The only thing more kick-ass than wasting your life playing silly, little games, is wasting your life making them.
Since the Internet showed up and irrevocably messed up our lives, people now have a readily available audience to show off their own, handmade works of “art.”
Cave Story. Screenshot by Zach Broadhead.
There’s something special about playing through a game made by just one person. Plus, they’re usually really cheap (or free, if the person who made it is cool enough) and they give you hella indie cred, yo.
INDIE GAMES:
If you have any of the current gen-gaming consoles, you have access to a buffet of indie games made by one dude or a small team of developers. Everyone and their brother’s favorite indie game right now is Plants vs. Zombies, made by the company that made Bejewelled way back in the day. It’s similar to the nine billion other tower defense games out right now, but with a weird-ass setting of having to defend your house from zombies with your garden or some other silly s— like that. (Available for PC, MAC, Xbox Live, and the iPhone.)
To be honest, though, tower defense games don’t really do anything for me anymore. I’ve played an obscene amount of crappy Flash-based ones, and I’m totally done. But that iron is still hot, hot, hot, so those aren’t going away anytime soon.
Lame.
Anyway, you have a computer. You’re reading this on one, meaning you have access to a mind-numbing selection of indie games. Many of which are free, because they don’t have big distribution companies like Microsoft and Sony wanting a piece of that sweet, sweet pie.
These games deserve their due. And I play a lot of these games because I’m broke as hell, which means I will be talking about them in this blog. There’re some serious goodies out there that really need to be talked about in more detail. Until then, just download Cave Story. You get to shoot monsters in the face to protect weird rabbit-people, or something like that.
http://miraigamer.net/cavestory/
Zach Broadhead hosts ‘Night Soil’ on Wolf Pack Radio from 9-10 pm. He’ll watch your back, but you’re best to watch your front.
Also, since PopCap isn’t owned by any of the big platform or software developers, and only has a distribution deal with Valve, they’re technically independent.
I swear people like Shawn ruin videogames for everyone else.
Shawn,
So if a game made by an independent developer sells millions of copies, they sold out?
You’re like a snobby indie kid, except since you get your tit in a ringer about something as insignificant as videogames.
Also, he said he’d talk about Cave Story more later because he didn’t have a whole lot of space.
Chill out, bro. It’s an introductory article.
Also, no need to be such a dick.
Well.
PvZ is 100% NOT an indie game…by any stretch of the imagination. It is a game made by PopCap games. As our author states, PvZ is “made by the company that made Bejewelled way back in the day.” Truth. Bejewelled went on to sell over 50 million copies. Thats like saying SubPop is an indie label.
And while Daisuke Amaya’s (the awesome designer who you failed to mention) Cave Story is a fine example of an indie game, you didn’t write about it at all..
There are hundreds of fantastic indie games out there, along with many great independent game studios. Yet, in this article all you managed to do was give us a bad definition of an indie game, call a PopCap game indie, whined about having played too much tower defense, and end it with a throw away sentence about a game that could deserve a whole story written about it.
Though I wish it were ‘Antonio’, this blog is not about the “bombiest independent games”.
Not at all.
Hella kickass article Brois Lane! (Superman puns are the sickest!) Been playing Cave Story all week now.
Also, I agree with Evynn, this article is about the bombiest independent games, so knowledge of the industry would be hella superfluous.
Hella.
Superfluous.
Shawn,
I am curious to know what motivated that remark. As this was a blog about independently distributed video games, what knowledge about the video game industry would have bettered this article? This is not an attack. I’m genuinely curious.
You don’t really understand the game industry do you? You should do some research before writing your next blog.