s $6, there’s almost no reason to see if it really is as addictive as everyone says.

Also available is Astral Masters (a TCG in the vein of Magic: The Gathering, but with no real money transactions for booster packs) and Tangle Bee (a casual puzzle thing the internet refuses to discuss). Both are $4. Choose your poison—I think I’m going to skip the cappuccino today and get Kudos 2 instead.

Aquaria Is Cheap. Buy It, You Bums.

Bob Mackey — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I'll admit that I used to have a few gaming prejudices that now fill me with a deep shame. For instance, until I bit the bullet and plunked down fifteen bucks for Jonathan Blow's Braid, paying more than ten bones for any game available exclusively as a digital download felt wrong somehow. This is exactly why I missed out on Bit Blot's underwater adventure, Aquaria, back when it was released late last year; I'd played and loved the demo, but the full game's price of thirty dollars was just a little too rich for my blood. The sad thing is, I probably would have forgotten about Aquaria forever if the game hadn't just come out on Steam for the low, low price of sixteen dollars. Now I can make amends for my former transgressions by purchasing my own copy, and getting all of you loyal 61FPS readers to grab one as well. Here's the game's trailer, if you need some convincing:

Unfortunately, the sale on Aquaria only lasts until the end of 2008, so you'd better scrape together some spare change while you can. Protip: you know those dudes in the Santa suits, ringing bells on street corners? They're literally rolling in quarters.

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For Indie Games, These are the Salad Days

Joe Keiser — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Good news, everyone! MSNBC.com is reporting that somehow, the beautiful, excellent labor of love World of Goo actually made a good amount of money for its innovative creators.

This is probably the most heartening story of the long list of heartening stories that have come out about indie games this year. World of Goo managed to make money with a slim marketing budget of approximately $0.00. Other things, like Braid and Castle Crashers, had a minimal marketing push—yet the most accurate predictors we have for this kind of thing (VGChartz might usually be wildly inaccurate, but their XBLA chart is based on information pulled from a massive collection of real GamerTags and is generally considered to be as close as we can get to true XBLA sales numbers) believe these games generated millions of dollars in revenue, each.

We are talking games that were made by no more than two men, games that were built on laptops in coffee shops. Could it be possible this era of HD gloss and budgets approaching nine figures could also be indie gaming’s greatest days?

It’s entirely possible. Back at the beginning of the medium most games were made by single renaissance programmers, but the money we’re looking at now is much better than what Richard Garriott and Roberta Williams made selling plastic baggies to their local software retailers.

And while it may be digital distribution that’s responsible for the most profitable parts of this trend, it’s not the sole factor. Remember that whole Limbo of the Lost plagiarism debacle? That story was so hilarious it actually got fully researched, revealing that the game’s “creator” Majestic Studios were really just three guys who concocted the whole thing in a bar. Had they not stolen every single bit of background artwork for their game, that three-man work (give or take a few, maybe fictional outsourcers) would have gotten an international release to actual, physical stores.

That a sprawling indie scene is creating its own commercial hits says that this is the healthiest the medium has ever been, with a large enough player base to support nearly any kind of well-executed crazy idea. Forget the success of the AAA titles and the Wii—if you want to see if an industry is truly mainstream, you have to look to the strength of the works at the fringes. They’re doing great, and, so long as we keep getting things like Mac Ports of Aquaria and WiiWare versions of Cave Story, we are too.

Please, Please Don’t Forget Xbox Community Games

Joe Keiser — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

I know you’re excited about that New-fangled Xbox Experience that came out today. You can’t wait to get lost in this strange new maze of bright icons and non-demarcated advertising. But after you’ve given your avatar your dream porn ‘stache and reveled in Netflix on the Teevee (now free of that Sony Pictures stink, apparently), try to cut through the clutter and find the real prize of the Experience: Community Games.

Surely you remember Community Games. That’s what Microsoft is calling the indie games service that got a big reveal at GDC 2008 before disappearing completely from view. It’s out now, but it’s still hard to find; on my 360 it’s five deep into the Game Marketplace menu, peeking out from behind some Gamerpics of Lebron James (and even that’s not the whole list—to get to that you have to go to Games Marketplace, then Explore Game Content, then All Games, Browse, Collections, Community Games).

We’re talking real, true indie stuff here, not that polished, “I have a big three publishing deal and an interview on newsstands now” product that people have been calling indie. This is gritty, garage band gaming, warts and all. It’s pretty exciting to see this sort of thing on console, so I’m going through as many of the free trials as I can. Below I’ve picked out a few of the gems you should try, if only so you can say you liked them before they sold out:

Artoon: Part puzzler, part platformer, this game uses sketch-like shading (think Valkyria Chronicles) and looks great for it. Some interesting use of space in the puzzle design makes this worth a download.

Biology Battle: A perfectly competent multiplayer Geometry Wars clone with a tenuous grasp of English that makes the whole thing even better. It’s a shame it costs twice as much as the game it cribs from, though.

Colosseum: An ambitious stylized 3D arena fighting game. This makes for a pretty good technical showcase of what an independent developer can do using XNA, if they really try.

In The Pit: You are a monster that lives in a pitch black pit. There are no graphics in this game—instead, you use audio cues and vibration to find and eat the people that fall in. If you have a surround system, try this immediately. It’s the kind of creative madness that only a completely independent developer could come up with.

Weapon of Choice: Now that’s what I’m talking about. This one’s a charmingly low-budget Contra-alike that’s got strange, awesome weaponry and some pretty interesting design ideas.