Nickles in the Toilet: Mini Followup

I just discovered XNPlay. It's an entire review site dedicated to XBL Indie games and is definitely worth visiting if you want some assistance in sifting through the pile.

Nickles in the Toilet: Vol 1

Here's a quick smattering of Xbox Live Indie games I've played recently and enjoyed. I was originally going to go with the tired cliche' "Diamonds in the Rough" for the title, but I think what I've currently selected is:

1. more amusing
   and
   
2. more indicative of the XBL Indie experience at present

There are some pretty cool experiences to be had if you're willing to fish around with your hands in the filth for a while. Just don't forget to wash up afterward. If I've left anything off it's because I either haven't played it yet or haven't gotten to it yet, hence the volume number in the title.

Miner Dig Deep

This is a fun little grind that has you sending your avatar deeper and deeper down a 2d mine shaft. You mine resources by time limited lantern light to get money for better tools and lanterns so you can stay down longer and dig deeper for better tools and lanterns. Nice relaxing guitar riffs and pretty addicting mechanics.

Arkedo Series 3: Pixel

I've only played a bit of the demo for this one, but it's won me over. Super slick polished visuals, tight platforming controls and a unique gameplay feature where you "zoom in" to sprites to explore them are the highlights of this one.

Gerbil Physics

Pretty short 2d physics game akin to Boom Blox. You have a set number of bombs you can place anywhere on the screen, and you have to use them to knock all the blocks down. The added enjoyment comes from the gerbil sprites that sort of live in each block, and their reactions to being buffeted about by explosives.

Pixel Boarder

Another one of the 2d "physics thing sliding on ramps" games, but the presentation is pretty cool, featuring chunky pixelated visuals and a pretty rad chiptune soundtrack. The interface is a little different as well, with each stick on the gamepad controlling one of the snowboarders arms, with weight shifting and other physical ramifications emerging from pose changes.

Solar

This one was my first actual XBLI purchase. In this game you play a star. Your objective is to attract planets through a pretty intuitive and relaxing gravitational sim. You can also smash the crap out of other solar systems by flinging heavenly bodies into them.

Weapon of Choice

This is a really polished 2d shooter along the lines of Contra, with some really quirky and interesting weapons and giant boss battles. You can tell a lot of love and time went into it.

Fishing Girl

Relaxing fishing grind that spawned from Danc's blog, Lost Garden. Fish to make money to get better rods to catch bigger fish, etc. Simple yet pretty effective.

Kodu

I haven't really scratched the surface of this thing, but it appears to be a pretty robust and powerful visual coding system. It's severely hampered by the limited code sharing abilities and has received very little fanfare. Like RPG Maker and other similar entities, I've avoided it mostly because I could spend that learning curve with real programming. The cubey landscapes are super cool looking though.

Buried Gem - Cryostasis

I came across this article in Next Gen a little over a month ago previewing Cryostasis, a unfortunately named horror shooter of sorts set in the arctic. I actually had to dig through my Twitter archive to remember what the thing was called. The cool trick is that the player can relieve the last moments of corpses he comes across. It sounds like a much more intense version of the data-logs from games like System Shock 2. In addition to reliving these moments, however, the player can change the past's future through his interactions with the world. My only hope is that this feature makes it into the final game (I'm looking at you STALKER) and it fulfills all my wildest hopes and dreams for gameplay possibilities.

Think about the narrative impact of stepping into the shoes of someone you know is going to die. This person isn't the protagonist, so it's actually not frustrating that you're put in this predicament. Depending on how much info the game gives, you might even know how this person died, giving the player a layer of in-joke foreshadowing meta-info that could color everything they do with those final moments( e.g. "Electric shock, guess I'll try and stay away from light sockets").

If the designers were so inclined they could really inject some heavy philosophy into this mechanic, either taking a nihilist view that your fate is sealed from the outset, or encouraging players to think about how they can impact larger systems even with little time or resources.

One thing that could be cool, but could lead to that live/die success/fail model is if the player could save the lives of the people and resurrect them in the present, giving himself another ally against the [cold, monsters, AI construct ??]. This could result in the endless repetition of trying to get a timed even correct and people saving and loading until they 'won' every subsection of the game, however.

So yeah, Cryostasis, lets keep an eye on it and see if it makes it to store shelves. If not, we could totally rip off that super cool mechanic for one of our own games.

article: http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/preview-cryostasis

http://cryostasis-game.com/

Dark Sector

Finally got Gamefly to send me Dark Sector last week. For the 2 hours I've invested thus far, I'm not that impressed. The glaive/boomerang mechanic has some potential, but right now its raw usefulness is overshadowed by guns. It a lot of fun to throw and steer the glaive from a first person view, and it can de-torso guys, so it does tend to win out.

The main sticking point I have is the level design. Why is it always the level design? The LDs are eschewing goal driven encounters with lock-downs where you either muddle your way through to the exit or kill guys until a random door opens. For the player to make meaningful decisions, they have to know what they're supposed to be doing in a given situation. Even if those goals are localized and player generated, at least there are goals. In these cases, it's a get from A to wherever linear formula, but you don't know how to get to wherever so you can't form a plan aside from killing things until something happens.

One area in particular dropped me into a dark shaft with 2 inches of water on the floor. Zombie guys kept spawning from this minuscule veneer of liquid as if climbing from the depths of some fathomless bog while I looked for a way to open the door. Some doors occasionally open when you get close and they flash a "hit B to open", some don't.

I had previously learned the "transfer electricity" ability prior to this, and there was a sparking wire I saw somewhere above on my way in, so I thought that might be the gating device.

Turns out that you just had to kill X of the zombies that spawned in endless waves. I got some kind of achievement and the door ratcheted open, its kill counter satisfied.

I realize that this sort of thing is hard to avoid throwing in on occasion, but at least let me know somehow that what I'm supposed to be engaging in is zombie genocide and not looking for some alternate mechanism of escape. At least God of War had those red walls to tell you that you were in arena mode.

Systemic design, goal oriented encounters, useful tools.

In addition to that, the only encounters I've seen so far could have just as easily been incorporated in a game that only involved a gun or two. Nothing aside from a few remote switches have been boomerang dependent systems.

It kind of reminds me of Jon Blow's talk on the ethics of game design and how we're padding these games out with meaningless repetitive encounters to lengthen the experience instead of coming up with mechanics that are inherently enjoyable to use and lend themselves to creating many varied scenarios where the systems can be creatively and emergently combined to give the player the agency and bit of mental exercise he or she deserves. Was that all one sentence?