Games like Minecraft and Braid have proven that there is money to be made in the indie game marketplace, which means more and more designers are following suit, one being Zeboyd Games. The two-man indie design team released two excellent JRPG spoofs on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) Marketplace in 2010: Breath of Death VII ($1) and Cthulhu Saves the World ($3). Both have been well-reviewed and spent time near the top of the XBLIG sales charts, but its success couldn't be rivaled by what wa...
Tower defense games have taught us little. We already knew that defending castles from baddies was fun and that legions of weenies are the key to success in most real-time strategy situations. What other insights have they to offer?
Fatherhood is difficult, especially when you're an octopus. That is the moral of the 2011 IGF Student Showcase winner Octodad, available for free from its website. This hilarious little title was created by a team of interactive media students at DePaul University in Chicago, and is the latest in a stream of successful indie games to come out of collegiate video game design programs. In fact, it's so successful that a sequel is in the works.
Deep in their heart of hearts, most Americans dream of having their car festooned with missile launchers and machine guns. Anyone who cuts them off or looks at them funny in traffic could be dispensed with quick and extreme justice, leaving a real-life James Bond and his passengers free to pursue their American dreams faster than everyone else. Racing games and shooting games are among the two most popular types of video games. So why aren't there more games where one can race cars and shoot ...
The relationship between developers and publishers in the video game industry has always been awkward. Many great game developers such as Bizzare Creations, Clover Studio, and Bullfrog Productions have been disbanded due to corporate shenanigans involving their publishers and owners. The indie game movement has risen largely as a response to this.
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
Steam has been a game-changer in the PC indie game market over the last eight years, making smaller games available to millions of users at lower prices than ever before. And few times in those eight years have there been as much indie awesomeness on sale for as little money as this weekend.
Without Japan, video games would not be very fun. Atari's early work was important, but Japanese developers, publishers, and hardware makers were responsible for almost every major advance in video games for the first 25 years of their mainstream existence. In recent years, it has often been said that they have become less relevant than Western developers. In the indie games movement— (our area of greatest interest here at Indie Games Ichiban)—Japan does not have anywhere near the presence th...
Xe Systems, the Private-Defense-Contractor-Formerly-Known-As-Blackwater, has been busy attempting to re-brand themselves. They have a new name, several new sub-names, and have at least titularly shifted their focus to training rather than mercenary work. Controversial founder Erik Prince is no longer with the company, which is now owned by a large investment consortium.
Every Friday here at Indie Games Ichiban, I will feature a sampling of reviews from the mountains of indie and vintage games that have crossed my internet connection in the past week. Each week will have some sort of theme, this week being old school turn-based strategy games available on Steam.
One of the biggest advantages iOS has over Android as a mobile platform is how readily and fully it has embraced mobile gaming. There are over 200,000 games available in the Apple store, compared to approximately 100,000 in the Android Marketplace. As an Android-using gamer, this has always bothered me.
Like the press covering film and many other specialized fields, video game journalists use all sorts of jargon to convey to their knowledgable readers as much information about a game as quickly as possible. For non or newbie gamers, this can be extremely confusing.
Angry Birds might be the most visible video game franchise in the world today. It has sold 100 million units, as many as all the Sims games put together. It has been incorporated into board games, birthday cakes, and Israeli sketch comedy shows. And yet, this piece of seeming mass-media whoredom is an indie game. Wha?
In the mid '90s, there was no such thing as a widely available indie video game. Brick-and-mortar stores were the only places for consumers to buy games, and magazines were the only outlets to hear about them. For video game creators, the need for a publisher to market and distribute was logistically essential to attract players.
Shoot-em-up games, or shmups, consist of lone or small groups of players shooting at and being shot at by hordes of colorful enemies. The genre is thought to have peaked in the mid-'90s, but recent games in the indie world may be saying otherwise. Geometry Wars and other twin-stick games kicked off the trend, but newbies Trouble Witches NEO, Outland and just-released Gatling Gears have brought some much needed originality into the modern shmup scene—making it something worth exploring again. ...
Following in the footsteps of great historical figures is a great way to learn about them. Michael Wood famously did so in the 1980's for his PBS documentary and book In The Footsteps of Alexander The Great. This March, UK-based marketing director Chris Worth completed a similar endeavor—not by tracing the path of a real-life emperor or explorer, but a humble video game character. One known simply as "The Courier".
In case you haven't noticed, I absolutely adore video games. Most of my friends don't, so to get my fix of knowledgable video game conversation I have turned to podcasts. They're free, they feature the smartest people in games journalism, and can be enjoyed while doing just about anything. Working. Walking the dog. Crying yourself to sleep. Whatever you're into.
The days of having to pay for video games are over. Generally, retail games are better because they're made with more effort and care than their free counterparts. But free browser-based game sites are insanely popular, specifically Kongregate, Armor Games, and the grandaddy of them all—NewGrounds. Despite not receiving funds directly from the players, they’ve become a profitable niche in the games industry. And that popularity has attracted more talent and money to the production of web game...
I am the sort of man whom game companies fall all over themselves to seduce. I'm sweaty, pale, awkward, and spend too much money on video games. There are many of us, especially among XBox 360 owners. We are the most stereotypically "gamer" group of console owners. The XBox 360 doesn't have motion control like the Wii or a blu-ray player like the Playstation 3. It just plays games really well. That's why hardcore gamers like me prefer it amongst all the consoles, and probably why Silver Dolla...
Today we pay homage to a phenomenon. One as diffuse and amusing as the internet itself, and as pointless as dog Halloween costumes. I'm speaking, of course, of giant games.
I will be adding the weekly mystery game/box/chest contents here with the newest on top for quick reference.
From the makers of Bayonetta (Platinum Games) comes Vanquish, their Japanese version of Halo. Not quite sure if this is good or bad, but since they made Bayonetta, this might turn out to be a really good game game play wise. The story already looks juvenile from the video. I like the dash and cover system in the video, something I wish Halo, MW, and BF2 had in their games.
Back in the days of NES and 8-bit gaming, I used to be a huge Castlevania fan. And it looks like I wasn't the only one. However, unlike me, gamer Nick "Nario" Hagman just couldn't let go of his Simon Belmont fascination that easy. Nario recently spent over 100 hours in Minecraft over 37 consecutive days recreating the original Castlevania game—in its entirety!
Hi Fellow hardcore Gamers within the UK Gaming Community. Please be kind enough to add us to your google plus circles and we will return the favour and add google +1 button likes for you and you can do likewise for our site.
Zynga just added another game to their Zynga with Friends series called Scramble with Friends. If you've ever played Boggle, it's basically the same thing, but is dedicated to playing your buddies just like Words with Friends or Hanging with Friends.
Gamers like myself who have switched back and forth between Skyrim on PC and Xbox lack the ability to share game saves. This really sucks. I love playing Skyrim on a console. It's a very comfortable, easy and relaxed gaming experience. You don't have to worry about your frame rate being optimized, or wrist pains from using a keyboard. However, gaming on the PC can allow you to use texture enhancing mods and get an overall smoother experience due to a lack in glitches and bugs that plague the ...
What's your highest scoring game of Scrabble? Since starting this Scrabble World, I've been able to break 500 points on a regular basis. This year I've even managed to break the 600-point barrier a couple times. If you ask me, that's a pretty hefty sum to score in one game, but I'm not on par with the professionals yet.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. You may know that Minecraft is an excellent creative tool, but perhaps less well known are the fascinating array of redstone powered games that have been made by players like you.
The Netherlands are a hotbed of indie game development, which seems appropriate for such a brilliant and eccentric little nation. Two man Dutch indie developer Vlambeer have found themselves in the news more often than most companies of their size, thanks to two great games and a third on the way.
For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...
This week's FIGRR is all about games that are old-new (or new-old, if you like) school. Each celebrates a different vital, yet largely taken for granted, aspect of video game history in the decidedly new-school world of indie games. Their titles betray them. Blocks That Matter is all about blocks. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is all about item shops. Neither are particularly sexy aspects of gaming, but both are ubiquitous elements of great games that can stand on their own.
Four years ago Mind Candy was a pretty small game company. They were best known for their revolutionary but short lived ARG Perplex City, and had no other successful franchises to fall back on when that ended. Their plan to save it? Start a free online social game for children ages 7-12 called Moshi Monsters, where kids can create monster pets, raise them, and socialize with one another in a controlled, safe environment.
There are a lot of fantastic video games out there. Indie Games Ichiban's bread and butter is making sure that you steer clear of the bad ones and embrace the good. But really, the biggest goal here is to help everyone have more fun. To that end, today a game is not recommended, but an event. If you like games—not just video games—but tabletop, board and even hopscotch, then PAX Prime is one of the best events you could possibly go to.
Every year at the big video game trade shows around the world, like E3 and gamescon, the big three console makers each do a hot-ticket exclusive press conference to let the media know what's coming for their system. Computer games have no such press conference. Who would give it if they did?
Video games are one of the best non-medical things that have ever happened to sick children. They are stimulating, entertaining and require very little physical strength to play, which makes them perfect for those suffering physical maladies.
The last week has been a trying one for me. On Sunday, there were four computers in my office, three of which were broken. The fourth was not really a computer, but more of a collection of parts that were cobbled together for the purpose of constructing a PC that would sneer derisively at the mere mention of turning down any game's ambient occlusion settings.
Last week, Google+ took a crucial step towards becoming exactly like Facebook. As of now, there are games available for download within the service, most notably Angry Birds, which is already available on at least one of the devices owned by everyone in America today. Some of the other popular games include Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker, and out of all of the available titles, all come from four companies that have come to form the four-headed dragon of U.S. casual gaming: EA, Zynga, PopCap...
After a decent amount of downtime, one of the best indie game sites on the internet has finally relaunched! PixelProspector is a one-man gaming blog and YouTube channel devoted to the weird and beautiful world of indie games. In the first half of 2010, it received a huge boost in popularity from its video 235 Free Indie Games in 10 Minutes, a hypnotic montage of the best indie games the site had to offer at that point. And to celebrate the relaunch of the blog, which now has an improved desig...
Most stateside gamers have probably never heard of Level-5. If they have, it's more than likely due to the charming and maddening line of Nintendo DS puzzle games, Professor Layton. Some might even remember Dark Cloud and its sequel from the early days of the PlayStation 2, and all eight of you PSP owners in the U.S. might recognize the epic Jeanne d'Arc. These games alone make Level-5 a noteworthy company, but they've quietly surpassed "noteworthy" status to become one of the largest and gre...
Confirmed! Those of you who have been waiting (or dreading) the announcement of social games in Google+ can now look forward to them showing up in your stream. The anticipated games have yet to show up, but Google has confirmed that APIs will be made available for third party developers to access Google+, much like Facebook allows them.
