See those catagories on the side? I added a new one 🙂 I figured since I talk about the “indie games” topic so much, it’s about time I stopped lumping them in as interludes and owned up to the fact that I’m posting a lot more to the blog these days than just progress reports.
I play a huge number of indie games, but I always seems to have a backlog of stuff to check out. It’s absolutely incredible just how much there is – even at the rate I’m playing these games, there are still huge areas of the scene I know very little about! I’ve hardly looked at the AGS scene, or the Shareware scene, or the Bullet Hell SHMUP scene, or the RPG Maker scene, or the Flash scene, or the Interactive Fiction scene, or… man, I could go on for a while here. Just off the top of my head, I’ve still to play “5 Days a Stranger” and Yahtzee’s other games, “La Mulana”, “Fate by Numbers”, “Darkside Adventures”, “Fedora Spade”, “Last Scenario”, “Wilfred, the Hero”, any of Emily Short’s stuff apart from Galatea…
…again, I could go on for a while here. 🙁
On top of that, there are loads of games coming up that I’m really looking forward to! These in particular have got me pretty excited:
Akuchizoku is an upcoming semi-professional game by the fantastically prolific Cactus, who I mentioned here just the other day with his B-Game entry Mondo Medicals. He also created Clean Asia (which is still one of my favourite indie games), as well as about sixty thousand other games.
I wasn’t sure about this one when I first saw the screenshots – but it looks absolutely glorious in motion. Retro, stylish and weird, but in his usual good way. Check out the video above, and see for yourself.
Remember the experimental gameplay project? If so, you’ve probably played Tower of Goo, Kyle Gabler’s most popular submission (he also made Attack of the Killer Swarm, Darwin Hill, The Crowd, and Gravity Head – a pretty fantastic track record, all told).
There were a lot of cool mini-games created as part of that project, but Kyle’s stuff really stood out, with its quirky style and character. This guy really knows what’s he doing, so I’m looking forward to seeing what this is like. Even though, to be honest, this isn’t the sorta thing I’d usually be interested in, heh.
(He’s being assisted by Ron Carmel, but unfortunately I’m not familiar with his stuff. Apparently he worked for EA.)
I’ve been eagerly anticipating this release since it won the Seamus McNally grand price at the IGF back in March. Apparently it’s basically finished, but the developers have held back the release to further test it and give it a bit of polish. Always a good sign 🙂
Alec just recently posted this gameplay video to the Bit-Blot blog, which shows about seven minutes of gameplay, and a boss encounter.
I don’t know if we’ll ever see a finished version of The Underside, but there’s a very good demo available – check it out here. According to the site, it’s still being worked on – and recently, too. This is the only game in this list I’ve actually played, so I can sound more convincing when I say that this is going to be pretty good 🙂
Upon releasing the first screenshots and gameplay videos, the poor game (and developer) took a lot of slack from a certain knuckleheaded subset of Cave Story fans. Sheesh. Some people, eh?
Anyway, I can’t wait to play this one! 🙂

There’s no video “as such” (aside from a little bit in a lecture here), but Graham Goring played a demo of it, and did a neat preview of it for the arsecast.
I read Jonathan Blow’s blog from time to time, and I really like his whole philosophy on game design. From everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve heard about this game, I don’t doubt that he’s on to something with this.
And that’s that… Hey, reader – you know all these blog posts are pure procrastination, right? I think I’m going to go to the library instead tomorrow and try to get some work done before I head to Amsterdam for the rest of the week.
Anyway, I’m done rambling for the day 😀
Missing:
– Limbo (https://www.limbogame.org/)
– Heart Forth, Alicia (https://alonso-martin.com/hfa/?page_id=3)
– “A Game with a Star” (https://www.origamihero.com/2propost.php)
– U-Head (https://tigsource.com/articles/2007/06/18/u-head-update)
– Tormishire (https://satansam.co.uk/tormishire/)
– Mirage (https://www.silvernova.co.uk/index.php)
– Nothing (https://www.l-ames.com/nothing/)
– Valdis Story (https://endlessfluff.com/valdisstory.html)
– The Undertaking (https://indygamer.blogspot.com/2007/09/news_4453.html)
Can’t argue with any of that 🙂
I’m also really looking forward to Pixel’s new RPG, though there’s very little to talk about just yet…