I Played This Indie Game and You Should Too!

I’ve played a few user levels in Distance, they’re insane, in the best way.

Hopefully my debut track “Head Like A Hole” goes over well (once complete), and I don’t end up getting sued by Trent Reznor.

Just came across this tweet, and it looks super cool to me:

If you didn’t play any Xbox 360 games last gen, they had a little sub-group of super indie games called XBLIG, these gams were self published and often cost as little as a dollar. They were amateur as hell but some of them were really fun, and I thought they were lost to time when MS shut down the XBLIG platform, but looks like a few at least will be released, and on multiple platforms too.

That’s awesome. XBLIG was really important for the rise of indie gaming, and I missed all of that and only played the stuff that came to PC.

There were some great games in the XBLIG program. The two I miss the most are Flotilla and One Finger Death Punch. I’m thinking they aren’t part of this bundle (I clicked the link but there was no list of what games are in it?), but bringing some games from that program forward into the new era cannot be anything but a Good Thing.

This is something I think about from time to time. Every time we switch media (both physical and software), we lose some of the previous generation- not just games but movies, tv, books, etc. There are film movies that never made it to VHS, VHS movie that never made it to DVD, etc, etc., and this is even more pronounced in the video game era. You may think that the ‘important’ stuff gets transferred, but really all that argument speaks to is your personal biases.

Yeah, I can’t find a list of games that are part of this collection, I guess that’s yet to be announced. It is a drag to think that a lot of these games are just lost - I think MS is doing a pretty good job of trying to maintain a history of their consoles and curate their older collections through backward compatability, but the XBLIG games are an oversight in that effort. Maybe this is a first step in reclaiming some of those games which were absolutely minor classics.

I wasted many clicks, and like @divedivedive I came empty. So, super excited about… nothing!

For a moment there I thought @tomchick was moonlighting or donning an alter ego. Oh that the logo was an anime Sarah Palin.

I don’t play games on PC, really- I’m console-only, for a long time. My only PC is Surface 5 (lowest model, intentionally bought for battery life over power). It might run either of them, but I really don’t care to check. They were both amazing in the 360.

Would love to see I Made a Game with Zombies in It get released again, just for the song (which later made it into the Rock Band lineup). That was fun to play for the first time.

Pikuniku was just released for free on Twitch Prime as a promotion (and just went on sale on Steam and Switch, or is about to) is freaking wonderful. It’s got a very unique move set and style of interaction, and is just chock full of surprises and funny shit. Don’t sleep on it if you have Prime!

fluffy

I picked up Ticket to Earth on sale a couple of weeks ago and have been enjoying it quite a bit. It’s a series of tactical puzzles linked by an OK story and character upgrades…

The battles are a little XCOM-ish in that you can either move and attack/use an ability or move twice. The catch is that the floor is made up of tiles of 5 different colors, and when moving it has to be along adjacent tiles of the same color. Every tile you move along adds 1 to your basic attack, which resets after attacking or being hit yourself. Some maps have fixed structures that offer cover, but you have to move pretty aggressively to stay alive.

To further complicate things, each character has five abilities linked to one of the tile colors, so every purple tile you pass through adds a charge to the purple ability you have readied.

It’s very puzzly in that the missions all seem to be fixed, as do the starting color pattern on the floor and position of enemies. Floor colors change after every turn, but I haven’t looked at it closely enough to determine if that’s randomized. I think so, but wouldn’t swear to it.

Not a great game, but good enough to grab on sale.

Anyone else here played FAR: Lost Sails?

It’s a fairly modest, but quite well put-together game. It looks like it might be some kind of survival game, but it’s basically a puzzle adventure centered around driving a giant tractor-like vehicle across a dried-up post-apocalyptic ocean.

As you might guess from that description, it’s very atmospheric. Some great (sometimes odd) music, beautiful scenery, and while I don’t know that they totally take advantage of it, driving and maintaining the vehicle is pretty clever and fun. But what I really appreciated is that it has a lot of confidence in its pacing. It’s not afraid to let you just chug along sometimes, watching the sublime landscape go by. But it also has its fair share of tense and intriguing and surprising moments.

You can probably finish it in one long session, if you try. Steam tells me I played it for 3 hours.

NG that game has me super thoughtful interested.

I’ve played a chunk of Crying Suns in beta and it’s very well done in places. I wasn’t totally enthralled by the combat minigame, but I bet it’s gotten at least a bit of love. I remember thinking the story was interesting, although sometimes told in a slightly long-winded way. Let’s hope it all comes together in the final product!

I played the demo for about 2 hours. I like the pixelie adventure stuff and the resource management, but I agree the real time battles … maybe I just didn’t get them as well.

Not sure if this is the thread for this, as it’s not out yet (even in early access), but there’s an RPG coming out in March that I’ve had my eye on for a couple months, Outward. Billed as a ‘realistic’ fantasy RPG, meaning that that it has some survival aspects, encumbrance and inventory work differently than most of these things, stamina and rest works a bit different, etc.- but most importantly (to me) you explicitly aren’t any sort of a Chosen One or Dragonborne or any such crap. You’re just an average dude wandering around doing stuff. Sure, there’s quests and whatnot, but you aren’t the lowly farmer off to save the world because of a prophecy or anything- I think the game starts with your family in debt, necessitating you needing to head off into the wide world to make money or something. Oh, yeah, and it’s fully co-op with another player- split-screen even! It really looks somewhere between Gothic/Skyrim/survival crafter.

I just watched an IGN vid talking about some of this stuff, and it looks neat.

I can’t believe they did the entire video in split screen. I’ll never play it that way, so don’t make me watch a video from that terrible perspective.

It’s kind of annoying that it’s high fantasy and cartoony. I’m right in the middle of Kingdom Come: Deliverance so I’d prefer something more like that for a “realistic” RPG.