May 2011′s Best Xbox LIVE Indie Games

Be careful what you wish for. After moaning about how rubbish last month was, this month has been one of the very best for Xbox LIVE Indie Games with a number of games that could easily have been the game of the month. Of course, it was ol’ muggins here that had to choose between them. They said it couldn’t be done. “It can’t be done,” they said. But no! I simply asked Sepp Blatter to choose for me, and he told me he’d choose whoever gave him the fattest envelope, then refused to answer any questions about it and said he’d sort it out within his family. Okay, in all seriousness, I’m a decisive sod, and I’ve chosen the hell out of it. So, enjoy a round-up about the games from May 2011, or as I’m (not really) calling it, aMAYzing 2011.

You can buy any of these games via xbox.com by clicking the link associated with each game, or on the Games Marketplace on your Xbox 360. Simply enter the marketplace and scroll up to Indie Games, where you can check the top rated titles, the games that have just come out, or “browse” to find the games mentioned in this thread. Indie Game trials last eight minutes, which is often enough to establish what you think about it. Even if you don’t buy any of these games, at least trial them, tell people what you think, get more people trying them.

Go. Play. Enjoy. Tell us what you think! Tell all your friends! Get them to tell all their friends…

(Xbox LIVE Indie Games are available in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. If you’re outside those countries you can still play these games by setting up a Gamertag for free for one of those countries. It’s worth doing.)

For a round up of previous months, click here.

Sequence gets it, ‘cause even though if I was giving them early 90s magazine style review scores they’d both get 97% or something, Sequence feels a bit fresher, a bit newer than Blocks that Matter. And so it edges it.

Sequence, if you don’t know by now, is a hybrid of RPG mechanics like hit points, crafting, and levelling up with, well, DDR. Outside of battle you must climb a tower by crafting items using items that you’ve gained from monsters, and watch amusing cut-scenes that’ll make you laugh. It’s not just the cut-scenes that’ll make you laugh, either, because there’s a great sense of humour throughout the game. Every item you collect will have a description, and usually these will consist of terrible puns, but the kind of terrible puns that are actually awesome and make you laugh.

And then there’s the battles. These are pretty complex at first, and really take some explaining, so I’ll leave that to the tutorial because you should have queued it for download by now. You have, haven’t you? The basic premise is that you have three fields, one attacks, one defends and one charges your MP. You simply switch between them with the triggers and press the buttons on your controller/dance mat/guitar in time to the arrows that appear on screen. There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s it in a nutshell and it works brilliantly. There’s a great challenge to be found in the battle system and it’s easy enough to use that you’re able to meet it.

And the music, of course, the music! Ronald Jenkees and DJ Plaeskool provide tunes for the battles, and they’re all really ace. I don’t know how to review music so I’ll cut some words from a pretentious online review of a random unrelated-to-Sequence song so that I can pretend I know what I’m talking about even though the words are largely meaningless. “Musically it’s the cream of nostalgic pop; but in purely conceptual terms, the music is too busy flying on clouds of giddy adolescent wonder to plunder the depths of its pretensions with conviction.”

What does that even mean? I sure don’t know.

And that’s Sequence, great music, great mechanics, and a great laugh. All for a great price! (Oh yeah, I don’t just throw this together, you know.)

So that leaves Blocks that Matter just narrowly missing out. It was the narrowest of margins, too, because Blocks that Matter really is tremendous.

As you can quite clearly see from the screenshot, it’s a 2D platformer, but more than that it’s a 2D platformer with heart and with a love for videogames. Each of the game’s forty or so levels has a block to find within it and each of these blocks corresponds to a block-based videogame throughout history that you’ve probably played and loved, because Swing Swing Submarine have. It’s even cleverer than just that, though, and it was pointed out on another forum that even the location of the blocks is as awesome as the blocks themselves sometimes. Remember that Super Mario block you picked up? Remember what you had to do to get it? It’s just an amazing amount of care and love that’s gone in to this.

Love isn’t enough to make a good game, though, otherwise surely you’d be reading about ‘Sex or Love?’ instead of Sequence. Blocks that Matter is a tribute to videogames by being an awesome game in its own right. The platforming mechanics are great, with everything being blocky, you always know exactly how high you can jump, where you can get to and stuff like that.

Then there are puzzles, too. The gameplay gets you to collect blocks of matter, and then use them to build your own platforms to continue. These can only be placed as Tetrominoes, though, and so you have to make sure you’ve got enough blocks, you’ve got enough space, and you keep enough blocks back to make sure you can build more platforms later.

All of this set against a heart-warming tale of kidnap, robots and intrigue.

It really doesn’t do anything wrong at all.

Avatar Legends is another game that could easily have been the best game of the month. It’s, well, it’s an RPG with avatars. What more is there to say?

Well plenty actually. Because if you read the title you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s another shit cash-in using avatars to sell a game that isn’t good enough to survive on its own. But that’s not the case here, because Avatar Legends is full of more content, care and skill than pretty much every other avatar game on the service.

At its core you’ve got a ten-hour single player quest. This is full of dialogue and specifically, dialogue choices that make me laugh. There seems to always be something silly that you can choose to say, and I love that about it. The fighting is cool, too, a simple action-RPG mechanic but implemented really competently, and so it doesn’t remove you from the world to partake in it. There’s a coherence there.

That would be enough.

But there’s more! If you feel like a change from the single player campaign, or you just feel like you could do better, you can! There’s an extensive editing mode that you can use to create worlds, quests, and basically your whole game from scratch. Then you can share it with friends.

That would be enough. And it is. A bargain, and get it now because it’s cheap, and will be increasing its price in the future!

greenTech+ is a puzzle game about global warming with a fairly interesting visual style. It’s bloody hard as well.

The goal is to get some orb-thingys to some reactor-thingys that make the orb-thingys safe, and that stops global warming. I’ll confess, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the plot. Anyway, you do this by moving a wisp-thingy (sorry) around, because the orbs are always attracted to it and follow it wherever it goes. So you collect them, and then lead them to where they’ve got to go.

This sounds simple enough, but there are some areas which you have to avoid hitting with the orbs because you’ll lose health. This means that you have to lead them safely around the screen and when there’s a bunch of orbs coming from loads of different places at once, keeping them all safe at once isn’t easy. That’s where the puzzle comes in, because you’ll have to replay and replay to work out where the best places to lead the orbs are at any one time, and it’s quite satisfying to work it out and then execute your plan.

Hedge Wizard is another puzzle game that I really like. You’re a peasant who has to collect gold for a lazy wizard, and bring it to his tower. If the wizard pisses you off, though, you won’t want to give him gold so you control the wizard’s magic to avoid the aforementioned off-pissing.

How might a wizard piss off a peasant? Well, by burning his village down. Or crushing it. Or flooding it. Or via the medium of zombie outbreak. Loads of ways, basically, so you have to use the magic to prevent these disasters occurring before the gold can be obtained.

For example, you could cast a water spell in a dried up river to stop a fire crossing from one side to the other and burning the village down. That’s a simple level, but it gets loads more complicated than that. And even that simple example could be more complex than it first seems. If you’ve flooded the river, how can you cross to the other side to take the gold to the wizard’s tower? There’s lots of moments like this, and I love puzzle games that do this – make it seem like you’ve solved the puzzle but then throw in a final unexpected twist that makes you have to think again.

If you have to think again, you can use the game’s excellent time travelling feature. As you play, the game creates a number of points you can return to, so you can go back to the moment you cast a spell and cast it again on a different spot, and stuff like that. It’s really very good, and if you like puzzles at all you’ll want this.

UpBot Goes Up is another brilliant puzzle game. As someone who’s slightly mental for puzzle games, this month really is terribly good.

UpBot is probably the most traditional of them, being influenced quite heavily by Sokoban. The goal is as it is in that game, get the blocks to the correctly coloured spaces. The twist here is that each block moves at the same time as all the blocks of that colour, and can only move in the direction indicated on its top.

So you have to move them around, using blocks to push other blocks into place while ensuring that those blocks can still get where they’re going, etc. It’s all so well designed, and the concept is so good, that it’s one of my favourite puzzle games on the service. The presentation, particularly, is really good. I hope this ends up on iPhone or something where people might actually buy it, because it deserves far more than it’ll get on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

And the puzzles keep coming with Shape Shop! This is more traditional, as puzzles go. You get a bunch of pentominoes, a silhouette, and you have to fill it using whatever shapes you need. It controls really well, there are a number of similar things on iPhone but having the triggers to rotate pieces is so much more user friendly.

It’s the presentation I really like, though. Maybe not so much the visuals, but the sounds. Each piece has its own little tone and it plays when you select it, and then completing a puzzle plays a little jingle of the tones of all the pieces you used. It’s just weirdly satisfying, for some reason.

There are 111 puzzles. Stupid amounts of content for yo’ pennies.

Explosive Gas is Bomberman with, well, with gas. It’s a pretty good representation of it, and there’s a level editor too which is fun. The included Minesweeper mode is an interesting, if totally broken, twist. Definitely worth trying if you’ve got mates round.

Minions! is a cool little, I dunno, third person adventure game? Something like that. You just get a few tasks to complete (“kill the boss!”) and then you go around the level finding enemies and trying to, well, kill them. It controls pretty nice, and is fun.

Mr. Gravity is a puzzle game that I respect for what it tries, but it doesn’t always work. That is to say, it works, but it can be kinda confusing and frustrating as a result. You simply have to alter the gravity to direct your guy through a maze, avoiding hazards, etc. Moveable blocks is where it gets annoying, but it’s worth seeing if you can get the hang of it.

Sky Ninja War is a side scrolling shmup. I like it mainly because it’s a bit a silly. The first boss is a bunch of guys cycling to power a helicopter type enemy. It’s, as I say, silly. It’s all lovely and colourful, too. Blue skies in gaming.

Call of the Underworld is a more traditional shmup, kinda, because it’s all bosses. It looks retro, and the bullet hell nature of it works pretty well.

Battle for Venga Islands isn’t the best game, but it’s a very interesting experiment. The game part of it is a twin-stick shooter that works, but isn’t spectacular. Where it’s interesting is that when you play, you’re either red or blue. If you’re red, you have to capture blue territories (by winning the twin-stick) and vice-versa. The world is shared between everyone that’s playing at the same time, though, so it really feels like a full-on war between nations. It’s pretty ace in that respect.

Akane the Kunoichi is a neat 2D platformer which I enjoyed, the jumping is nice and the platforming is too, if a little slippery. There’s a decent range of enemies and the levels are well designed, with exploration in mind to find some hidden items that’ll unlock a secret ending. It can be frustrating sometimes, though, because if you lose all your energy you have to start the whole level again, no checkpoints, and the levels can be long.

bumblepig is kinda of a scrolling shmup, but your aim is to collect pollen and then deliver it to flowers. Depending on the colour of the flower or of the pollen, the flower will change colour. If you keep making them the same colour you’ll build your combo and get more and more money. You use this money to buy what every bee always spends their money on: new hats.

Even in good months, some games are bad. Really bad. So bad that they don’t even deserve a functioning link to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. But if you’re in the mood for some punishment, or just want to be reminded how much better the games above are, check these out, last month’s most terrible games.

10 Amazingly Awful Games. Haha! Ironic title! No, actually, it’s perfectly accurate.

Shoot or Date. Shoot. Myself. In the face.

Sex or Love? Sex. Myself. In the- no, wait.

G.O.R.K. is kinda like Feeding Frenzy, but with foes that home in on you, chase you, and move quicker than you do. There is no evading them and there’s really not much fun to be had here.

Urban Micro Racers is a top-down racer, what I wouldn’t give for a decent one of these. This isn’t it. If you crash into walls or your opponents a few times you explode and it’s very difficult to avoid doing so due to the controls and the unpredictable nature of your opponents. It’s difficult to even finish a single lap. It’s a bizarre mechanic that’s totally unnecessary.

Story Tale Mania Apocalypse is a game that puts a bunch of words of your choosing into a story. Unfortunately, it’s such a huge bunch of words that the story is always nonsense, so there’s no point at all.

Dragon Forge is a game where you pilot a dragon around barren landscapes until you… I don’t know. I’ve no idea what you have to do. You can kill a few enemies and then a few minutes later they come back, and then you kill them again and nothing continues to happen.

Rushing Punch<ラッシングパンチ>. Where to begin. You know that bit in Ghost World where Thora Birch says that a band are so bad that they’ve gone past “so bad they’re good” and back to bad again? That’s Rushing Punch.

Avatar’s Rock Paper Scissors is quite astonishingly bad. First there’s the peculiar apostrophe in the title that means I can’t quite work out what it means. Then there’s the fact the the dev hasn’t even bothered to animate the avatars, so you play rock paper scissors by standing perfectly still and then doing that shitty default celebration hand in the air thing if you win. Then there’s the same Kevin MacLeod music that I am utterly sick of at this point. Best of all, there’s three difficulty levels. As you are probably aware, rock paper scissors is a game that is totally random and requires no skill at all. The only thing that these difficulty levels could mean is that on hard the AI is going to be a massive cheat. This is the worst game this month by some margin, I think.

Plane Traffic is Flight Control, but it doesn’t work. You begin with a menu screen with a woman that might actually be a man, I can’t tell. The problem is in the way you select planes. You use the right stick to select them and if there’s a plane slightly off screen you sometimes select it and it means you can never be sure when you press the button whether you’re going to select the plane you want. At first, this doesn’t matter. When it gets even a tiny bit busy it’s unplayable.

Zombie Sausages 2 is… what? I honestly can’t work out what’s different between this and Zombie Sausages. It’s exactly the same game as far as I can tell. Same controls. Same modes. What?

So, what did you think of these games? What do you think of what you’re playing this month?

Enjoy your Indie Games.