So I might mention the one or other Xbox indie – but I will focus on all sorts of indies. May they come out on STEAM or just for the PC. I won´t cover any iApple games – not because I don´t like iPad games or something, it´s just the lack of an iDevice to play them. The same goes for any WP7 titles.

Why?

First of all I reconnected with my PC … yeah I know this sounds weird. But the truth is that I left the PC for one reason – lack of comfort! I wanted to play on the beamer or TV, I wanted to sit on the couch with a pizza in front of me and a pad in my hand. I wanted good graphics for a fair price.

A couple of years ago the Xbox 360 was the optimal platform for me. Today – not so much anymore. Lets face it, the Xbox 360 is old. And there is no new shining Xbox3 on the horizon. There is still far too much life in the box to be the “old model”.
But I recently played Crysis 2 both on Xbox and PC – and the Xbox version looks old compared. Also I can now play with the same pad I used on the Xbox (literally the same pad!). And my graphics card features HDMI, just like my Xbox. Game prices … games for PC are really cheap! Not to mention that giving my PC superior graphics power was quite inexpensive too! And the more I worked with digital content and downloadable games, the more I enjoyed playing with the PC again.

Also the same goes for a lot of the serious indie devs – who wants to create a great game that is very likely to be ignored no matter how good it is?

Xbox Live Indie Games Is Broken, And Here’s How Microsoft Can Fix It
There are a lot of very good points in the article!

“A lot of people look at the [Indie Games] platform as a joke, and a lot of it is. But there’s a lot of talent, too. It’s just not an intuitive marketplace.”  Dave Voyles (one of the Summer Uprising organisators)

And this is so true – a lot of talent is there, no doubt. But it´s not intuitive to find the the games based on talent – it´s easier to find a massage app!

Well – that´s it. Now on to a real post.

Bookmark It

I don´t really share Philippe´s point of view, even though he does make some good points.

So here comes what I define as indie (today – my opinion here is not set in stone):

You are indie …

… if your game design decisions are not based on exterior influences (like money, a boss …)

… if the motivation to create a game comes from yourself and not an exterior influence (like like the need for money, or a boss…)

… if you´d rather give away your game for free then see it getting lost

… if you know everyone involved in the creation process by name

… if you are free in the choice of your distribution channel (no that does not mean you need to be able to publish via XBLA!)

… if nobody else has a sayso in any decisions in your “company” (if you want a yellow bath duck in your company logo, then you can have it!)

Now these are a bit black & white, of course a team can still be indie, even if the decisions are shared. And if an indie game developed for the XBLIG channel is picked up by Microsoft for XBLA, then I might still consider it “indie”. There are lots of shades in between. But the more a company (or single game designer) is moving away from these guidelines, the more it/he becomes commercial. Not necessarily a bad thing – if you trade the freedom to choose the distribution channel so your graphics designer can start working full time on the project because you get external funding, then you could still be “indie” and get even more freedom with the game design decisions. You know it´s not a good idea to say “I want to create a Crysis 2 style game with more cut scenes and better graphics” if you are not on a multi million dollar budget – freedom in decisions is always limited by exterior influences.

Sometimes a tradeoff is what gives you the freedom in one area, because you don´t mind loosing it in another.

My guess is, that the highest average indie levels are achieved in the flash game community when the games are released for free.
What do you think? Complete bullshit, missing some points or total agreement?

Bookmark It

So I will change the way news get posted on indienerds.com. Trailers will be posted only for games that have been released – with a few exceptions for games that truly look amazing for indies. Also I won´t publish all trailers – I am a member of the Creators Club, so I can play most games before they are published. And I will post trailers only for those games that I liked when I checked them out.

There will be less quantity and more quality from now on.

Zach, aka StarfoxA, has joined our crew and already posted 3 written reviews (Hypership Out of Control, A Shooter and Figment) to the site – and I hope he will continue doing so. As well as I hope the next interview from Can will be online soon.

I myself will focus on creating more videoreviews – for the games that are truly outstanding. I won´t limit myself to new releases, instead I will keep bringing you reviews for older games too – skip those reviews if you know the title. But there are a lot of games I still want to videoreview and haven´t found the time for.

For the good titles I will post Scott´s Weekly Xbox Indies and create a monthly roundup myself. I started to do so for the german videogames magazine Maniac last month, the next one I will translate.

If you want to support indienerds.com, then post the videoreviews to forums, mention them on blogs or other news sites. It would be highly appreciated.

And in the future I will implement some payed ads – only for games that are worth advertising, so don´t worry there will be no “auto-ad” system. But I want to add a forum to the site and that needs a faster (and more expensive) server. The forum is already in place (even though it´s not public for the time being and used just by the crew).

GameRain – yeah I have been holding it back because I needed to find out how the news on the site are working without it messing with the statistics (a GameRain brings a lot of traffic to the site). But it will start very soonish! Way over 200 games are waiting to make a lot of Xbox gamers happy.

Cheers,
Gerald
PS: And I am working on games of my own, so maybe you might get some sort of XNA tutorial out of it in the coming months.

Bookmark It

Kotaku just published an article about J-Force, a bunch of poor indie game developers that out of desperation, because they couldn´t come up with a compelling game idea, tried to bring a game mixing up “Zombies”, “Avatars” and “Massage” in one title to XBLIG. Their description for the game was something along the lines of “quick cash grab” as far as I remember. It´s a pretty good article that tells the story of a game that had a really tough time getting on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace.

I´m impressed! Not a joke – I mean what I say!

First – J-Force managed to make over $50k with a game that basicly is just a reflex test. That´s an impressive number on the XBLIG channel!

Second – they got an article on Kotaku.com, a site visited by a lot of gamers. And the article not only mentions the name of the company, but also those of the devs and even shows pictures of them. Before that they got mentioned by great game devs like James Silva. Maybe not in a good way, but they got so many links to their site by now that a lot of people know the name J-Force.

They are whining about how unfairly they have been treated by the developer community. And truth to be told – they have been. When a game goes up for peer review the fellow developers have the task to check a game for failable problems. And when they don´t like you they will try really hard to find a reason to fail you. When I was in the army and the task on hand was cleaning my weapon I was completely in the hands of my superior – if he wanted to fail my cleaning efforts all he needed to do was to put his little finger into the weapon. There was no way anyone could clean a 20+ year old gun in a way that his finger would come out perfectly clean. It´s kind of the same with indie games – if they want to find something, they will find something.

That´s why I never should have told my superior how stupid I thought the whole army nonsense is. I spend quite a bit of time cleaning weapons. I was stupid, but I was also true to myself. J-Force on the other is not honest when they complain. I doubt that they were blind and I very much doubt the last sentence of the Kotaku article:

“I think my plan backfired,” Eden wrote to me back in August. Even then it had been clear he’d stirred a hornet’s nest rather than stomped a hornet. “I guess I went about it totally the wrong way?”

That´s plain and simple BULLSHIT! They got what they wanted – the hard to get exposure. Those guys are pretty smart and maybe they had to jump through a couple of hoops to get their game on the marketplace, but it will get for sure a lot of extra attention for it. A lot more than they would have gotten by investing the same amount of real development time into the title. They just had to wait a couple of extra weeks before it was released and since now is a better time for console gaming anyway it certainly won´t hurt. And they looted out the limits on how far they could go without risiking getting pulled for unappropiate behavior.

To get back to the beginning of this article…

“We feel like we just can’t reason with these people, they’re like women,” Eden told me over e-mail in late August…

A comment like that will get you attention. If you write something like that to a journalist you don´t need to add “please quote me!”, it´s a given. Sure you will alienate most women – but it´s simple math to see that this won´t hurt sales too much because not that many women are visiting the sites that are quoting it. Pretty sure even their girlfriends or mothers will never know about the nice things those guys have to say about their gender.

Is it honorable? Not in my opinion, because I personally think the XBLIG channel should be used to promote great games and not stupid apps or bad shitty games. But it is a smart business decision – with all the crap on the channel this one title rises to the top of the crap because they at least managed to get the attention for it.

I doubt that J-Force will ever bring an innovative hit game to the marketplace. But I will definately check out their “big project” just to see if I was right. And I´m pretty sure that this is true for all the developers that made their peer review this time a hell. Since it´s a lot easier to find problems in a game that is more complex there might even be a chance that devs will fail this epic masterpiece of theirs again and again. At that time I might believe it when I read the line: “I think my plan backfired…”

Bookmark It

I will keep this short – because you can expect a full videoreview from me soon after the release on the marketplace. Shouldn´t be too long. But I love this game and want to give you at least a “tiny little bit” of information what Inferno is about (and 4 screenshots … to give you an idea what it looks like).

• It´s a twinstick shooter like you have never played before -
  because this time you have levels you can explore.
• You can play locally with 1-4 players.
• You get to pimp your weapon by buying upgrades for it – as well as other “stuff”.
• There will be lots of different types of enemies and they are all fun to get rid off.
• Once you finished the game there will be a special mode.
• There will be bosses.
• It´s my favorite Radiangames title so far!

Now while you are waiting for “Radiangames Inferno” check out the other two games if you don´t know them. They have a 4+ stars rating for a very good reason! Because they are not just worth playing, they are awesome! JoyJoy costs a dollar (80 MSP) and Crossfire costs three (240 MSP).

For Crossfire I already made a videoreview in the past – check it out here.

Bookmark It

When i write “hit titles”, this feels weird … what makes a game a hit title? When it sells like hotcakes? Or when a game gets reviews telling you that it is quite exceptional and great? I tend to say the second, because those games do feel like hit titles to me. If you don´t know them, then have a look here and here,

I have read about Crossfire a lot, and something i have read sometimes was that it´s too expensive. I never paid much attention to those opinions, because i didn´t think that 240 points are expensive for a title that is very polished, offers fresh gameplay and is a great game on top. But when i read the analysis and the comments to it, it hit me that while in fact it is not expensive, it is perceived as too expensive.

Once you enter the XBLIG marketplace, you see a ton of games for just 80 points. And some of them offer an unbelievable treasure of content, polish and/or gameplay. Games likes Along Came A Spider, Breath of Death VII, Your Doodles Are Bugged! or Urban Space Squirrels come with a pricetag of 80 points. Suddenly a great game has to come at 80 points or it´s expensive. At the same time players buy arcade titles all the time that cost 10 to 15 times that much and it´s not very often that i hear them complain about prices.

The point perception shifts the moment a player changes to the indie marketplace – they are expecting them to be dirt cheap or expensive, there is no grey zone.

There is a need to make gamers aware that games with a pricetag of 80 points might produce an decent acceptable income IF they are hitsellers. And this happens very rarely. Gamers need to see, that while a game is priced at 240 or 400 points, the developers still usually make very little money of them. And that it´s a fair deal to pay less than 3$ for a game like Crossfire.

This is another problem – gamers start to think in points, instead of real money. Somehow 3$ sounds a lot less than 240 points. When “I MA3D A GAME W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT” sang to me that “it costs less than a dollar” it had a different effect. Developers should start to announce the price in $ and € on the “buy my game” screen. It would shift players price perception back to triple-A titles that cost 60$, making the price look a lot cheaper.

There is a “Point Perception Problem” and if you are a gamer, then start to think in real money again.

Bookmark It

But Triple-A studio bosses trying to lecture me on how to communicate better with gamers? Fuck off.

Cliff Harris from Positech Games

When i read the statement above on Cliffs blog, my heart glowed a bit and i felt very happy. I am writing about videogames for over 10 years now and i had quite some contact with Triple A publishers – in the early years it was much easier to get press copies of the games, they included nice press material and even though i was writing for a small gaming community site in germany, we felt like we mattered to them. Things changed – today you often don´t even get an answer. I once contacted Sony (SCEE), and even after going through quite some hoops to get the email address i was so unimportant that they didn´t even bother to write back with some copy&paste answer. The bigger they get, the less they care about the individual (most of the time).

On the upside … Boris Schneider-Johne, product manager for the Xbox 360 in Germany, wrote me a response to every email i sent. And they were not the copy&paste kind. He has a true passion for gaming and in his early years he translated games like Monkey Island to german to make it accessible to more gamers. As a gaming journalist he wrote for my favorite gaming magazine and he is one of my true childhood heroes. The fact that Microsoft decided a guy like him is responsibe for the product management of the Xbox in Germany gives them quite some Kudos in my opinion.

We need “people that care” in the game industry and that´s why i want to say THANK YOU to Cliff Haris for writing the line mentioned above. The reason he wrote the line is quite interessting and i advice you to read it here. In short it´s the Triple A approach to communication with gamers vs. the indie one.

There has been a follow up from Mark Rein (from Epic), but it seems to me he still has not gotten the point. Arguing with PR logic to something that should be a matter of caring for the people that play your games.

To Mark: Nobody says you should reveal to gamers your PR bullets Mark, it´s the fact you tend to ignore them that matters. And i don´t think that Cliff is so upset because of the fact you interrupted, this is minor, it´s the opinion you spread.

You can find it here on the Xona Games website. Thanks to Matthew Doucette from Xona Games for bringing this to my attention!

Let me finish by telling you that i really love the indie scene – the feedback and direct contact from developers makes this a great experience and a joy to create my reviews. I might get more hits by featuring reviews about tripple A titles, but i don´t care about that. There is a lot the big studios can learn from indies – but since it won´t necessary lead to more green it won´t be teached on PR courses. Isn´t that something you gotta love?

Bookmark It

For the well known german gaming community “consolewars.de” i will create from now on a monthly XBLIG Roundup. The first is now online and you can have a look at it here.

The games featured in the first roundup are:

- Lumi
- Kong360
- Missile Escape
- Decimation X
- Urban Space Squirrels

Bookmark It

Gerbil Physics 2 is the successor to the wonderful Gerbil Physics. Please watch the review here first, to know what i´m gonna talk about.

Now GP2 feels very much like the first part, but they expanded the whole concept by adding adventure like elements and “mini-games”. Now this might sound like a good idea, but if you build a game based on physics, you better make sure the gameplay is solid. They did not do that for GP2.

In some levels you get to control “things” – all you get to control them by are the lb and rb buttons on your gamepad, but the things often can move around in all directions based on physics. You see were this is going … you just have to hope they do what you want them to. The worst thing is the very bad programming of those “things” – they behave different each time. Elevators go the first time very high, the next time just a little. Hands you can “punch” with go the first time half into the level and the next time they get stuck way before that. To the end i started skipping the levels where i only saw, that i needed those buttons.

You see the tongue "thing" - it goes up, down, left, right - and you control it with just 2 buttons ...

A lot of levels are build on the idea of getting ONE gerbil from the start to the end. Since it´s physics based, this one gerbil often does not do what you want him to. Now it´s back to the start and try again. But since it´s just this one gerbil, it feels very repetitive. I hate games that make me do stuff again if it´s not enjoyable. Since i was pretty much pissed off because of the “things”, i had no patience to play those levels.

And then there was this obsession with slingshots. You very often have to slingshot gerbils into targets – you press the stick in the direction you want and the further you have pushed the stick, the stronger the gerbil will be shot. The problem is, that the control of the power is not very precise (thank god you at least get a visible feedback) and they love to make you do it again and again.

The level design – yes everything looks more beautiful this time, but if i can´t see if something is actually an obstacle or just background drawing there is something wrong.

There are some really nice levels in GP2, but in a big part of the game they exchanged the “smart” approach for a “just try until you get it right by sheer luck” one – i hate games that work like that.

Now after i had my rant about the bad – here comes the good. There are quite some improvement to the first part.

Every level is now played against the time – the faster you are, the better your rating. You can get a bronze, silver or gold medal for each level. And there is a nice level selection screen now, it even has cute little gerbils in outfits resembling how hard they are.

In addition to the rope, bombs and desintegrator you now get a slingshot (as mentioned before) – it would have been a nice addition if they had not abused it. And if you finish the game you get a machine gun. I never finished it, but in one level you get a free go – i didn´t like it enough to endure the bad levels for it.

If i had played GP2 first, i never would have purchased the very good Gerbil Physics. And now i´m very disappointed, because i was really looking forward to playing GP2.

If you don´t mind repetitive gameplay or say you don´t mind to spend the 80 points just for the levels that are good (there are some!!), then go ahead and buy it. You probably still won´t regret it.

Bookmark It