Topic: XBox Live Indie Games

[KDR_11k]

The Indie Games section is pretty hidden away in the XBox Live Marketplace and not much is said about the games there in the mainstream gaming press. Anyone got good games from there?


So far I liked:
unRevolutionary (5$): Yeah, I told everybody and their dog about it. A twin stick shooter with tons of highly varied levels and an experience/class system that drastically changes the gameplay in subsequent playthroughs. There's a lot of longevity even without repeatedly playing the same levels.


Miner Dig Deep (1$): Somewhere between Mr. Driller and Clonk, you're a miner who digs deep to find valuable metals and gems. The limits are that your lantern doesn't have infinite oil and you need to be able to get out of the hole you dug yourself into if you want to get your valuables back to the store.


Armor Valley (5$): It's like that Glory Days game I keep going on about, except in 3D. It's quite fun until the final push to destroy the enemy base when playing against the AI which can get quite frustrating. Supposedly playing against other people fixes that but it only has local MP and I haven't had anyone around to play it with.


Mech Gladiator (1$): A simple mech combat game, there's only three levels in two difficulties each but they're pretty interesting boss fights, for a dollar I think it delivers enough. There's even online MP but of course you won't find any random people there (supposedly a problem with all indie games), might come in handy for playing with friends though.


Blood Tempest (1$): Really fast action game about sea combat, it looks great but at times seems uncontrollable. It's basically the combat system of Modern Pirate Hunter but from what I can tell that's all you really need from that. For a buck it's good enough.


Protect Me Knight (3$): (the name is in Japanese so you won't find it in an alphabetic search) Something like Gauntlet crossed with those defense shooter games. You have to protect a princess from enemies while playing as one of four classes and with up to 4 players coop. It's really one of the more famous game sof the service.

[broodwars]

I believe Jonny highly recommended Shoot 1up.  I've pretty much ignored the Indie Games section so far in my 2 months with my 360, though it has been kind of tempting to check out once in a while.  There's just nothing in that list that jumps out at me as "must play"s even at their low price.

[Caliban]

I have:

PLATFORMANCE : Castle Pain
Breath of Death VII
Arkedo Series - 03 PIXEL!
Arkedo Series - 02 SWAP!
Arkedo Series - 01 JUMP!
Kodu Game Lab
CarneyVale Showtime
Weapon of Choice
Beat Hazard [by far my favorite because it managed to grab my attention for much, much longer than the other titles, even though I can't get my 360 to connect to my computer so I can use some of my preferred songs]

[KDR_11k]

I have Beat Hazard on my PC with the iTunes DLC. IMO the default music in the PC version is FAR superior to the stuff in the 360 version, both in sound and gameplay.

How's Kodu working out for you? I've been looking at that.

Also I think I'll add to my recommendations:

Philip Muwanga's HexyTrench (1$): Somewhat like a hexagonal pipedream RTS or maybe Netstorm (anyone remember that?). It has a ton of features including online play (as always no population), even a map editor and game variable editor (basically a very limited modding tool). There are random item drops that seem to favor the losing player most of the time (and a nuke can completely change the game but at least it restricts them to once per player). If there is anything like it I've never encountered it.

[Caliban]

haha I haven't touched Kodu in a long time, but now that you ask I do wonder if the Kodu community is doing well or did it just crumble.

[KDR_11k]

Today's game is a good one.

BioHack (1$): A puzzle game where you place regulators to control the flow of reactants between different pools of chemicals and have to reach a specific amount of the target product.

[Dirk Temporo]

Biohack: The hacking game from Bioshock, as the name would have you believe.

I really wish that Beat Hazard would just play songs from an external hard drive. It's incredibly inconvenient that it will only play songs ripped to your internal, or from your computer.

[Caliban]

It doesn't even allow to play songs from an mp3 player that's plugged to the 360.

[KDR_11k]

Got Spatial Rift (1$), moderately interesting. It's a space combat action RTS, you can control one unit directly but what's annoying is that special weapons which are extremely powerful (like the human medium ship's missile barrage which can instantly kill 2+ ships of its own weight class) can only be activated by you so you have to switch units and fire special weapons all the time if you want to do well. Manual combat isn't that much fun otherwise, you have to pound away at enemies for a long time to kill them with regular attacks and moving around doesn't help all that much.

[KDR_11k]

Revolver360 is awesome, doesn't involve actual colts though. It's a frantic shmup with a Super Paper Mario-style world twisting mechanic, you can rotate the world at will but you collide with the 2D projection of the enemies and bullets.

[KDR_11k]

Astroman is a good platformer. The physics and enemies remind me a lot of early Metroid games but the game is level-based, not open world like Metroid. There are upgrades to find but with the different structure it doesn't feel like Metroid. Still fun.

Well, let's see what else there was that didn't get mentioned yet...

radiangames everything: This guy is a machine, he's been making a game per month and they're all great.

Garden Gnome Carnage: It's hilarious, WTF and IMO worth paying the dollar for even though there's a free flash version. This one has military dudes and matching music instead of the christmas elves of the original, IMO that funnier.

Null Divide: Retro-styled (and I mean that in a NES way, not Jeff Minter) twin-stick shooter with Metroidy upgrading. It makes more use of upgrading than Astroman so it feels more Metroidy than that.

Abaddon Retribution: Nice space shooter (not purely twin-stick) where you upgrade and defend a massive mothership, the difficulty curve in coop MP is a bit wonky but otherwise it's great.

Coral's Curse: Another Metroidy game, this one has one big connected world and casts you as a snake-woman with a long tail that you have to use to get through the world. The physics make it interesting.

[criffo]

Forteresscraft - Coming out on the next week or so. It's almost identical to the pc game Minecraft. It's gonna be released in episodes. If you enjoy Minecraft, you'll enjoy FortressCraft. 80 M$ points.

[NWR_insanolord]

I'm completely addicted to Minecraft, but I wouldn't want to play it that way, even if were the real thing and not a knockoff. I am, however, hugely excited for the iPhone/iPad version of Minecraft.

[KDR_11k]

Fortresscraft doesn't have the survival aspect. That's the reason I play Minecraft, to delve deep and kill nasty monsters.

[Morari]

Yeah. Without the survival elements, Minecraft gets pretty monotonous after a while. It's just enough incentive to keep you building. I've been running a multiplayer world on my server for the past few months. That way my friends and I can just come and go as we please, like we would in singleplayer. It's an interesting social experiment if nothing else...

I really don't know how anyone would be able to play the game outside of the PC though. No mods, no hi-res texture packs, no mouse controls. I'm kind of curious to see just how well it scales though, since the client tends to eat up a lot more CPU than you'd think from the simplistic graphics.