In a blog post over on the XNA site, Microsoft have confirmed that they’re making some changes to the Indie Game requirements.

For 2012 (starting right now in fact) they’re increasing the size limit for games up to a maximum size of 500Mb.

Games larger than 50Mb can be priced at either 240 or 400 Points and the 80 Point price can only apply to a game under 150Mb (up from the previous 50Mb limit).

Lastly the limit of eight titles per developer has been raised to twenty.

Undoubtedly good changes in terms of what people can do and charge, there’s still a massive problem hanging over the head of Indie titles; no one can find the things on the new Metro dashboard, meaning they get even less exposure now.

It’s hard to know just where Microsoft’s head is at with the whole Indie thing any more – despite the concerted and creative efforts of some developers to create and promote their titles, the XNA service is clearly still not opening up the opportunities that was envisaged. With some devs resorting to crafty means in a bit to get more attention. Hats off to them too for their fiendishly clever efforts.

The problem remains that, even when something worthwhile is released, first it gets overlooked by the dash designs and then gets swamped amongst the crap. These changes certainly won’t alter that, it just means there’ll probably be more (and larger) crap to sift through.

How can Microsoft address this? At this point that’s a very good question, since despite these announced moves to increase the service they also seem intent on hiding it away (not something unique to Indie Games at the moment though, since even XBLA titles can be a pain to locate in the new dash layout).

Time will tell if anything will change, but after two and a bit years, you’ll forgive me for remaining a bit sceptical right now.

I don’t know what this has been the month of. Maybe it’s been the month of trying to rip off successful iPhone games and failing so spectacularly that if I was given a choice between playing those games and listening to the Metallica/Lou Reed album, I would actually choose Reed. On the other hand, there’s been a couple of ace games that go some way to making up for it, it’s nice to have got DBP out of the way so that a normal release schedule can resume!

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.

The Fall of Gods is maybe a controversial choice, with all the love Wizorb’s getting, but for me, it’s genuinely a better game. It’s an action-RPG which, weirdly, I’m going to try and undersell because if you go into it with your expectations too high it can only disappoint you.

It’s not the most polished game ever, it can be a little buggy at times, even, but what it is is full of character. Basically the gods have been fighting, then all of a sudden there’s an invasion by darkness or something and when that happens, what else would a god do but recruit a young boy to save the world?

Nothing. Nothing else. That’s what.

You’re a young boy saving the world on behalf of some gods, and you do this by taking part in an ace action RPG. The game reminds me a lot of Alundra, which happens to be my favourite game ever. If it satisfies me under such circumstances, I don’t see how anyone else could dislike it! It’s much simpler than Alundra is, though.

The puzzles aren’t as hard to work out, though they’re nice and plentiful. The combat isn’t really challenging until much later, but I like that about it. The world is pretty huge and encourages exploration, and there’s nothing that gets in the way of exploration more than pesky combat at every turn. The Fall of Gods knows it’s about exploration, and dammit if it doesn’t let the player explore.

There’s something like 10 hours of game here with loads of NPCs, a ton of secret caves and various other things to find, and I enjoyed pretty much every minute of my time with the game. It’s one of the games of the year, for me. I guess I failed on that “underselling” thing.

Wizorb is ace, but calm down, loves. It’s not the bloody second coming or anything.

It’s just Breakout.

Yes, it’s Breakout in a really beautiful skin, and it’s incredibly playable, but it’s still just Breakout at its core and as good as Breakout is, you’ve played this game before. Many times. It’s the best version of Breakout on Xbox LIVE Indie Games, though. The controls are brilliant, for one thing. The analogue stick shouldn’t be precise but it is and there wasn’t one single time where I died and thought afterwards “that was the game’s fault.” I always was able to put the paddle where I wanted it, and if I lost it was my own mistake.

The RPG elements are pretty much non-existent. You can repair a village which rewards you with a rune which can take you to some bonus levels which unlocks a super attack, but if you’re good enough to beat the bonus levels you’re good enough to beat the game without the super attack, to be perfectly honest. Still, it’s Breakout in a pretty shell. It’s great, but let’s chill out.

HACOTAMA is Sokoban but in the prettiest 3D this side of, well, I dunno. It’s just pretty is all. Everything is sharp and bright and colourful, and the glass balls you can ride around on reflect light in a really beautiful way.

The game itself is fun. It’s really simple to play, all you need is the A button to either push the balls or to clamber on top of them and ride them around. You’ll need both techniques to get the balls to their destination, which is how you complete a level.

The quirk is that, being 3D, the gravity is centred in the middle of the block structure you’re on. This means you can walk all around the level and push the balls all around it to. It makes for some really hard Sokobanning. Yeah. Sokobanning. I went there.

High Gravity Wells is another puzzle game, but in a far more unique vein than anything I’ve ever played before. I’m a complete nerd for puzzle games so it’s nice when this happens.

You control a ship, except you can’t control it because it has no controls. Instead, you have to turn on “gravity wells” which, er, do a gravity thing. Your ship is pulled towards them, and if you leave it on it will orbit it. Your goal is to use such techniques to throw and manoeuvre your ship to a spaceport, thus ending the level.

It sounds more complex than it is, probably, and as soon as you’ve done the first level it feels completely natural and completely sensible. And really fun, too. People will tell you it’s frustrating, maybe the FFFFFUUUUUUU level is especially for them.

Puzzled Rabbit is just Sokoban, but I like Sokoban. This one is just really pretty, has tons of levels, and the quotes you unlock when you complete a level are a nice touch. It’s just a calming experience in general, if you’re tired of shooting crap in the face.

Jellyfish MD is a match three puzzle game but not one like you’ve ever seen before. It takes place inside a 3D jellyfish and you can rotate blocks and pull them forwards and backwards and twist them and it’s basically confusing as hell, but good.

Redd: The Lost Temple is a 16-bit Zelda dungeon as a game. It has issues with what you can see, but it does a lot of stuff right. You can’t really attack in any effective way so it causes you to think differently about enemies, and later on it goes all out bullet-hell on yo’ ass.

Dead Pixels is, well, it’s got pretty awesome presentation is what it’s got. It really looks awesome and has a great feel about it. I found the gameplay pretty dull though in all honesty. Move right and shoot with basically no variety unless that comes long after I got bored. The DLC model is great though, the more copies it sells the more new modes will be added. Interesting.

Math Fighter is cool because it made me feel totally stupid. One of the questions was “|-56|=” and I’m all “what the hell does that even MEAN?” It’s nice to play a game that can teach you stuff. Other than that, it’s obvious what happens, you answer more math(s) questions quicker than your opponent and whittle down their health. Most games like this are full of 3+4 and stuff, and you’ll probably find that here if you play on easy, but don’t write it off because it will be able to genuinely challenge you too.

Robotriot is a 2D platformer with lovely retro visuals and equally lovely music. Search through small levels looking for a thing to destroy to invade a ship. My only concern would be the game’s length, but it’s fun while it lasts.

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.

Some people might think that calling Angry Fish the worst game in the history of the world is an exaggeration, and to those people I say “oh, you must not have played Angry Fish yet.” It takes all the bugs from FishCraft and rather than fix them, says “screw it” and just adds more bugs instead. Then it takes a third of the levels away. Then it calls it Angry Fish because the morons were too retarded to realise that FishCraft was an Angry Birds rip-off, and they need it SHOVING IN THEIR STUPID PATHETIC FACES.

Pigs Can’t Fly is a Tiny Wings rip-off, and misses the point in a manner that even Fernando Torres would be embarrassed by. It controls horribly, it’s far too heavy meaning you can get basically no momentum, and dumbest of all, there are huge patches of flat ground. Flat ground. If you’ve played Tiny Wings you’ll appreciate how utterly stupid that is.

Avalis Dungeon 2. If you buy every game in the Avalis Dungeon series, by the end of it you’ll probably spend £15 on less than five minutes of game.

President John America is like Dope Wars from years ago but with less drugs and presentation that’s so bad it’s barely even possible to see what the hell is going on.

ZOMBIECRAFTT!!1 SAMPLER is the last game in the Skyfish trilogy, a trilogy so bad that there have been calls to ban anything ever appearing in trilogy form again, lest we get a repeat of this total nonsense.

Falling Blocks is a game where blocks fall from the sky and you have to climb them. Except you can’t, because they don’t fall in places that let you climb them half the time, and even if they did you can’t see a damn thing in the game’s first-person view.

Aaaaaand done.

The Indie Games Summer Uprising has been going on for the last few weeks, and so thankfully the XBLIG service hasn’t been so full of rubbish like it had been for the two and a half months prior. The Uprising hasn’t quite been as full of amazing titles as I’d hoped for, but there’s still plenty of awesome stuff to play. TFE, T.E.C. and SpeedRunner offer tons of hours of content for less than the price of an XBLA game, and since Guardian Heroes didn’t come out you’ve got 800 points burning a hole in your pocket, right?

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.

Train Frontier Express is this month’s best game!

It has trains! It has frontiers! It has expressness! It doesn’t really have those last things. I don’t even know what that would mean. It does have trains though.

It’s a world builder, first and foremost. And in a staggering move, there’s not a block or a pickaxe in sight. You start by laying track for your train to ride on, in a beautifully simple way. Then you can start messing with basically everything. You can raise and lower terrain, create mountains, rivers, bridges, anything you want. Then you can start messing with props. Props are stuff like signs, houses, trees, roads, and all sorts of stuff like that. You can create a whole little village and the train infrastructure that serves it. There are loads of different props, I’m stunned that this game isn’t even 30MB. It’s like magic or something.

Then you can take your train out and just ride around the world you’ve created from a variety of different angles, and in a variety of different trains. It probably sounds like there’s not much point to it but maybe that’s the point. It’s just a relaxing thing to sit driving your train around.

Or you could not-quite-finish your track, and just send your train over the edge of a cliff onto a small village, exploding into a massive fireball. Up to you.

If you can’t be bothered to make your own world, you can get online and download other peoples instead, too. I fully expect there to be some awesome creations on this over the next few weeks.

Andromium is a shmup of sorts, but there’s no shooting so I guess it’s just a mup. But then that doesn’t make any sense at all so God knows what it is.

It looks like a shmup, that’s a good enough start. Without shooting though, you just have to concentrate on avoiding obstacles and passing the andromium between you and a partner, either AI or otherwise. Hang on to the andromium too long and it explodes and takes you with it, so you have to press A to pass it to the ship on the other half of the screen, which will then pass it back to you, whereupon you catch it and pass it back, and so on.

The other ship is either AI in the normal mode, a second player, or if you’re ultra-hardcore, it’s you using the right stick. The dual analogue stick mode is amazing and is called Mastermind even though it should be called “so, you think you’re good at shmups” mode.

The trial doesn’t do a great job of selling the game, but it’s really worth a buy. The trial makes it seem quite slow and easy, but a few levels in (and on Mastermind) that is definitely NOT the case. Just risk it. You won’t regret it.

T.E.C. 3001 is an auto-runner. I’ve seen it compared with stuff like Canabalt but it’s not like that at all, there’s no endless mode here, and every level is its own set stage.

That’s important, because you’ll have to learn courses if you want to do well. You’ll die a few times later on when obstacles that you weren’t expecting get in your way, but the game encourages this learning.

It’s not enough to just get to the end of a stage, you’ll want to get a high rating too. To do that, you need to collect loads of batteries and finish in a quick time. There are numerous routes through many of the levels so to get the best scores you’ll need to explore (at high speed) and learn the most pointy routes through each level.

If playing for high scores isn’t your kind of thing, it’ll still take you a while just to get to the end of the game. I won’t lie, though, you might not get quite as much from it.

SpeedRunner HD is T.E.C. 3001 in 2D!

Okay, not quite.

It’s another game about completing short levels as fast as you can, it’s just that here you have a time limit and not getting to the end in time means you blow up. Whoops. There’s also some special moves like wall jumping and a grappling hook. The wall jump can be a bit temperamental but the grappling hook is always a lot of fun when you get the timing right, it’s very satisfying indeed.

The game is short, so again it’s a case of whether you like going for faster times if you want to see how much you’ll like this. It does have the benefit of multiplayer, though, if you’ve got people to play with.

Who is God is a Doodle Jump-like game. It stays a bit too easy for a bit too long but it has that Magiko charm about it and so is still fun. CHOOSE YOUR GOD.

Millennium Man is a really interesting 2D platformer with time-manipulation mechanics. It’s nothing like “rewind if you die,” though. The world evolves over thousands of years, and so you have to travel through time , to the past to jump on a platform that crumbles in the future, or to the future to get through a wall that’s fallen down over time. Unique.

Annecto is a game where you rotate tiles to create circuits. I honestly have no idea how to describe it, but it makes total sense when you play. It’s kind of like a million match-three games, but in a completely different and unique way that makes it worth trying.

Goals is a really basic top-down football (soccer) game, but that makes it really fun. There’s no messing around with trying to work out which of the 4,998 button combinations does what, you just pass and shoot and aftertouch. It’s great.

Blow Me Up is a physics puzzler about one man’s quest to, well, it’s certainly SOME kind of quest… You have to blow the guy up, flinging him in different directions to get to the exit before you run out of explodey-power. It can feel a little hard to judge at times, but is still fun.

Doc Logic is a cool 2D platformer with music from 8-bit weapon. You have eight stages to complete, and have to level up in each stage by collecting clocks to open new areas. As you level up, enemies get tougher and more numerous making it harder and harder to reach the next levels. You can’t die, you can only run out of time with each “death” costing you five seconds. It’s frantic, and cool.

Cute Things Dying Violently is a really funny physics-puzzler. You just fling critters around using a slingshot-like target, trying to hit switches, avoid buzzsaws and get them to the exit. Kind of has issues in that it’s difficult to aim them where you want them and if you get it wrong, you can’t see your last shot so you’re liable to make the same mistake again instead of being able to make a minor adjustment.

VideoWars is an RTS game with no micromanagement, just really quick rounds where all-out attack is generally the best form of defence. You build nodes to gather territory, and the more you have the quicker your funds increase. Then you can start launching attacks or building defences, or whatever you like. The AI is kind of easy to beat, but there’s multiplayer too!

Ninja Sneaking is a game about ninjas and sneaking. You just have to complete simple 2D platforming sections without getting spotted, and if you get found it’s game over. There’s been complaints about no checkpoints but I think it works without them, it forces you to be careful and adds tension, and the way the game scores you for how long an escape takes from start to finish makes the lack of checkpoints ace. Risk/reward.

Zombie Racers should be rubbish, but I think the guitar rock soundtrack makes it a lot more fun. You just drive around top-down running over zombies, trying to kill as many as the target requires before you run out of time.

Kobold’s Quest is a game where you have to fetch a new-born baby from a human village because your king is all hungry and stuff. Need I say more? Okay. It plays as a simple 2D platformer, but with multiplayer which rewards whichever of you gets the baby back. Work together to fetch the baby, then turn against each other to get the baby to the king. Genius.

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.

Crazy Balloon Lite has a tiny hint of Kuru Kuru Kururin about it, but with no competent collision detection whatsoever.

Avatar Farm! kills all your crops when you turn off your Xbox JUST TO SPITE YOU.

I don’t know what the hell SWASHBUCKEL UR SEATBELTS is meant to be, but I know I don’t like it.

Raventhorne has strippers, a main character made from Mars bars, and takes place on Uranus as you fight to save the locals from an evil lawnmower that was cursed by a gypsy to be evil forever. It’s none of those things, but if the game’s description can lie like a bitch about what’s in the game, why can’t I?

That Really Hot Chick is called that because it has a baby chicken in it. DO YOU GET IT?

Space Bat is a thief.

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

Enjoy your Indie Games.

Do you ever just think, like, “why do I bother?”

Whenever I hear someone saying “Xbox LIVE Indie Games are rubbish!” I always leap to their defence. What about Apple Jack? What about Hypership Out of Control? What about Sequence? What about Blocks that Matter? I could probably go on for hours listing awesome games. Then you get months like this month and you’re forced to accept that yeah, maybe Xbox LIVE Indie Games are rubbish after all.

In other news, there are rumours that Microsoft is going to rename the channel “Xbox LIVE Minecraft Clones,” personally I’m against the change but I can see the thinking behind it.

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.

And now, for the absolute best game that came out last month… LOL. It’s my round-up, and I’ll do what I want. To be honest, though there were a few (so very few) alright games last month, none of them were really good enough to sit alongside the Games o’ the Month, and so they’re not going to. Instead, we’re going to learn about Protect Me Knight.

Protect Me Knight, or まもって騎士 to give it it’s Japanese title (which is what it’s filed under on the Marketplace) is, well, it’s fairly unique. I can’t think of another game like it, anyway.

But first, the briefest history. The game is created by Ancient, which is a company pretty much built around Yuzo Koshiro. He’s a composer, so you’re probably already expecting awesome tunes, and you’d be right to. Before this game, he’d worked on music for Shenmue, among other things. Ancient themselves have made games from Sonic the Hedgehog to Car Battler Joe. Basically, if you’ve played games, you’ve probably played something that Ancient have had a hand in, and there’s a whole ton of games industry experience gone into making Protect Me Knight.

What the hell is it, though? I can’t just say it’s unique and then prattle on about Ancient. It’s, well, it’s like a bit of tower defence and a bit of Gauntlet and a bit of protecting princesses from goblins. You know, as all games should be.

Your princess starts in the middle of the screen, and is surrounded by defences that you can then upgrade or add to. You need to keep them up, because your goal isn’t so much your own survival as it is the survival of your princess. When you’re attacked, there’s not really very much feedback to let you know that you’re losing HP. When your princess is attacked though, she cries out for your help to alert you to the fact that she’s in danger. Run to her.

You can keep your defences in good nick by attacking them (which restores their health) or by upgrading them to the next level using Love Points. Love Points are earned from your princess by killing enemies and there are three levels to which you can upgrade. The first is a small stick structure, the second is a much more powerful barrier, and the third is a catapult that you can sit in to fling rocks at the more powerful enemies.

Enemies are not scared about attacking in number, and even in the first few levels you’ll find you’ve got fifty or so to contend with at once, each trying to get to your princess and each taking out different defences. Your basic attack is with the A button, and repeat presses perform combos. You also have a stronger attack that you use with B, which uses MP and varies between the different classes of character. The mage has a fireball, the ninja leaves a bomb behind, etc. Experimenting with each class to find the one that suits you is essential.

Love Points, remember them? They’re not just used for building structures, they’re used for everything. If you die, Love Points are used to revive you. Most importantly, at the end of each stage you can spend your Love Points on levelling up things like your attack and defence. This introduces a huge element of strategy and risk into the game. Do you spend Love Points on upgrading your defences, or do you save them to level up later? If you don’t upgrade your defences your princess could be in trouble, but if you do upgrade them you could find yourself too weak to protect her later on.

Protect Me Knight is not an easy game, and you’ll be swarmed by really powerful enemies really quickly. It’s a game that’s incredibly rewarding, though, and seeing that adorable smile on your princess’s face makes it all worthwhile.

In case you still need more, there are dragons, there’s four-player multiplayer, there’s an endless survival mode as well as the normal arcade game, and the initial loading screen is probably the best thing ever. Don’t skip it.

And now for a few games that did come out this month, and somehow managed to not suck.

Assembly Line is a puzzle game unlike any I’ve played before. You, well, you run an assembly line.

The thing you need to produce is a slate with a pattern on it as displayed in the top right, and you have to set up machines to produce it. These machines can paint, drill holes, or etch lines onto your slate, as well as rotating and flipping it to ensure that it’s correctly positioned so that your design goes onto it in the correct way.

What I like best about it is that you have to do it all in your head. You can’t see where you are at every point in the line and so with every forty-five degree rotation you have to visualise the slate and know which way it’s facing and what you need to do to it to produce the design the customer ordered.

It’s a pretty awesome feeling when you run your machine and get it bang on first time, and that’s what the game’s all about. It’s not about amazing graphics or flashy effects, it’s about that feeling you get when you solve a puzzle that makes you feel like you can solve anything.

Vizati is another puzzle game, though a ruthlessly traditional one. There are a few games like this on XBLIGs, you have a grid with some coloured blocks and you have to rotate it to make like-colours join up and disappear. It’s not a new concept.

It does a few things differently though. First it has a “nudge” mechanic, like the tilt of a pinball table. You can nudge left or right and all the coloured blocks are shifted one space that way, whereas a normal rotation can only make them fall. The other thing is giving you a move limit, so the puzzle isn’t just joining the coloured blocks up, it’s joining them up in the amount of moves you have.

The thing that really makes it nice though, is the story and the way it’s told. As you’re solving puzzles, the story is unfolding around you, with characters running on and off-screen and talking to each other at the same time that you’re dealing with the weird floating block-puzzle that appeared in their world as if from nowhere. It’s effective, and it’s not something that you see tried often.

Labyrinth is a hugely ambitious game, and one that you should download if just to see what one person is capable of. It’s a puzzle game in which you have to escape from, er, a labyrinth, solving puzzles along the way. It’s not perfect, camera issues and an unneeded health mechanic can annoy, but it’s worth trying because this is the kind of game that really only works on a service like this.

Production Panic is a game about conveyor belts. You have to direct things from an entry point to an exit point, either by flicking switches to change the direction of junctions, or by filling in missing pieces of the conveyor belt like a jigsaw. It sounds simple, but when you’ve got a few different things on the belt at once and they all have to go to different exits without smashing into each other and the cake hasn’t even been iced yet, it gets hectic.

Grand Theft Froot is a 2D platformer that has very basic Metroidvania properties. It takes a fair while to get going but the mysterious story drives you on. You don’t know how you got there, you just know that you’ve been told to collect froot in order to SAVE THE WORLD (basically). I’d be suspicious. There are some awful design decisions, like if you fall into a spike pit you lose a chunk of HP every second, and sometimes the only way out of the spike pit is fifteen seconds away which means a certain (and very annoying) death but mostly the platforming is nice.

QuickDraw is a game that tests your reactions, which is about it, really. It’s nicely presented and there’s some nice variety in the few mini-games it has, but ultimately there’s not a huge amount of mileage in it, worth a trial though.

Star Ninja is a peculiar looking game, but the gameplay is simple. You are standing at one point of the screen, and you have a certain number of shuriken to throw at numerous pirates. You have to take out every pirate on the screen to advance, bouncing your shuriken off walls and ceilings where necessary to advance.

Pixel Blocked! is a semi-clone of Guru Logic Champ. It takes the basic idea and the basic goal (you have to shoot blocks into a puzzle, rotating it as necessary to form a shape) and then adapts it. Rather than having the ability to remove blocks a la GLC, if you make a mistake you have to use a missile to destroy the extra block. At a basic level the puzzles are nice, but the problem is that the level is really, really basic. There’s pretty much no challenge at all in solving them and even having 180 puzzles isn’t that impressive if it takes barely an hour to beat them all.

Trailer Park King is an adventure game with lots of boobs. You’ve probably stopped reading and are either rolling your eyes or queuing a download, but there’s more to it than boobs. There’s murder, there’s mystery, there’s a nice art style, there’s full VA that isn’t rubbish, and there’s a TV that asks if you want to put some porn on. Well, do you?

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. That’s basically everything that came out, but these are especially useless.

TechAssault, after spending half the month loading, was soon deleted. It’s boring, it’s plain, it’s slow, it doesn’t tell you what to do, it looks terrible, your bullets don’t have any impact on enemies, that’s if you can find your enemies, or if there even are any enemies, there’s a small chance that there’s literally no aim at all, the game doesn’t really say. I’m trying something new, lists separated by commas in the middle of over-long sentences. Problem, grammar?

Zombie Death Car gives you a giant arena, a car that feels about as much like a car as your face does, and zombies that are basically invisible until you’re three feet away. Then it challenges you to mow them down by using controls that, while familiar to anyone that’s played driving games before, somehow make the car behave more like your aforementioned face than a car. You wouldn’t try and drive your face, would you?

Don’t Call Me Skyfish is like punishment for being Adolf Hitler in a previous life.

URGENT EVASION 360 makes me want to urgently evade my Xbox 360 out of my window. THAT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE. DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME?!

Fawnix might be the worst game I’ve ever played. I probably make that statement a lot but it amazes me how much worse games can get when you’ve convinced yourself that they can’t possibly. I, as a man of nearly 29 years, can spell the word “cat.” I can also pronounce the word “cat” brilliantly, if I do say so myself. Years of practice. In Fawnix, however, I cannot spell the word “cat,” and I cannot pronounce the word “cat.” Assuming that this is meant to be some kind of educational thing, how on earth are children expected to be able to do it when I can’t bloody do it? The controls are poorer than the United States.

Tourist Trap is an point-and-click-style adventure game in which you have to pick up items and use them on other items to solve puzzles. The trial has just two limitations: you’re not allowed to pick up items, and you’re not allowed to use things on items.

Sketchy Bounce. “Hey, you know what the Xbox LIVE Indie Games service is really lacking?” What? “A crappy Pong clone.”

I’m not sure if GHXYK2 Classics Vol. 1 is a game, or an experiment in how far you can push people before they give up on that pesky “will to live” thing.

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

Enjoy your Indie Games. You know, the ones you already had prior to this month.

There was some good stuff released this month, but it was no May. Oh, May, how I loved you. I think a lot of the awesome stuff we might have seen this month is being held back for the upcoming Summer Uprising, an unofficial version of Xbox LIVE Arcade’s Summer of Arcade.

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.

Rainbow Runner is an endless runner which, since the iPhone, has become an incredibly crowded genre.

What a game needs to do, then, is do something different because otherwise you’ll be as tiresome as the rest of them. Rainbow Runner does something differently.

What it does differently is Ikaruga-esque. The enemies are all colour-coded and running through them when you’re the same colour (changed via the face buttons) destroys them without you having to shoot. Run through them with the wrong colour and you’ll lose health. Usually it’s a choice between shooting and bashing through because shooting is done via the right stick, and unless you use controllers in a really weird way the same thumb is used for that and the face buttons.

You can’t absorb fire like in Ikaruga, and so when a boss appears the game suddenly turns into a bullet-hell endless runner hybrid, and it works incredibly well.

You’ll be wanting loads of modes, so the game’s got them. You’ll be wanting different difficulty levels and the game’s got a bunch of them, too. Anything else you want?

Stop being greedy. It’s only 80 points, and wants to be part of your collection, thanks.

Bunker Buster is one of two games Magiko released this month, the other being PLATFORMANCE: Temple Death. Bunker Buster couldn’t really be any different.

The game is kinda like a game I played on my dad’s Sinclair QL when I was a kid. In it, a helicopter moved from left to right and moved down a few pixels every time it crossed the screen. You had to bomb skyscrapers one floor at a time because if you didn’t, you’d get too low and crash into them.

It was ace, and so is this. Your craft automatically flies side to side and you can use fuel to control your elevation. You simply have to bomb all the targets in a level to go up a rank and on to the next level. If you lose a level you’ll go down a rank and if you get demoted too far you’ll lose the game. It’s quite compelling trying to beat it without losing a rank, I’ve not seen this “lives” system before but it works really well.

What else works well is the variation in levels. Your plane’s physics change, its rate of fire, and the level layouts and enemies. The concept is simple but every level feels new and totally different. It’s great.

Tacticolor is RISK in real-time. I’ve actually never played risk but it’s how I’m led to understand RISK plays.

I honestly don’t know what more I can say. You simply have to take over a board by building up your troops and then attacking an enemy territory, with dice rolls deciding the victor depending on how many units you have ready. You have to really keep an eye on stuff, with it being real-time. While you’re waiting for troops to get ready your enemy could launch an attack and it’s a really interesting take on what is a quite traditional mechanic.

Then there’s the presentation to mention, because it looks brilliant. Crisp, clean, modern, just very nice indeed. There’s multiplayer, single player, various difficulties, and in-game awards to earn. It’s right good.

Kung Fu FIGHT! is another endless runner, but much more traditional than Rainbow Runner is.

So, why isn’t it tiresome? Mainly because of the number of things you have to keep track of, and how closely you need to pay attention if you want to be successful. As an example, there’s a sumo wrestler enemy who leaps into the air to belly-flop you. Sometimes you’ll need to slide underneath him to get past, and sometimes his jump will be timed differently and so you’ll need to leap over the top instead. There’s a subtle difference to look for and react to, and it’s this constant need for attention that makes this fun. Usually you can play these games in a daze without thinking, but not so here.

It looks great, and has a sense of humor too. These things never hurt.

Avatar Battle Bees is a competitive online game with avatars, and bees. There are some single player modes too, but online or in multiplayer is where you’ll want to be the most.

For some reason, your avatar is flying around on a bee. A bee which happens to be armed with missiles and guns. I don’t know much about bees and so have to assume that that’s how they really work. It’s an, erm, one of those games where you fly around and shoot at other stuff, kind of like Ace Combat. It’s that genre. Flight-em-up? I don’t even know. But you know what I mean.

It’s fun, it controls really well and there are loads of modes. Presentation is XBLA standard, too, there are no dodgy fonts here. Really good stuff.

PLATFORMANCE: Temple Death is of course, entirely bloody awesome. I probably would have made it game of the month but something else appeared in a rainbow of awesome.

It’s more of the same, Platformance-wise. You’ve got one screen with tons of obstacles in your quest to get to the girl and to the top of the online-leaderboards, which are totally addictive. Deaths happen basically everywhere, and the game is awesome.

It’s not quite as good as Castle Pain, as a few obstacles feel a bit more random and so impossible to plan for than they did in Castle Pain, but it’s still brilliant and still addictive as hell and still only 80 points, so why are you waiting?

Sudo-Quick isn’t the best representation of Sudoku ever, because that requires a piece of paper and a pencil. It is a really cool videogame implementation, though, with a focus on speed and easy controls. You’re told what box to fill in and then you fill it, so you don’t have to hang around working out every possibility for every box because you can always work out the one box it’s given you. This does make it kind of easy, but with timers and such there’s still pressure. It’s like Sudoku as an action game, or something.

Arc Lancer is a twin-stick kinda game, in space. It’s not just score attacking though, you have missions to take on, upgrades to buy and it’s all rather fun. Even the actual twin-stick part which is usually rubbish.

Insanity X is I don’t know what it is. You just kill all the enemies on a screen and move on (or just leave them and move on). You go from room to room to room until you die. I don’t know if there’s a win condition or anything, but it’s strangely playable anyway, even not knowing what the point is.

Pixelbit Helicopter Challenge is similar to Rotor, in that it’s a helicopter game with mini challenges and stuff to complete. It’s not quite as stylish as Rotor though, and the controls are much simpler so when you complete a challenge, there’s not quite as much satisfaction as there is when you master something in Rotor. It’s still fun, just an easier kind of fun.

Monster Escape is a puzzle game in which you have to build paths for monsters and collect eggs, reach exits, and avoid enemies and the such. Nice presentation, and a very interesting idea. It could have been implemented better, but it’s still worth having a go to see a puzzle game you’ve not seen before.

Them Blockz is another puzzle game, and it’s Sokoban-like in a way. You move around and as you move, blocks stick to you. You then have to manoeuvre them to an exit. This is obviously simple at first but you can easily block yourself in once you’ve got loads of blocks stuck on at once and a tiny passage to fit inside. Which is what ‘she’ said. So some good puzzling, here.

TIC: Part 1 could have been the game of the month if it was longer, as it is it just doesn’t offer value for money, really. It’s gorgeous, the story is great, the gameplay is fun and the music is lovely, but with a story that lasts just over half an hour, there’s simply not enough here. It’s still worth playing, though, because it really is a sight to behold.

Lair of the Evildoer is probably a game in a genre that has a name, but I don’t know what that might be because it’s quite a lot of things. Part RPG, part twin-stick, part date-sim, part shooter. Okay, not the date-sim part. You just travel through a building, collecting weapons and destroying zombies IN THE FACE. Then just carry on going. The controls are a bit… much… at times, but it’s still an enjoyable experience, it’s always nice when a zombie game doesn’t just have zombies in to appeal to zombie nutters but is a genuinely cool game outside it.

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.

Pick is just the worst thing ever. It claims to be like Guitar Hero for every song in your library, or something, when in actuality you might as well just listen to the radio and press buttons on your guitar controller without even turning your Xbox on, because the song recognition is completely absent. You just press random buttons while a song plays. Terrible.

Avatar Word Wave is that all-too-common mash-up, of crosswords and roller-disco. Or something. Unfortunately, neither aspect works particularly well and having to play them together is impossible because you can’t concentrate on them both. It’s like trying to play Halo at the same time as playing Mozart on the piano.

Bamdizzle Bamdizzle Bamdizzle Bamdizzle Bamdizzle Bamdizzle. You’ll see what I mean.

Call me Skyfish is a poor looking platform that plays exactly how it looks.

A Game About My Cat is bad for two reasons. Firstly for gluing me to a slope so I can’t jump with momentum alone like Tiny Wings, and secondly for telling me how awesome it is to have a cat. I know. I want a cat more than anything but I can’t have one. YOU JUST UPSET ME, GAME. I HAVE SAD FACE.

Case o’ Games is impressive if only for how you can make so many games available in one package and yet still have no redeeming qualities.

When Maidens Attack is, well, there aren’t many games that the “what is this I don’t even” meme sums up much better than this.

Beach Paddle is a variation of a game with paddles that nobody’s allowed to say the name of when they make a version of Pong. Crap, I mean a version of “generic paddle game.” Stupid anime girls with little in the way of clothing are completely unnecessary and only there for one reason. BRB.

Angry Wizards is a similar thing to Lair of the Evildoer, but slowed down to such a ridiculous level that each stage takes bloody ages as you walk through empty hallways like a geriatric with no feet.

Ballbuster. Get it? BALLBUSTER!! The game is about busting actual balls like children play with but it sounds like- oh, never mind.

And to end on an awesome note…

Every month, we’ll revisit a couple of games that you may have missed from months gone by. These games are lost in the depths of the Games Marketplace, pull them out of there! Played a really awesome Indie Game in the past? Hit me up on twitter @toythatkills and recommend stuff! Is “hit me up” still something “the kids” say? What about “the kids,” is that still a thing too?

MotorHEAT is a racing game of sorts, as you can tell from the screenshot. It’s not so much about the driving as it is the avoiding, though! You auto accelerate and your job is just to move left and right to avoid traffic.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Avoiding traffic by the smallest of margins will increase your boost meter (RT) and then you can go even faster, scoring more points.

It’s a score attack game, this. You just score as much as you can before time runs out, getting extra time for passing checkpoints and points for distance, overtaking cars, using boost, and all sorts.

What I love most is the risk/reward, which is just awesome. You get more boost and more points for passing cars within mere centimetres and with boost activated, but then there’s a huge risk of crashing and being penalised ten seconds. Do you dare get closer? Do you dare? It’s brilliant.

Also brilliant is the online leaderboard (Gold only and peer-to-peer) which updates your position as you race, telling you how many points you need to move up to another position in the overall leaderboard.

It’s just great, this. Totally great.

Skwug is a 2D platformer with a nice gimmick. You can warp to new places.

Warping always moves you the same distance you can always judge where you’re going to warp to, and you can only warp three times before having to recharge by landing on the floor.

This makes for some really unique platforming, as you warp over spikes and through lasers, and allows for some interesting puzzles as well with the limit on warps meaning doing things in the right order is sometimes essential. Switches play a part, switches means puzzles.

You won’t have played a 2D platformer like this before and you’ll be playing this one for ages. There are loads of levels and then some medals to go for for being quick and finding items.

Most fun.

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

Enjoy your 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.

Pathetic update is pathetic. Sorry. It’s been a fairly rubbish month for XBLIGs and that’s reflected in the low quality in this round-up. I mite make it atchally a lo kwality pOst wiv typos n stuf. Or not. Of course, it’s still worth playing the pitifully small number of good games from this month, because they’re still fantastic, LaserCat in particular.

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.

LaserCat is the best game this month by a country mile. Or a normal mile. I don’t know what a country mile actually is, so whatever’s longer, that’s how much better than everything else this month LaserCat is.

If you’ve ever played Jet Set Willy, you’ll feel at home here, but in a less having to shout at the screen kind of way, because LaserCat is lovelier to control than Miner Willy ever was. If you’ve never played Jet Set Willy, well, never mind. You’ll still love this.

You take LaserCat through 225 adjoining rooms, looking for keys so that you can save your friend who’s imprisoned at the top of the tower. The keys are just lying around the place, and when you grab one you’re warped to a trivia question which you need to answer correctly to get the key. Otherwise, lava.

These trivia questions are full of laugh out loud moments, as are some of the funny names of rooms, or the messages you get when you die. When they’re not funny, they’re full of references to games and other things, and it’s just a joy to read them all.

It looks great as well, with rooms changing colour as you go through the castle to find the keys, so that you never feel like you’re looking at the same things over and over even though the world is blocky. It feels like so much care has gone in to the construction of it.

And it’s only 80 Microsoft Points. Go and buy it, would you?

Shield the Beat is a music game most notable for its music, which includes DJ Champion and Franz Ferdinand amongst others. I don’t think there’s any doubt that as far as ambitious titles go, this one is right up there with what it tries to do.

It’s rhythm action like you’ve never played before, entirely with the analogue sticks. You control a shield around the ship in the centre of the screen, and rotate it to absorb bullets as they’re fired at you in time to the music. It starts of simple but can get frantic, especially when you’re using both analogue sticks to absorb different coloured bullets, Ikaruga style.

It’s really fun, but importantly, the music is great and if you don’t play the trial and instantly want to hear more of that first band, there’s something wrong with your ears. Yeah. I went there.

Starzzle is a puzzle game, and while not unique in its gameplay, it’s presented so well and there’s so much content that it’s a worthy purchase at 80 Microsoft Points.

You can move the characters in four directions and when you do, they keep sliding until they hit a wall. The aim is to collect 60% of the stars and this unlocks the next level. You’ll unlock things quicker though if you collect all the stars, and there’s bonuses for doing that, for finishing the level in the minimum amount of moves, and for doing it quickly.

A twist comes later when you control the blue guy as well. Only the red guy can collect stars and the blue guy is just there as a mobile wall. Position him to enable the red guy to reach otherwise unreachable areas. It sounds like a simple gimmick because it is, but the extra possibilities it gives to the puzzles are endless.

Oh, and the story will really appeal to your typical Xbox LIVE Indie Games fan.

The Bronze Award, not the best games out this month, but every one of these is still either great, or has a really unique aspect to it that more than makes it worth trying.

Cell is a kind of puzzle game. You’re a cell, and you press A to move around, which makes you slightly smaller. You then absorb smaller cells than yourself to get bigger again, and keep going until you’ve consumed everything or met the level’s target. Three different modes to keep it interesting. Some people might say it’s a rip-off of Osmos. They might be right.

PewPewPewPewPewPewPewPewPew is a short-lived experience but one that it’s worth trying. You and a friend, armed with microphones or headsets, make silly noises and look generally stupid as you control the game with your mouths. Unique.

Shifters is an awesome looking drag racing game, with customisable cars. You control the acceleration and clutch, and when to change gears and use your boost. You bet on races, and can use your winnings to buy new parts and go faster. I never quite got the hang of it, but did go faster and faster each time so was getting there. It’s fairly unique as racers on XBLIGs go.

The Most Addicting Sheep Game an Impossible Game clone done well. You go left to right through short courses, jumping, rolling and scoring your way through obstacles until you get to the end. It tells you what the top score is and that’s what you’re aiming for, perfect runs. It’s tempting to hate this game for its horrendous use of the word “addicting,” but I’ll forgive it. It’s cute.

鉄鋼歩兵 is a decent if a little slow over the shoulder shooter. Hugely customisable mech things to control so if that’s your bag, you’ll like this a lot.

Hack This Game is an interesting puzzle game, in which you have to identify a button combo from a series of clues that you’re given, hacking deeper and deeper into a network until you’ve stolen all of Sony’s customers’ credit card details.

Decay – Part 4 (Final) is the final part in the Decay series, so you’ll already know if you want this and to be honest, if you don’t know whether you want this the answer is probably “no, you don’t,” because you’ve clearly not played the first three parts yet.

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.

Delta Energy 2.0 is not playable, at all. The crosshair points one way and you look that way but the gun’s pointing somewhere else and you have literally no idea where you’re aiming because there’s almost zero visible feedback. Then the other tank runs around like it’s Vettel’s Red Bull or something. Unplayable.

NLL 11 is just awful. It’s hard, the grass is so bright that you might go blind if you look at it too long, and if you press Y it turns in to a beat ‘em up for literally no reason at all. Nothing I pressed had an outcome on the fight and when it was over the ball just went back to the centre. I know nothing about Lacrosse, still, but I could appreciate College Lacrosse as something that was a decent sports game. But this? No. I was three nil down in three attacks because the opponent was relentless, and didn’t have any fun with it at all. Teams aren’t rated either, so there’s no way of telling whether or not you’re playing as a good team, or against a good team. There’s just so much basic stuff that this gets wrong.

Oh hi, Bombies. Welcome to my table. So, I see you’re a twin stick shooter, what is it that you’re bringing to the table today? Oh, the same old shit?

Kinetic Kube S. Wow. What an absolute mess this trial of this game is. If you try to play a mode you’re not allowed to play (and how would you know?) you have to sit through a 30 second video until you can do anything again. This video also plays when you exit the game. Thanks for the waste of my time. The game itself is every single kind of game in history, all at the same time. Seriously. The tutorial makes it seem like there’s four different games, but then when it starts you realise that actually, you’re playing them all at once. You need as many hands as that suggests you’d need. I had literally no fun with this at all. You just can’t keep track of everything you need to keep track of without being three different people at the same time.

We Come In Peace is Hypership Out of Control, if that game was horizontal, bad, slow, had stuff to collect that looks the same as stuff that killed you, and had utterly horrendous collision detection.

Modern Hunt doesn’t steal the assets from Duck Hunt, but copies them so closely that they may as well have. When you go in to “aim” mode, you literally cannot see half of the screen.

And to end on an awesome note…

Every month, we’ll revisit a couple of games that you may have missed from months gone by. These games are lost in the depths of the Games Marketplace, pull them out of there! Played a really awesome Indie Game in the past? Leave a comment and we’ll see about getting it in here in the future.

Fishing Girl is just adorable. You get separated from your boyfriend when a river forms between you, and to get him back you have to cast a fishing rod to the other side of the river and reel him in.

Your fishing rod is so rubbish though, so you have to catch fish to earn money and get better rods and better lures so you can catch better fish and get more money, until you get a rod that’s good enough that you can cast it that far.

It’s pretty simple to play, but it’s mainly so nice just because it’s so relaxing. There’s a time limit of ten minutes, but it’s not stress or anything, it’s just pleasant. Then there are awardments to get, one of which being “complete the game in two minutes.” So if you want a real challenge, it’s there for you, because that isn’t easy!

80 Microsoft Points for this.

Colosseum: Hammerball is something to try if you were looking forward to NLL 11 but were disappointed by how awful it is. It’s kind of a cross between hockey and lacrosse and DESTROYING YOUR OPPONENTS.

A bit.

It’s just a sports game, then, basically. There aren’t many rules, just that you have to hit your opponents goal with the ball to score a point. Aside from that, anything goes. Games are either 2vs2 or 3vs3, so there’s always a lot of space to be found which is nice. I had a lot of fun with it, and the art style reminds me a lot of Borderlands. Better in multiplayer, obviously, but even against the AI there’s fun to be had. Another cheap’un.

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

Enjoy your Indie Games.

Not the best month, really. Dream.Build.Play is around the corner and everyone seems to either have a game they’re holding back for it, or they’re working very hard on getting something ready. That said, there have still been some great titles. It’s mainly been a month of conflict and stupidity. Mostly from FortressCraft’s PR person, but also with the whole ongoing situation with XBLIG ratings being abused. A huge problem, because the Top Rated list is the one place on the dashboard that really seems to drive sales.

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.

Solve It – Pack 1 is 30 levels of puzzling bliss, which is probably most closely related to Chu Chu Rocket. Chu Chu Rocket and someone asking you directions to the shops.

You’re placed somewhere in a level, and you have to reach the end by turning, jumping, climbing, and just, well, getting to the end. To do this, you have program instructions into your character so that they know where to move, then when you press go they’ll do it. It takes a certain amount of spatial awareness, but that’s not where the true difficulty lies.

You can always have another go if you fail, see, so accidentally sending the character right instead of left isn’t a terrible thing to happen.

No, the difficulty of the puzzles here is in how you only have a limited number of steps that you can take to get you to the exit. You have 12 moves you can make, which can be upgraded slightly by using LB and RB which allow you to add a few extra specific series’ of steps.

The game looks great, and is a really interesting puzzle, the kind of which I haven’t seen before. Only 80 Microsoft Points and so, totally recommended.

Oozi: Earth Adventure Ep. 1 is an excellent platformer that only really misses out on the Gold Award by being so short. It feels thoroughly 16-bit in its execution, which is something that the world is lacking so much these days. 16-bit 2D platformers are probably the king of all genres.

So, you run through huge levels hitting checkpoints, bouncing on enemies and collecting stars for extra lives, and it’s genius. Oozi feels a bit weird at first, he’s very very fast, but you’re used to it in seconds.

What’s most notable perhaps is how well it’s presented. Not only are the graphics amazing, but the whole front end is really professional looking.

It’s still short, though. There are just five levels and then some challenge levels to do after that. For only 80 Microsoft Points though, it’s an easy buy, and I’m totally there for episode 2 when that hits.

TriLinea ReAct is a match-three game which is normally enough for me to yawn myself into a coma but this is actually really good.

Where it succeeds is in breaking the gameplay down into really small chunks so you don’t get bored wishing you were playing Zookeeper on DS. The bits it breaks it down into are all really varied too, so even if you’re bored of one level the next will, while using the same mechanics, be totally different. There are fights, puzzles, challenges, and it’s all really nicely presented.

There were issues with controls initially, but these have been patched now and there’s a colourblind mode too! If you tried it before, give it another go.

みみ いんざ すかい or, Mimi in the Sky, is a twin-stick shooter. I know, I know, you want to stop reading now. But carry on, it’s actually good.

I’m serious. It’s good.

It doesn’t make the mistake that most make, and assume the player isn’t going to wake up for the first five minutes and so start off really slowly. None of that here, it starts off crazy with screen filling points to collect and enemies to shoot and so there’s always something going on.

I particularly like the way that points are only attracted to you if you stop firing for a few seconds. It’s a nice risk/reward mechanic and makes the game much more interesting.

Infinity Danger is another twin-stick, but it’s totally different to Mimi. There are no enemies here, as such, it’s all about boss-rush.

There’s one boss, at first. Kill it, and you’ll get a time bonus and it’ll come back stronger. Kill it. Time bonus. Stronger. Kill it again and again and again and it’s filling the screen in a very very short time which makes it not only harder to kill, but harder to avoid too. There are no lives to speak of, just a time limit. You get extra time when you kill a boss, and time is taken away when it kills you.

There are online leaderboards, something milkstone are great at, and there’s a sort of achievement system in place too for accomplishing various tasks. One level and one boss, yet such great value for money.

If you like it, check out Warning Forever, the game it’s based on.

Love Hurts is a side scrolling beat-em-up. I’m not sure it’s that good, really, but it kept me playing it. It looks pretty cool, the music is good, and there’s a decent amount of moves. Mainly I played on because it was funny, though. The gameplay itself feels pretty slow and difficult, but I don’t play this kinda game so I’m not sure how good it is compared to its peers.

Snake Man is, well, Snake. It’s good though. It’s pretty lenient with hitting walls and stuff so you’ll die usually from blocking yourself in. There are levels to play, awardments to get, and it’s playable. It’d be a much better game if it included an endless mode as well though, which it doesn’t appear to.

The Hearts of Men is a decent Gauntlet kinda game. It looks nice, save for the dodgy animation, and plays pretty well. Search for keys, go through gates, kill bosses.

Solar System 4D. You’ve basically got the solar system and can speed up/slow down time to see how planets rotate/orbit. It’s interesting. Then you can click on planets to get basic information and some photos, which are really cool. Stuff I didn’t know before, Mercury’s orbit is all askew, Venus is much bigger and closer than to us than I had any idea of. Obviously the software can be slightly limited, and stuff like the above might be common knowledge (I’m no expert) but it was a really cool, interesting way to learn about stuff like that and I spent an unexpected amount of time messing around with it.

Mute Crimson is a 2D platformer. It doesn’t look great, but it’s fun to play and has some interesting mechanics like wind, etc, that makes it quite timing based in places. It’s funny, and has some very well concealed collectables too which is always fun if you’re afflicted with OCD about such things.

Bureau – Agent Kendall is notable mainly for what it attempts. A text adventure, almost, but with a good attempt at CGI graphics and certainly the best attempt at them we’ve seen in XBLIGs so far.

The sum of Hello Rocket’s parts is better than the whole, really. I love the idea, a lander kind of game where you have to manipulate the world around you to destroy enemies and collect stars. I love the rating system which awards you up to three stars based on your time and your performance. What I couldn’t get on with is the collision detection and the controls. Rather than the thrust button thrusting, as you’d expect, it pulls the tip of your ship upwards as if it’s attached to the top of the screen with a piece of string. It doesn’t feel very natural, really.

CEPINAS would be pretty nice if the controls were better. You have to take over planets by orbiting them with LT held down while your opponent does the same. Take over all the planets to win. Movement is weird though, it’s digital rather than analogue and combined with dodgy collision detection, means you’ll often collide with stuff by mistake. It’s a nice idea, though

Shoot Your Self is funner than I was expecting. You’re in a gun in the middle and you have to adjust your trajectory/power to shoot your avatar at structures to destroy them. You only have a certain amount of shots, and there’s a combo that builds if you don’t miss. Pretty playable, actually.

Duodecad is a card game. You place your cards on a 3×4 grid, then your opponent does, and if the number on the side of the card that he plays is higher than the adjacent number on your card, it’s a point for him. Whoever has the most points when the grid is full, wins. There are tons of rules you can change, including trade rules that determine how many of your opponents cards you get when you win, to build a stronger and stronger deck. Online multiplayer, or play the (pretty good) AI. There’s also loads of ways to upgrade the power of your cards, like placing them on special squares, etc. Rules like this are all customisable so play with or without ‘em. If this was an XBLA title, it’d be as popular as UNO.

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.

Gyroball doesn’t appear to make much sense at all. It doesn’t tell you how to play and as a result, you won’t know how to play. Funny how things work out like that, isn’t it?

Fortune Cookies in Bed is ridiculous, of course. You press a combination of buttons, it gives you a fortune like “hey man, you’re excellent” and then you can change the ending between in bed, on drugs, something else, and “at farting.” Yes, that is genuinely an option. Silver Dollar Games have done it again.

BugO StinkO is a ridiculous platformer that isn’t in any way fun to play, and isn’t in any way funny unless you are very, very simple.

ETMD. You know when you first start making games the first thing you do is make a scrolling shooter ’cause they’re relatively simple to do? That’s what this feels like.

Crisis: North Korea could almost be good but it’s like the dev got bored half way through making it and released it unfinished. It plays music for the first five seconds then that stops and it’s kinda plain after that. When you die, the game just… waits. And waits. Hopefully clicking this link won’t get you put on some sort of list.

A tricky game with a cookie is The Impossible Game done badly. Again. This one is done particularly badly though, with unresponsive controls and terrible collision detection and checkpointing.

Abronium Tournament disappoints. It’s a series of top-down different multiplayer events. The first one I played was a Mario Kart style race with powerups. You can’t see your ship half the time, I have no idea what any of the powerups I deployed actually did, and you can’t see the ones that you’re being hit with so you just end up losing all momentum and being flung around for no apparent reason. Then there was a capture the flag game that proceeded in much the same manner until I just gave up on it.

Bouncing Avatars is the game that Doodle Jump would have been if when they were making it, Lima Sky said “hey, you know what’d be fun? Having almost no control over the character at all!” Your avatar moves so slowly it’s almost impossible to enjoy. It’s better than Avatar Ragdolls, but most stuff is.

Strategic Warfare: Conflict has about 10 walls of text that explain how to play the game and then when the game starts you realise that they haven’t actually told you how to play the game and you’ve got no idea what you’re doing. In a way, it’s like RISK but in real-time. You have to send troops from your towers to enemy castles to take over them, while they do the same. Then they take them back and destroy you because it’s stupidly hard. On the first level you start with four towers with 20 troops each, the enemy starts with six that have 30-40 each, and they refresh a lot quicker, their troops move quicker, and there’s literally no introduction to the mechanics at all. Difficulty curves are not present, here. The way to win is to replay the battle over and over and over until you get lucky. Not really fun.

Conquest of the planet earth. Absolutely do not download this if you’re in any way epileptic. I think it might actually have given me epilepsy just from playing it. It’s an FPS, but for some reason the screen is constantly flashing so you can’t even play the thing.

Avatar Snake is a nice idea but it’s been done so, so badly here. A decent dev could have some fun with the idea. This just… exists.

And to end on an awesome note…

Every month, we’ll revisit a couple of games that you may have missed from months gone by. For no real reason at all, this month it’s an Echoes (ECHOES, echoes, echoes) special! Played a really awesome Indie Game in the past? Tweet me @toythatkills and we’ll see about getting it in here in the future.

Echoes+ is probably what the guy who made Asteroids was thinking when he was making his game. In his head, this is what it was. Basically, the best version of Asteroids I’ve ever played, as a twin-stick (with a classic Asteroids control scheme if you prefer).

The controls are quick and responsive, there are bombs, powerups, four difficulty levels, and everything looks awesome.

The best part is the amount of modes there are to play with. There’s the normal mode, a classic Asteroids mode that removes the new enemies, and among others, there’s a couple of modes that just focus on those new enemies. These are probably my two favourite modes, particularly the one you see in the screenshot above. Waves of meteors just come constantly from any of the four walls, and you have to blast through. Blast the yellow meteor for a multiplier bonus. It starts off slowly but soon you’re trying to evade 2, 3, 4 waves all at the same time and it’s total chaos, and awesome with it.

The leaderboards aren’t online, which is disappointing, but it’s still a great game with a ton to do, and a sort of achievement system too. There are 25 achievements to go for, and you get more points depending on the difficulty level you achieve them on. Get to 100% and you’re clearly some sort of robot.

Halfbrick Echoes is part of the very, very short-lived “Halfbrick Fridays” series of games, which Halfbrick released before going on to uber-success with Fruit Ninja on iOS.

In the game you have to collect gems in top-down levels such as the one above. Sounds simple enough, but every time you collect a gem it creates an “echo” of yourself which follows in your footsteps. Soon you’re collecting gems while trying to avoid tons of the different versions of yourself, collecting powerups to freeze or destroy them to give yourself a breather and generally taking part in a hectic game.

It’s pretty unique. About the closest thing it can be compared to is Pac-Man or radiangames Fluid (which came later) and neither is really that similar at all.

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

Enjoy your Indie Games.

If you were already excited about the release of Serious Sam 3, then prepare to go into overdrive. Croteam and  Devolver Digitial have announced that they’ve teamed up with three well know Indie Game developers to bring out titles based on the series.

The games are:

Serious Sam: Double D (Mommy’s Best Games)
Serious Sam explodes across the second dimension as Mommy’s Best Games (Weapon of Choice, Explosionade, Shoot 1UP) slams the legendary hero into a frantic side-scrolling shooter on PC and consoles. Featuring killer hand drawn artwork, classic and original enemies, and the innovative weapon stacking system, Serious Sam: Double D is a uniquely exciting chapter in the Serious Sam saga. All that stands between victory and annihilation is a man with a T-shirt and jeans… and a great big pile of guns.

Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack! (Be-Rad Entertainment)
Pledge allegiance to the evil lord Mental, join the ranks of the Headless Kamikaze brigade and destroy the vile Serious Sam. Be-Rad Entertainment’s (Lame Castle) hand drawn auto runner brings the awesome to mobile platforms as you guide your fearless group of Headless Kamikazes across the battlefield, dodging hazards and pitfalls while avoiding oncoming fire from the deplorable Serious Sam.

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (Vlambeer)
The classic RPG turn-based battle gets a seriously frantic overhaul as Vlambeer (Super Crate Box, Radical Fishing) turns their talent loose on the first Serious Sam role-playing game. Traverse a harsh and dangerous world map as Serious Sam and his team are thrown into rapid-fire battles against towering numbers of enemies on their way to glory against the legions of Mental’s horde. Arm your squad to the teeth with massive ordinance, throw down some special items and take aim at the hordes of charging enemies holding that sweet, sweet loot you crave so badly.

The games will be shown off in more detail at PAX East this weekend.

February turned out much slower than I’d expected it to. With not far off 100 games in peer-review at one point, I was expecting a mass of releases. As it turns out, many of those games still await release and it wasn’t really any busier than it would have been anyway. Odd. On the plus side, that means there’s more time to play some of the excellent games that came out this month!

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 releases, click here.

Ninja360° is all kinds of amazing. Seriously. Think of a kind of amazing: that’s what kind of amazing it is.

You’re on a small level and have to collect all the coins to finish it. When you’re standing on the level, it rotates with you as you move, Mario Galaxy-style. When you’re jumping, the level is stationary and you can take advantage of this to get better times or mess up and fall off. If you fall off and die, you don’t lose, you just go back to the start or a checkpoint, with your collected coins still collected. You can sometimes exploit this for faster times.

The big addictive hook comes from trying to earn better times, which are rewarded with medals. It’s almost a puzzle trying to get gold medals, because the times are so difficult to achieve that you’ve gotta really think outside the box to achieve them. You can watch videos of a few levels at the start and I guarantee you’ll think: “wow, I’d never have thought to do that.” Also, if you achieve a silver medal it unlocks a video demonstration of how to achieve gold. And some are just so clever, and use the basic mechanics in such awesome ways, that it’s impossible not to love the game for its sneakiness.

It looks great, with humorously animated backgrounds that you can change at will. It also controls really well, for the most part. There are occasions where you’ll want to wall-jump and the ninja will open a parachute to glide, making you slip off the wall. These times aren’t that common, though, and the levels are so small that even if it happens, you’ll rarely lose more than ten seconds of progress.

And how much content is there? 99 levels. 99! And it costs only 80 points. Can’t really argue with value like this.

In NYAN-TECH you just have to get a key and then get to the exit. There are basic platforming standards, spikes to avoid, double jumps, but then it gets really puzzley.

There are certain blocks that can only be removed by pressing a button, or made solid by pressing a button. There are different types, too, some that go solid/invisible when you hold the relevant button down, and some that switch between solid and invisible like, well, switches. When there’s five different button prompts on the screen to be taking care of at once, it gets pretty hectic.

There’s a time limit, too, which ticks down as you move, so you’ll need to go through the levels efficiently.

Levels are small, they look great, and it controls really well. If you like Ninja Bros., you need this. If you like games, you need this. 80 Microsoft Points.

Battle High: San Bruno is a beat-em-up and to be honest, it’s not a genre I get on with at all. Which makes it pretty obvious that this one’s good, because I enjoyed it.

I was still terrible at it, but I had fun being so.

It looks pretty cool in screenshots, but the animation is lovely and it looks even better in motion. There’s a movelist in game which shows that there are loads of moves for each of the characters. I had trouble pulling some of them off but I put that down to my own ineptitude rather than any issue with the game. Sorry. I wish I could do it more justice but I just don’t know beat-em-ups.

Only 80 Microsoft Points, this.

Rotor is beautiful. The colour schemes, which you can edit in minute detail, look tremendous and mean that even though there’s only one “level,” every game you play feels completely different. You just have to randomise the colours before you begin.

There are three main modes in Rotor, Arcade, 3 minute, and 10 minute. The gameplay in each is similar and while the timed modes just tick down, Arcade is where the Crazy Taxi style gameplay comes in. Each time you accept a new event in Arcade, your time is extended slightly, and so if you’re good you can go on and on, it’s easily the most compelling of the three games and the one where you’ll spend the most time.

There are three types of events in all three modes. One gives you a line to follow and you’re graded on your accuracy. Another is a checkpoint race, and is similar. The final type is an orb hunt, where you’re given a random number and asked to find that many orbs in time. Orb hunting is where your precision flying skills are truly tested, and you’d be advised to avoid those at first if possible!

In a way, there’s not much to do in Rotor, but the more you play it, the more you want to play it. It takes a few goes to get the controls, but as you get better and better the game seems to open up, and suddenly what could be a quite frustrating experience to begin with becomes wonderful as you swerve around at impossible angles destroying your previous high scores.

80 Microsoft Points.

College Lacrosse 2011 is, well, a Lacrosse game. It’s ridiculously ambitious for an Xbox LIVE Indie Game with motion-captured animation and as a sports game, it feels as comprehensive as you’d want it to be.

I don’t know anything about Lacrosse and the chances are that you don’t either, so why should you be interested? Well, because a good sports game’s a good sports game. It plays a lot like a football (soccer) game, and the controls feel natural and largely how you’d expect them too. It’s a lot pacier though, and the pitch really feels a lot smaller and more cramped. Sometimes this is an issue when you have trouble making space but it’s really just essential to work out how to play it rather than (like I was) playing it like it’s FIFA. Once you get to grips with it, it’s a lot of fun.

Avatar Adventurers Online is, well, there was some discussion over whether or not it’s an MMORPG. How massive is massive? Anyway, it’s an online RPG with (not-quite) massive numbers of players.

The screenshots don’t really sell it, but they do tell a story. The game is every bit as sparse and barren as they suggest it is. That doesn’t make it any less compelling though, and it has great combat and loads of spells, levelling up, and miscellaneous items.

A low entry price and no monthly fees must make this worth a try.

Wizard’s Keep is the second game from the guys that brought you Miner Dig Deep. Yes, you, because I know you’ve got it.

It’s very different, though, as this one’s an action RPG.

You have a basic attack, a powerful attack, and the ability to block. It’s essential to balance these well because while the combat starts off really simply, hammering the light-attack button won’t get you that far through the game.

Once you’ve completed a few quests you can start gathering materials and making new stuff, which is where it gets a lot more MDD-like and where it starts getting as addictive as that game got. It just takes longer to get going, this one, but you’ll stick with it.

You can’t not.

Baby Maker Extreme 2 is pretty much the same game as the first, but the pseudo-3D graphics are creepy as hell. As far as new stuff goes, there’s loads of new upgrades and stuff. You can have new outfits for your creepy baby. As much as people deride it, I enjoyed the original BMX, and this is more of the same. Just a creepier kind of more that doesn’t really offer anything that you’d need if you have the original.

Timeslip should be fantastic, but I just got frustrated. You’re a snail and every thirty seconds or so a clone of yourself is created which follows the path you followed previously, so you can use them to wait on switches while the current you runs through doors, etc. If you come into contact with yourself, though, you lose and have to start again. This is a mechanic that’s been used a lot recently, and if the game focussed on puzzles instead of killing you at every opportunity it’d be a lot more fun. Still worth trying, though, because it is a lovely mechanic and it’s interesting to see Yaroze games turning up on XBLIGs.

Run! places your avatar on a course that heads into the distance, auto-runs it, and you have to time your jumps and movements to avoid hazards and take advantage of speed boosts. There’s loads of courses and it looks pretty quaint.

Bird Assassin is pretty ace, really. Not so much for the gameplay, which is alright but repetitive. It’s really funny though, I lol’d a few times during the trial. Gameplay-wise, you walk from left to right aiming with the right stick and shooting birds, avoiding traps, etc. That’s pretty much it, but it works. There’s an extensive upgrade system, too.

Super Tank Run is a retro-styled auto-runner, kind of, with a heavy metal soundtrack. Your tank travels along and you can switch into one of four lanes to avoid barricades and collect coins, which is what your final score’s based on. It plays pretty well, but definitely needs to be played on the D-Pad. There are a few modes, a timed mode where you just score what you can, a defensive mode where you have three lives and lose one for every barricade you hit, and an offensive mode where you attack oncoming tanks. Pretty good for 80 points, this.

Spermatozoon is not a bad game, but I am baffled that this made it out when Privates was banned. You have to press A at the right time to get to the egg in the middle, avoiding the walls (contraception) that rotate around. If you miss, you’ll destroy a bit of wall, so it gets easier as you go. Kind of addictive, and thank the lord that contraception in real life isn’t destroyed so easily.

Trivia or Die is easily the best quiz show game on the service, I think, purely down to the speed it goes at. There’s questions every few seconds, unlike the Quizcall games where it takes AGES to load between questions. Speed is where it’s at. It’s quite funny too, getting questions wrong results in abuse.

Googly-Eyed Splitters is a 2D platformer set in small self-contained levels. It starts off ridiculously slow paced and really boring, but then introduces a mechanic where you can split your character in two and fit in smaller gaps, help the other half out with switches, etc. Each thing is controller with a different half of the controller. At that point, the game gets really cool and puzzley. It never controls brilliantly, to be honest, but definitely stick with it until the end of the trial when you give it a go, because it gets better.

Toy Cars is a game that has literally not atmosphere whatsoever, but I haven’t played a decent Micro Machines game in ages and this one is alright.

Escape is a platformer that has deadzone issues so I constantly went left, to my doom. In spite of this, it’s okay. I like the short platforming challenges and there are secrets to discover, which is always a must in platform games.

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.

All Out of Bubblegum! I didn’t really get. It starts off pretending to be tower defence, and then becomes a twin-stick. The twin-stick part doesn’t work, as you have to kill every enemy in a wave to progress and they keep getting stuck behind scenery so you have to wander around for ages to try and find the last enemy that’s stopping the wave ending.

Mummies vs GunnS has some strange punctuation, there. It’s the worst kind of FPS, there’s no goal, there’s no animation, and the enemies take 1,000,000 hits to take down. Yawn.

Avatar Ragdolls is one of few height climbers on Indie Games, which is a surprise with them being so popular on iOS. This one’s not spectacular. It’s very, very slow and takes a major effort to lose. Also, sometimes you can boost and sometimes you can’t, and there’s no indication as to how long your boost takes to recharge.

Zombie Concentration is a twin stick. I’m losing the will to write anything at all about these at this point. I swear I’ve played over 500. This one is slow, cramped, and offers no satisfying feedback when you kill enemies.

Old School Destruction. The loading is just amazing. If I discover that it took less than four minutes between pressing start and the game starting, I would be astounded. Here’s a quick outline of the plot: “Oh noes!!!! Invation!!!!” Gameplay is pretty bad. You roam around a 3D environment that looks rubbish, when for the amount of time it took to load you’re expecting it to actually be generating a real world or something. Right stick aims, but in a really peculiar way. It controls a cross-hair and when you pass over an enemy it auto targets, you then fire with a trigger to shoot really pissy little bullets. The other trigger fires grenades, when the game feels like letting you. Not great. Or good. Or average. Or passable. I’m not even sure it’s as good as “bad.”

Try Cuckoo Crack if you want truly annoying sound effects. Gameplay is bad. It’s vaguely Helicopter Game like, but with less in the way of obstacles. You just have to avoid trees – well sometimes you do. Sometimes you can fly straight through them and nothing happens, other times you’ll crash. Genius design decision. To score points you have to drop eggs into nests but you have to be pretty much on top of the next to do so or falling too far will mean they’ll break and you’ll score minus points. Sometimes, there’ll be a nest at the bottom of the screen and it’s impossible to drop an egg in and then gain enough height to avoid crashing into the tree. Rubbish.

Unstoppable Chopper is a Helicopter Game that has the nerve to use a helicopter. With balls like that, it needs to be good. It isn’t. It’s slow, painfully slow.

And to end on an awesome note…

Every month, we’ll revisit a couple of games that you may have missed from months gone by. These games are lost in the depths of the Games Marketplace, pull them out of there! Played a really awesome Indie Game in the past? Let me know and we’ll see about getting it in here in the future.

Leave Home is a side scrolling shmup unlike any other, because in a way, you make the game.

See, the game changes based on how well you play it. If you play really well and don’t die, the game gets harder. If you play badly and die a lot, the game gets easier.

The game’s always a fixed length so you can’t lose, it’s purely for points. It means you have as long to rack up points as does someone who’s rubbish. Like me, for example. The better you’re playing, though, the higher you’ll score and the higher will be your opportunity to score as the game gets more and more difficult until you eventually lose, or it ends.

And look at that screenshot? Isn’t it just the prettiest? And it’s yours for 80 Microsoft Points.

Bloom＊Block lets us end the round-up with the same company we started it with. Cute.

Which is what this game is, funnily enough!

It’s a puzzle game where you have to roam around on the faces of cubes, stepping on each one precisely one time. This starts out fairly simple but gets difficult quickly as the cubes are arranged in ever more intricate shapes.

As with a lot of Indie Games, it’s the sheer amount of content that makes this so amazing, though. There are loads and loads of levels, and also loads and loads of achievements to earn. There’s so much to do, I honestly doubt you’ll do it all. So it’s a game that’ll never end!

Recently dropped its price to 80 Microsoft Points, for even better valuage!

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

Enjoy your Indie Games.

Here’s an interview with Michael Ventnor of Red Crest Studios, who released Hyper Button and Bonded Realities this month. Read on to find out his thoughts on Nintendo, enemy design, and why he doesn’t like Pokémon.

First, tell us about yourself and your gaming history?

My name is Michael Ventnor, living in Brisbane, Australia. Up until the Xbox 360, I was exclusively a Nintendo gamer and fanboy. However, last year I discovered the Indie Games service, where Microsoft allowed pretty much anyone to develop games for sale on the 360, which is a dream come true for me.

The reason I originally wanted to get into programming, as a bright-eyed primary school student, was to make video games. Unlike others in my class, though, I found I easily understood and sometimes enjoyed learning the maths and logic involved in order to understand programming languages and algorithms. Programming stuff was something I really enjoyed in my spare time. I graduated BSc in Computer Science at University of Queensland.

What made you want to make this game?

Truth is, I have many ideas for game mechanics all written down, but I selected my RPG idea because a) there are not enough on the Indie service, and b) I thought making an RPG would be easy. A turn-based RPG is just fancy packaging around logic and what we in the computer field call “state machines.” This sort of stuff is what programming languages do best.

Surprise, turns out that arrogant assessment was wrong after all! Now I see why there are so few RPGs on the service. I wanted to release by September 2010, then November 2010. It was a tough lesson for me.

A third reason I wanted to make RPGs is because I enjoyed them while growing up. Like I said, I was a Nintendo child, so I enjoyed lots of Nintendo RPGs like Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. Indie RPGs are frequently compared to Earthbound and I’m sure I’ll be moreso, but this is because Earthbound has so many qualities of an indie game. It takes risks. It has a charming style to it. It’s funny. It strives to stand out from the other RPGs. I seem to enjoy RPGs, and games in general, if they have a unique spark to them and if they’re happy and light-hearted (which probably explains my Nintendo allegiance). Hence, when you play Bonded Realities, you’ll see lots of one liners and self-deprecating humour.

I already likened your game to Earthbound without even playing it, probably a bit presumptuous but it does have that vibe about it. I can’t think of many better influences, though. What else have you learnt from those games that you’ve been able to use to make your game as good as it can be?

I asked myself “what did I enjoy?” and “what did I find annoying?” Why did I find Earthbound fun? For one, there were lots of interesting enemies, and I was always curious to see what the next area and the area’s enemies looked like. I tried to replicate this feeling in Bonded Realities, every enemy is heavily characterised and has unique attacks. Secondly, and this could also apply to Paper Mario, it felt like a giant vaudeville show. Lots of nonsensical “non-sequitur” stuff happened, so I tried to include the same feeling in my game.

Why did I find Pokémon annoying? As I was walking through caves, I had to deal with wild encounters too low level to bother. How to stop them? I had to use Repels, which only worked a limited number of steps. Don’t have Repels in your bag? Tough. This led to the idea of the Smoke Ball in game. When you use it, encounters stop, and you can use it whenever you want. I found there’s no reason to put a price on this for the player, since not getting enough experience to beat the boss is payback enough for using this item too much.

I think your stance on random battles will make a lot of people happy! Sounds like there’s a great balance between having enemies that players will want to see, and letting them see them at their own pace.

Tell us a bit more about the game, what can the player expect from it?

These are some goals I set myself when I made Bonded Realities:

1) Funny, moreso than any other RPG I’ve played.
2) An interface that felt great to use and never became overwhelming.
3) Lots to do, especially adding things that break up the monotony and slow pace.

For 1), I tell a lot of jokes, and I’m Australian, so those things really help when thinking up humour. I don’t have the burden of publishers paranoid of PR, so I used some quite shocking humour by RPG standards. Jokes only went in the game if I laughed at it myself when I thought it up. The innkeeper’s one-liners about the awful conditions of your room are my favourites.

For 2), I wanted an almost Apple-like devotion to a good interface. My desk was littered with mock-ups of everything from the battle UI to the shops to the pause menus. I asked myself “what needs to be displayed on screen?”, “how long will it take the player’s eyes and brain to process all this?” and most importantly, “what can I remove?” You watch the trailer, and you’ll notice in the battle UI things like each ally being assigned a different colour, or how remaining HP is graphically signified with your stat box draining, thus removing the need to display max HP on screen.

For 3), I thought up lots of little ways to add challenge if you ever got bored with the game as it stood. Finishing battles quickly (by wall clock time) results in bonus experience points. Defending will recover a random amount of PP. Find all the treasure chests, including the very-well-hidden ones with super-powerful equipment, and you get a big reward from a character called the Treasure Oracle. There’s techniques you must use to avoid one-hit KO attacks (or the final boss, who has the ability to send your whole party to sleep at once).

I already mentioned the wide range of enemies. I just hope it lives up to expectations, since there are some very good RPGs on the Indie service developed with more resources than I, and I hope it isn’t received poorly because of that.

It sounds really streamlined, I don’t see why gamers wouldn’t take to it if they try it!

Maybe the biggest hindrance is the old “nobody’s trying” problem, what are you planning to get people’s attention?

I plan on contacting as many sites as I can, but there’s no way I’ll get the attention of IGN, and I’d have to be exceedingly lucky to make Kotaku or Joystiq. So the sites I plan on contacting are smaller news sites but still have a respectable readership. RPGamer has been fantastic in this regard, and I’ve also got the attention of RPGFan, XBLAFans and some others. Once lots of smaller sites pick it up, I’m hoping for a “trickle-up” effect where bigger sites will want to see what the fuss is about.

Writing good press releases, and getting a trailer on GameTrailers is also important.

I think the way your game has an Earthboundy kind of feel could really help with sites like Kotaku, actually.

What was development of Bonded Realities like? Did you do everything yourself?

The programming I did all myself. I wrote the engine from scratch. It’s quite powerful, actually, since I had other uses for it besides RPGs in mind, but that’s not going to happen for a long time yet. The art I did all myself. I’m not as good a drawer as some may think; I helped develop my drawing skills and the art style used in BR, by drawing my own political cartoons. Doing that also helped develop a good wit, which I put to use writing BR’s jokes.

The music is all licensed. I can’t write a song to save my life.

Development had its ups and downs, as it always does. Designing and coding the engine was my favourite bit, since I enjoy problem solving like that. The most mundane bit was writing the level data. Imagine playing a text-prompt version of Command and Conquer. I had to write the level data by hand, but I think it would’ve been less work than if I wrote a graphical editor. Writing a graphical editor would’ve made implementing levels more fun, but it would’ve sucked a whole lot more time from the project and I don’t think I could’ve afforded to do that.

What are your thoughts on XBLIG in general, prior to releasing your first major game?

It’s great, even if too much attention has been put on the crapplications. Lots of people dream about selling games but don’t know where to begin, and it’s wonderful that Microsoft, Google and Apple, among others, are making it easy for indie devs to reach a huge audience on their respective platforms. Crap will always be made for these sorts of markets, so just ignore it, and give the attention to those who deserve it. If those developers make enough money and fame, they’ll keep making games for you, so I hope the media will give more attention to good XBLIG titles and not maintain the impression that it’s 100% crap.

Finally – I’m Bobby Kotick and I’m very busy, those sequels aren’t going to churn themselves. You’ve got 15 words to tell me why I (and everyone) should be interested in Bonded Realities!

A summary for a busy person, how about this: “Longing for good old-fashioned RPG gameplay in a funny world? Now’s your chance!” That’s 14 words, but add “sex” in there somewhere and it’s bound to get people’s attention!

Bonded Realities is out now and can be yours for 80 Microsoft Points.

I am back! I moved on December 6th, and haven’t had the internet since then. I don’t know why it took so long. We did have a few centimetres of snow between then and now, and I understand that while the entire country is cleared, Royal Mail are still snowed in, and some postmen have been trapped ankle deep in snow for over a month now. So maybe the company that came to sort my phone line suffered similar delays. Regardless, the games! I think this is possibly the worst month I’ve ever had to create a thread for. I could have put almost every game in the “bad” category, and it was a Herculean effort not to.

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 releases, click here.

Bonded Realities was a shoo-in for Game of the Month, really. All the pre-release hype (insomuch as any Indie Games are hyped pre-release) suggested that it was going to be a funny, charming RPG, and that’s exactly what it is.

The sound is great, both the music and the sound effects are really nice. It looks good, too. The screenshots don’t really do it justice, as it looks quite, simple, I guess. But in game, and in the context of the characters and the world they really work so well. The best graphics come with the enemy design, though.

The enemies, see, are just ridiculously imaginative. Every single one is either funny in basic concept (Pitch Fork) or has some hilarious attacks; usually both. This makes the (random) battles a joy, and if you don’t like random battles, turn ‘em off! The enemies are full of puns, and the rest of the dialogue continues the humorous trend, and there are laughs everywhere you go. It’s honestly impossible not to like it when the whole atmosphere around the game is so happy.

The story is a mysterious one, and I’m not nearly far enough yet to spoiler your face off. What I can tell you, is that after being dropped at playschool one day, you suddenly find yourself transported to a strange place with only a sword for company. It’s a nice twist on the old “waking up with amnesia and a sword” plot that’s been done to death in RPGs.

There are some issues, the battle system is very simple for example, but equally that could be seen as an advantage. There’s less pressure on the player in battle which frees them up to sit back and enjoy the enemies attacks.

For just 80 points, it’s another great RPG on Xbox LIVE Indie Games, and you can click here to read more about Bonded Realities later!

Aban Hawkins & the 1000 SPIKES is a super-hard and super-unfair platformer, but that’s what it tries to be and that’s why it’s so awesome. It’s from the same people that made The TEMPURA of the DEAD and has a similar style/sound to it. An excellent one.

Each level is pretty big, and you have to get to the end in one go. There are loads and loads of things that will kill you and most of them come from nowhere so you’ll die and have to start again. Some people won’t like this, but personally I do. I really enjoyed having to learn the levels and it made me laugh when I’d get right to the end and suddenly die from something you didn’t notice. When I say stuff comes from nowhere, it’s always signposted, just sometimes hidden really well.

You’ll know from this description whether you’ll like the game or find it frustrating, so buy or don’t buy!

My favourite thing about Pixelbit Snooker & Pool might be that it’s only 4MB in size, which is just amazing, because it looks excellent. It’s, well, it’s snooker and pool, and there’s none of the faff that the WSC games have. So, no player models which means small filesizes and next to no loading times.

It plays a great game of snooker, too. The AI is fairly suspect but I never play these games for the AI, it’s all about the break building and this has that down. Aiming at a ball shows the direction both will travel in which makes building breaks easier, but really puts the focus on positional play, as well it should, so it really feels snookery.

The physics could be better, but there’s absolutely nothing gamebreaking wrong with them and indeed, it feels a lot better than many snooker games I’ve played. Like it.

Squid. I’m all for games that take the top-down-shooter mechanic and do something unique with it. It’s why I liked Ripple before, and it’s why I like Squid now.

You’ve got no weapons, see. The only way to defeat enemies is to use their own weapons against them, any way you can. This starts basic enough, with missiles that tail you that you can lead into enemies, but then other enemies appear with their own attack patterns, etc. It’s always the avoiding I enjoy more than the shooting, so this is right up my street, and plays differently enough to the norm to warrant a look.

It looks and sounds lovely as well, which never hurts!

Hyper Button is a bunch of QTEs, basically, but it has a really nice scoring hook that rewards you VERY well for perfection, so it’s quite addictive, playing over and over for that perfect score.

Antipole is a game I wanted to like more than I could. Or, I do really like it, but the movement of the main character is about twice as fast as it should be, and this badly hinders the jumping. Aside from that, the game is nice. The gravity mechanic is different enough from VVVVVV to warrant its existence, and the enemies add an extra thing to think about.

radiangames Ballistic is a perfectly competent twin-stick, as you’d expect from radiangames. The UI is uncharacteristically poor, it’s cramped with options hidden and explanations obscured, but overall, the game’s decent enough. Is it the worst radiangames game? Probably. But it’s still better than most other shooters on XBLIG.

Sword and Hammer is the stupidest game I’ve ever played, but I can’t not recommend it because everyone needs to at least play the trial for the utter bizarre absurdness of it all. Live action QTEs. Wut?

Wizard Apprentice is simple, but could have a whole ton of depth later on, it looks pretty big. It’s a monster-raising dungeon-crawling RPG. When you defeat a monster in battle, you can capture them and use them in battles. The battles aren’t that exciting, and the plot is non-existent, but there’s something compulsive in raising stronger and stronger monsters, and this has got it covered. Interesting, interesting, bit of a surprise, this. Oh, it’s an avatar game too. Even more surprising!

龍炎高校伝説 is by Hunters, there’s something about their games that I really like. They’re never brilliant, but they’re always fun and always packed with charm and humour, this is no different. It’s a side scrolling beat-em-up. And it’s enjoyable.

I don’t get Maid_san’s Caving Adventure but yet still I enjoy it, and still I keep playing it. It’s a 2D platformer with stealth elements. You have to complete levels quickly and/or collect stars, or something, the whole thing is so vague. But whatever, you have to get a rank C or above in a level to proceed and that ain’t easy. Needs more play, more working out, but it’s quite fun doing so. Contains bouncy tits and some upskirts, if that’s your thing!

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.

2010: A New Threat is horrible. It took me about ten seconds to actually work out where my ship was every time I died, by which time I was nearly dead again. A simple twin-stick with horrendously confusing controls.

Bioerosion バイオエロージョン is bad. It’s a weird looking over-the-shoulder shooter with controls that are so inaccurate that it’s nearly impossible to play.

Blocks Indie. Here’s a game that could be really good. But is not. You are a ship with a crate balanced on top, and you have to manoeuvre your way to a delivery point by using left and right thrusters to keep your ship straight and the cargo balanced. This would be brilliant, were it not for the stupid decision to not let the player use both thrusters simultaneously, making it impossible to keep the ship straight while at the same time having fun.

Boom Kikker is stupid. It’s just stupid. It’s some weird tile placing game that has a set of rules that make no sense and even if I have understood them right, they don’t appear to act how they’re explained and the whole thing is so ugly that you can’t even tell what’s meant to go where anyway. Any other theme at all and it might have made sense.

If Bounce! was programmed by a three year old, that’s still no excuse for how amazingly inept it is. Absolutely shameful that someone thought this was fit to be released. Embarrassing. Actually embarrassing. I’m embarrassed just playing it.

Corrupted. I probably claim every month that something it the worst twin-stick ever. This is the worst twin-stick ever. A medieval theme doesn’t disguise your crap gameplay.

CRON, oh CRON, I looked at your screenshots and I was hopeful. I saw your main menu and I knew you were to be rubbish. Invisible maze game with invisible enemies. Yeah, that’s a good idea. You can Sonar to identify them but that’s just irritating, and if you were going to let me see stuff, WHY HAVE YOU MADE EVERYTHING INVISIBLE!?

Death N’ Failure. Yes, I will die. Do you know why that is? Because your game is an unplayable mess. The player has absolutely no control over the character at all. Awful.

Extreme Skill is not needed to play this game. Extreme patience. Extreme masochism. Extreme inability to realise you’re playing a crap game. That’s what’s needed. It’s The Impossible Game but shit. Again.

Honor in Vengeance. Read this sentence. How long did it take? One second? Now imagine I gave you 45 seconds to read it. Then did the same for ten more sentences. Literally half of the trial of this game is spent looking at text that fades in and out so slowly that you need an iron will not to quit before the game starts. They you’ll wish you had, as you’re faced with a 3D space shooter with enemies that you can’t even see.

I didn’t play Snowball Showdown and I’m not even ashamed of it. You’ve got eight minutes to make an impression on people trialling your game, forcing them to spend the first five watching an unskippable video is dumb. I quit, so did everyone else. How are your sales?

I would rather kill myself than ever play SSRGFM again. It’s an arena fighter where you don’t appear to have any attacks at all, you just run around and fart. This is hilarious if you are four years old, or a fucking idiot.

The Charge isn’t a good game, but it’s here mainly for having the nerve to put some skank on the cover in a cynical attempt to generate more trials to people who haven’t discovered porn on the internet yet.

And to end on an awesome note, because we need it after that…

Every month, we’ll revisit a couple of games that you may have missed from months gone by. With last month being the first of 2011, it only makes sense to look back at the two best games from 2010. There were a lot of amazing games, but if you’ve been following my thoughts on Indie Games even remotely closely you can probably stop reading now, because you know what two games I’m about to rave about.

If you’ve got recommendations of older games for future months, tweet me @toythatkills.

Apple Jack came out just before these round-ups started, so I’ve never had the chance to rave about it properly. It also came out at around the same time as Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Wii did. I got Mario first, played it solidly, but then downloaded Apple Jack because it was there. I expected to play it for a few minutes and get back to Mario but from the very first second I was totally hooked, and didn’t play Mario again until I was done with Apple Jack. That this Indie Game was more compelling than a game with a year of hype, made by an experienced team in a major franchise confirmed for me that Indie Games had “arrived,” as it were. That there was more potential in this service than in any other distribution method.

The first game I ever remember playing properly was a 2D platformer (Alex Kidd in Miracle World, history fans) and I’ve loved them ever since. Xbox LIVE Indie Games have been very good to me in this regard, and Apple Jack is the best of the lot. There’s just so much going for it. Most importantly, it gets right what so many get wrong, the jumping, which has a perfect weight to it. Too floaty or too heavy and your game fails, but Apple Jack is spot on. This perfection carries over to the rest of the controls too, and playing it is a total joy.

This is aided by gameplay itself, which is great. Your goal in each level is to defeat every enemy, and this is done by throwing them into one another, which destroys both. There’s a ton of variety in the enemy design and each has its own attack and movement patterns which means you have to learn them to use them to their full advantage. Some enemies are colour-coded and can only be destroyed by enemies of the same colour which adds a brilliant puzzle element to levels, the design of which is excellent.

There are 100 levels, all set somewhere in the British countryside. There’s no relation between the places the level is set in and the level itself, but being English myself it’s lovely when you happen to be playing somewhere you’ve been or heard of before. To add a little bit more addictiveness, is the multiplier system. Killing a pair of enemies releases coins, killing another pair quickly gets you twice as many, then four times, eight times, 16x, 32x, and it keeps going and going until the screen is totally filled with coins which looks glorious. So many levels I had to replay after insisting to myself that I could complete it better!

I’m also really proud of the fact that I’m one of the very few people that will have completed the super-hardcore version of this before the patch came out that made it easier! It’s still difficult, though, and there are levels that’ll take loads of attempts to beat – the difficulty curve is, like everything else in this game, perfect.

This is absolutely the best 80 Microsoft Points you will ever, ever spend. I don’t think I can express my love for this any better than Robert Florence did, though. “Apple Jack, I love you to your core.”

Hypership Out of Control is some close competition for “best 80 Microsoft Points ever,” though. It’s another game that came from nowhere but totally got its hooks into me. The screenshots imply that it’s a bog-standard vertical scrolling shmup, but it’s anything but.

What it is, is a super-fast corridor based avoid-em-up, or something.

You’re in a ship and the accelerator is stuck, the brakes are out, and you’re screwed. You go faster and faster and faster and faster and your job as the pilot is to avoid all the walls and just live for as long as possible, racking up points – it’s a wonderful high-score chasing game, and horribly addictive with it.

Points are earned by progressing through the level, the quicker you go the more points you get. You can also get points by collecting coins, and doing so increases a multiplier. This, people, is about as perfect as risk/reward mechanics get. There are loads of power-ups too but you always have to balance the reward with the risk of getting to them, this leads to some hilarious level design, too.

The game is split into waves, each with a distinct look, feel, and set of hazards. The hilarity comes when something tempts the player one way, a long trail of coins, a power-up, or something, only for something better to appear in a now impossible-to-reach area. You can only laugh at the cleverness of the developer and how you were totally sucked in.

Since its release, the game has been updated with reverse waves too. These weren’t designed to be played this way round so they’re full of dead-ends and other hazards, think of them as a hardcore mode, and prepare for some learning if you want to set some scores on the leaderboards, which handily are online.

You can set scores in one of HSOoC’s many modes. The normal mode gives you three lives and you go as far as you can – there’s no end, so once you complete all the waves you go back to the start. Another mode gives you a single life to, again, go as far as you can. Another mode requires that you collect coins, as they constantly tick down. Kind of like Super Sonic. If your total ever reaches zero, you lose. There are infinite lives in this mode, but you’ll need enough coins to keep using them!

The gameplay is totally solid, but it’s the little things that really elevate it above and beyond. The sense of humour, mainly, which is absolutely brilliant. It’s not something the game really needs, but it’s twice as good with it being there. The music, too, is so good. I’ve been offline for two months and so haven’t been able to play this, but the tune still appears in my head now and then.

It’s an amazing game, and you owe it to yourself to play it.

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

Do tell!