August 2009
Storage Inc., Dodge These Balls & Zombies 2.0 (XBox Live Indie Games)by Shabbir on Friday, 28th August 2009 13:04
There has been a serious lack of updates here! Unfortunately, I've been pretty busy with work and haven't had the time to update the blog, however, that doesn't mean I haven't been playing anything. I always browse around on XBox Live and see what's new and available for download, so for this post and the new few, I'll talk about a few of the things I've downloaded and tried on my XBox.
First up, are a few indie games I've tried. For those who aren't aware, indie games are effectively low budget games made by the enthusiastic developer by himself or herself. Usually, the developers will be making the game on their own, or they'll be in a group of a few people. Indie games have changed over the years, but I think the core indie game developer has stayed the same. Don't take my words as the definition of indie gamer however, since it's almost open to interpretation. I hope you get the general idea!
So anyway, these games are much cheaper than normal titles, or the arcade games on XBox Live. Quick note, all these indie games I tried were the trial versions, since I wasn't really prepared to shell out any money on them!
The first I tried was called Dodge These Balls. This is a very simple game, where you control one red ball amongst a group of bouncing black balls in a 2D plane, and you just need to avoid all the black balls for as long as you can. In the trial version, you first move your red ball around avoiding three black balls, and they increase the number of black balls. There's a sudden jump however in the trial version to 15 balls, which I'm sure is for demonstration purposes! A sudden jump like that isn't quite reasonable! It's a gimmicky little game but not something I would purchase at all.
I also tried Zombies 2.0, which is basically a tower defence game. Your goal is to battle off a horde of zombies, and also rats and dogs, which I assume are of course zombie rats and zombie dogs. You must defend your base, and you can place stuff like tower lights and turrets as you progress. Each level earns you money which you then spend on upgrades on yourself as well, since you need some weapons on your character. The game is played in a birds-eye view perspective, and your character has a flash light on him so you can only see what's approaching in a certain direction at a time. This makes it more difficult and ensures that you have to keep moving. I'm not really a tower defence guy, so I didn't find this game that enjoyable but I'm sure others would.
Finally, Storage Inc. caught my eye and I thought I'd give it a try. At first it looked complicated, but looks can be deceiving. It turned out to be a very simple game where you control a forklift, again from a birds-eye perspective, and you have to carry crates to designated gates. There are time periods to carry certain crates in, which makes the game test your organisation ability! Out of the indie games I've tried, this would have been one that I would be tempted to purchase, if I had the Microsoft Points.
So those were the first three indie games I've tried, I'll be playing some more and also various demos and stuff and write my thoughts on them too in the coming days.
Bully Completed and Reviewedby Shabbir on Monday, 3rd August 2009 13:45
I finished Bully: Scholarship Edition a few days ago and have reviewed it over at Homemademech. It was certainly an enjoyable experience, the only problem being a few glitches here and there due to it being a port from the original PS2 version, and some of the new classes that were added to the game being clearly aimed towards a Nintendo Wii. Besides that, the game is excellent and takes the great stuff we love about GTA and puts it into a very enjoyable environment.
I'm not sure what I'm going to move on to next. I have Fallout 3 DLC: Broken Steel to play, but I'll probably play some GTA Chinatown Wars now and aim to finish that. I have plenty of iPhone games to play too!