My Blog About Indie Games

Alternatively called: Why I End Up Buying Every Humble Indie Bundle

So on one of these past episodes of 8-Bit Banter, The Internet and Gaming, the subject of indie games was brought up.  Now, I have a small reputation among the people I know as being a little of a Gaming Hippie, in that I support indie gaming a lot.  I make a post every time that the Humble Indie Bundle comes around, and the HIB is about as hippie as gaming tends to get outside of games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing.

But in an attempt to not be the Gaming Hipster among my friends (Oh, you haven't heard of this game?), I want to clarify something about my stance on Indie Games.  Being a game developed by a small developer is not an automatic way to get more points from me.  Occasionally, I worry that I send that message.

I like Indie games that are GOOD.  Now to decrease the douchiness of that sentence, I have enjoyed a great number of indie games.  As I have stated, VVVVVV is one of my favorite games ever.  I loved the gameplay mechanic, the style of the game, the humor, and especially the music.

Oh look the title is all over the walls

I liked some other indie games from this current wave, too; Super Meat Boy is infuriatingly difficult, but absolutely satisfying.  Cthulhu Saves the World is one of my favorite JRPGs, too, with it's bringing back a huge amount of nostalgia for the older Final Fantasy games as well as having some of the most ridiculous writing in any game I have ever played.

But that is not to say that there are no bad indie games.  I won't list any, because that would be a little rude towards people who have put a lot of love in their projects.  I will say, though, that they exist.  

Importantly, this is just as true for big-name games.  It's a tragedy to see any game do poorly, because there is a genuine desire to make a good game on some level, even if it gets lost in the hype machine and the desire to spite competitors (Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, I'm looking at both of you.).

So I think this is what I have been trying to say.  I like indie games, and whenever I see one become a great success, it feels great because you know that it was not the result of a multi-million dollar ad campaign or the result of yearly releases.  It's a genuine win for a genuinely great game.  And I buy every Humble Indie Bundle because I want to be a part of every great success that I can be.

30 Days of Video Games Day 10

Day 20: Favorite Genre

I'd have to go with the classic: the platformer.  The old 2D genre that Mario owes his fame to has seen a kind of reawakening in this age of downloadable games.  I want to give a few highlights of the genre here:

Braid:

Solid gameplay, solid story, amazing art.  It's a platformer, with the added ability to turn back time.  The levels feature some puzzles that range from insane to just plain stupid, too.  But seeing the world unfold before you is an experience I haven't really had with many other games.

VVVVVV:

This is easily the crown jewel of the 3rd Humble Bundle.  I LOVED this game.  You can move back and forth in the same way that you would in a platformer, but your only way of avoiding obstacles is by switching gravitational pulls.  The retro art style goes great with the game, too.  The only thing I wish is that the game was longer.  If any game I list here could get a sequel, I hope it's this one (maybe they could call it VVVVVVV).

New Super Mario Bros Wii:

This was a great time.  I love that they took the idea of a multiplayer platformer and got rid of waiting for your turn.  Add that to the fact that your actions affect other players, and you get controlled chaos (in the best case).  It's really good fun.

Wario Land (1 and 4):

I played Wario Land 1 all the time when I was a kid.  I still have some of the game's music in my head, and I remember it as one of the first games I played that issued challenges to get cool hidden treasures.  I logged in a lot of hours with this game, especially when we traveled cross-country.

I didn't play 2 or 3, mostly because I didn't even know they existed.  But when I got my Game Boy Advance, I took a risk and got Wario Land 4, and it was worth it.  This game has character.  Great levels and great boss fights combined with a sense of humor really lets this stand out as one of the best platformers I have ever played.

30 Days of Video Games Day 16

Game with the Best Cut Scenes

This is a troubling question because I have a million answers due to the lack of an answer to the question, "What makes a cut scene?"  So what better way to solve this dilemma than to answer all of my hypothetical solutions?

Cut Scenes that Involve a Lot of Gameplay: Chrono Trigger.  Before the final fight with Lavos, you have the option of taking on like twelve side quests, and they have really deep story elements for the backgrounds of some characters.  You can even change the events of the "present" on one particularly emotional cut scene.

Cut Scenes with Minimal Gameplay: God of War 3: Killing the gods of Olympus is a spectacular experience.

This particular scene, ripping the head off Helios, was really cool.  Killing Poseidon was a very close second place.  And if you count quick-time events as Minimal Gameplay cut scenes, then you really can't go wrong with God of War 3.

Straight-Up Movie Cut Scenes: Okay, I personally guarantee that I will think of another game eventually, but I have been having trouble all day with this one. At the moment, the game that comes to mind is Super Smash Bros Brawl.  It's not that the game has particularly wonderful story-telling, but it's the reason the Smash Bros games are wonderful: it's a bunch of awesome characters crossing over into a single universe.

Pardon the low-res, but Samus's ship, the Blue Falcon, an Arwing, and a pink thing I can't really recognize: awesome.

Also, I find it hilarious that Diddy Kong has to fight Rayquaza.

30 Days of Video Games Day 14

Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper:

This one isn't really fair.  I have so damn many, and they're rotating every half-hour.  I took a screencap from pretty much every Meet the Team video and made them wallpapers.  I think I took four of them from Meet the Medic. But for the sake of the technical name, I have this as my current wallpaper:

I have a lot more as well.

30 Days of Video Games Day 13

A Game I Have Played More Than Five Times:

I have to start with the game I would have played five times over if I still had it: Metroid Fusion.  Actually, pretty much any Metroid game.  It's this strangely perfect balance of exploration, action, and puzzle-solving.  Plus, the aheer amount of skill it takes to get to some secrets can drive you crazy.  Until you actually succeed, of course, and then it's awesome.  But yeah, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid Prime each are awesome games.  Maybe the only exception I hold could be the original Metroid, because I need at least a little prodding in the right direction.  Plus, by the time you have a ton of upgrades, you feel like The Juggernaut.

I could do this fight all day.

Much the same thing could probably be said about Portal in the next few years.  It's short, it's wonderful, and I think I've put the count up to at least three play-throughs.

But the winner has to go to Chrono Trigger.  I found it on a large emulator collection I was given.  I thought, "Hmmm... Chrono Trigger.  This could either be retarded, or it could be pretty cool."  So I started playing, and IT WAS AWESOME.  The story was sooo much cooler when I didn't even know what would be on the back of the box.  Ugh, it was too damn cool.

So I played it again and again on my emulator when I found out there were multiple endings.  Then, I got the game for Christmas on my DS, and the number of times I've played it has been increasing somewhat steadily.

30 Days of Video Games Day 11

Gaming System of Choice: Nintendo DS.  In my case, specifically a red-and-black DS Lite.  

Why yes, internet.  That is correct.

I used to have the original DS.  It was a tank, definitely made of pure Nintendium.  There were some superficial scratches on it, and even though I had bought it used, it was a great machine.  I did, though, upgrade to a DS Lite about a year later.  Some people have said that the DS Lite is made of impure Nintendium, and I have started to see signs of age in my DS Lite; the top screen goes blank occasionally due to a pinched wire or something.  However, the years of play I have in that machine are a testimony to how strongly built these little Nintendo machines are; my DS Lite has lasted me four years, and any electronic device that lasts me four years deserves a medal.

Pic related.

But the entire DS series has been great.  Even though it has more variations  than some games have sequels, the DS has had a pretty spectacular run.  It paved the way for strange video games that many would never consider, like Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center: Under the Knife.  It sells better than proverbial hotcakes, and showed that you can run an entire adventure game like Zelda or Metroid on a touchscreen.  But even more prolific than the DS's successes is the third-party support that it received.  Unlike its console cousins, some of the best DS games came from non-Nintendo companies.  Sure, it also had Mario titles all over the place, but some of the aforementioned weird games and creative ones like Scribblenauts and Drawn to Life had moderate to great success on the DS.  It really is one of the better successes to come out of Nintendo.  If for some reason Nintendo ever goes out of the console market, I hope that they can stay in the handheld one.  Either way, I hope that Nintendo's handheld systems continue to do their great history justice.

30 Days of Video Games Day 9

Saddest Game Scene - Midna dying in Twilight Princess.

This sucked to play through.  Part of the draw to me was that I didn't know if she was going to be saved.  I mean, she was important, but I wasn't sure about how much so to the game.  She could have been disposable, for all I knew.  So when I was trying to save Midna, I was actually going as fast as I could.  If she died, it wouldn't have mattered that there was a game over and I get to try again; it was about the character.  I wasn't playing to not lose, I was playing to save the character.  So good job with that one, programmers at Nintendo.

This is Midna not dying.  The internet has failed me.

30 Days of Video Games Day 8

Short Article today.  Day 8 - Best soundtrack

Has to go to Super Smash Bros. Brawl.  I love all of the things they have done for the soundtrack to this game: the remixes, the straight ports, the half-and-halves... all of it was wonderful.  This was one of the games I followed through its development, looking for releases on new characters and stages.  Super Smash Bros. is one of my favorite franchises, and I am stoked that they have a new one coming to Wii U.  If they released this soundtrack on a CD set or MP3 download, I would go and get it.  Taking music from Pokemon, F-Zero, Mario, Kirby, and so many more games and adding orchestral sounds makes a happy Freddie.

30 Days of Video Games Day 7

Best Gaming Couple:

Just kidding.  Kind of.  They do make a great team.

I dunno much on this one.  I do like the idea of Mario and Peach, but only when Peach actually does something to further her getting out of the situation, like in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.  It's kind of the same with Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey; Maya's a fun character, but Phoenix carries most of the investigation.

I guess I'd go with Crono and Lucca.  Crono isn't a particularly great character, what with him hailing from the silent-protagonist tradition, but he's very offset by the awesome characters around him.  Lucca is definitely my favorite for a couple with Crono, which is saying something considering most of the teams you make end up with Crono looking like a pimp.

 A 32-bit pimp.

But Lucca was a machinist, and she complained a lot less than Marle.  She also spoke regular damn English, something Ayla could never comprehend.  Also, judging by all of the fanart and cosplay on the internet, I'm not the only one with this opinion.

This is notable because Lucca isn't naked in this picture.

30 Days of Video Games Day 6

Most Annoying Character

Before I go into the real answer, I have to give a shout out to Larry Butz from Phoenix Wright. It's fun that he's a recurring character and that none of the other characters really like him, but damn it, he can even make Phoenix want to beat the crap out of him.

But no, this award goes to someone who really deserves it.  I've been playing a lot of Tropico 3 lately, and it really is a wonderfully fun game.  It's kind of a messed-up Sim City, where you're a small island nation in the Caribbean in the middle of the Cold War.  The events are just as wrong in the campaign mode, too; I've had to choose between people's lives and taking money out of the treasury for my own personal gain.  It's a hilarious game.  But even in the first mission, you get to meet Betty Boom, the revolutionary DJ on every damn island you go to.  Her entire job is to complain about everything you do.  I have played a mode easy enough where I could just govern like a nice guy, giving tax breaks and generally keeping the peace.  She complains about EVERYTHING.

The world as seen by Betty Boom

This is a true story: in one of my games, my island was so prosperous that I issued a tax cut and I gave the islanders free housing.  I was trying to please the capitalists and the communists.  Betty Boom complained about BOTH EDICTS.  How the hell can you complain about free housing?  And whenever I build an army to defend myself from rebels (I've lost because the destroyed my palace), she condemns my trying to protect myself and my citizens.

30 Days of Video Games Day 5

Day 5 – Game character you feel you are most like.

I've thought about this one since I've been on the list, and even though whenever I think about this answer my brain immediately says, "No, no, think of someone else," I always come back to this character.  So, bleh, it has to be Dick Gumshoe.

He's the nicest guy in the world, and he believes in people to a fault.  He's often described as "this big lug," which is pretty much the way my mind refers to myself.  And his pay will always get cut because of the little errors he makes, regardless of whether or not those errors are within his own control.  

So.  Dependable (kind of). Loyal to even those that treat him poorly.  Broke like a joke. A big son of a gun.  And when he was dealt his hand in life, it turned out the dealer left the joker in his hand and now everyone has to get a new hand.  Yeeeaaaaaahhhh.  Sounds pretty accurate.

30 Days of Video Games Day 4

Arg only 25 minutes until midnight!
My Guilty Pleasure Game - Definitely Warioware for the Gamecube.

It is almost the exact same game as the Game Boy Advance version, and that's what makes it guilty.  Another reason for guilt is the fact that I sold my GBA game, which gives me the sads.  The graphics look awful when blown up on the big screen, and the fact that I already know all of the games makes me playing against new opponents very unfair.

Ew.

But the game has one very redeeming factor: it's freaking Warioware.  And that makes it wonderful.  It's weird, and  it's random in about the closest way something can actually be "random."  Warioware is and always will be one of the best stupid guilty pleasures around.

30 Days of Video Games Day 3

Day 3 - A game that is underrated.

I can't think of an underrated game without thinking of Killer 7.  It's a weird game by just about every definition: the story is very off-beat, the main characters (or character?) are strange, the supporting cast is just as odd and the gameplay isn't what anyone expected to happen on a Gamecube.

Are there 8 people in this picture? 2? 1? Twenty? I can't answer wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately, that last part is what gave Killer 7 its shaky ratings.  It's an on-rails shooter, like House of the Dead with the ability to turn around and choose routes, but little else in the way of exploration.  One of the most 'apologetic' reviews I read said that Killer 7 would have made an amazing anime, but not as good of a video game.  Half of the points he gave (I think he gave it about a 6 out of 10) were for style.  And that's pretty damn accurate: the game oozes style in all of the right ways.  In the interest of keeping this short, I have this to say about Killer 7: good characters in an offbeat but interesting story can make up for some *airquotes* bad gameplay.

I never found the gameplay bad; I thought it was kind of captivating.  Plus, you get to play as a Luchador in a suit with twin grenade launchers.

30 Days of Video Games Day 1

For anyone who doesn't know, this meme has been kind of going around the internet.  I'm not 100% on why it was made or why other people do it, but I'm writing this because video games are fascinating to me for many reasons, one of which being that popularized gaming has been around for all of a few decades.  For anyone who accidentally stumbled on this and had some compulsion to read this and therefore doesn't know me, I am less than a few decades old; two and a fifth (rounded down) to be exact.  Being almost as young as an industry is kind of weird, and it makes a totally legitimate sounding excuse to really like video games and treat them halfway seriously.


So here goes.


Day 1: My Very First Video Game


Okay, so I'm not sure what my first game is, because I started playing reeeeaaaally early.  I'm pretty sure, though, that the first thing I played video games on was the original Game Boy.  And as any red-blooded American who played games on that brick, I played the most American game around:

I remember playing this before I even knew what I was doing.  I played multiplayer Tetris with my brother before I even really recognized Mario and Luigi as the characters on the side of the screen.  

Since then, I've seen Tetris grow into probably the biggest game franchise ever.  Tetris on the Game Boy in 1989 accomplished what the Wii set out to do in 2007: it captured every gaming market around.  Do you know someone who hasn't played Tetris?  If they haven't, they're in the minority.

Pokemon Black and White: The Sequel Pokemon Needed

Let me start this off with a story:

I have been buying Pokemon games since the Red and Blue versions came out in 1998. As such, I am a part of that special generation that dragged their unsuspecting parents to the Pokemon movies (just the first two, though). Since I bought my first Pokemon game, Blue Version, I have since bought and/or acquired: Yellow, Silver, crystal, Pearl, and Platinum. Apparently, I have a pattern where I'm fooled into buying a new Pokemon game and then I just HAVE to get the third one for each set.

Now, by the time Pearl Version came out, Pokemon had taken something of a dive in its former popularity. I don't know if this is true with most peoples' experience, but after a while, people got tired of hearing that there were more and more Pokemon. Basically, it felt like we were buying the same game with more and more Pokemon, not all of which were particularly likable.

So after defending my purchase, I bought Pearl Version. I was all about Giratina; I thought it was easily one of the coolest legendary Pokemon to come out of the series. So then they said they were going to release Pokemon Platinum, where Giratina was the game's mascot. So I stated that my new purpose in life was to buy Platinum. After being mocked about me being "addicted" to Pokemon, I again defended myself. I said, "Well, this is the last Pokemon game I am going to buy."

Nope.

I too was filled with the skepticism of my friends, but when I heard that Black and White were in development and that they were going to have new features, it popped on my radar. Then I read about the new features and saw that very few of the new features were not the same things that would get changed from game to game all the damn time.

I am generally a man of my word, so I needed something really new to happen in Pokemon Black or White. What sold it to me was that there were only new Pokemon for the first part of the game. ONLY new Pokemon. Know what that means?

In caves, I would run into NO GEODUDES AND NO ZUBATS. That was my prompt to get signed the heck up for Generation V of Pokemon (Jeez, five!?)

Where an I going with all of this? Well, as I assert in the title, I feel like this is exactly what a Pokemon sequel should be. Adding animations to the normally-still sprites was a great touch for presentation, as was adding a map that doesn't look like crap. And while certain Pokemon may not seem particularly well-designed (http://www.hejibits.com/comics/gray-matter/ is pretty accurate), I found a bunch I really like. Adding Triple Battles was pretty fun, too, though it can get a little frustrating when some moves don't reach other Pokemon.

If you are on the fence about buying Pokemon Black or White, I'd suggest edging over to the side of buying the game. It's not going to change your mind if you're a loyalist to the first generation of Pokemon, but I had a blast discovering the new Pokemon and exploring a new game world. Pokemon was growing a little gray around the edges, even for a loyalist like me, but this one felt fresh enough that I didn't at all regret my purchase.

The Humble Indie Bundle

Just adding another blog into the sea of blogs talking about how awesome the Humble Indie Bundle is. It's just pretty darn awesome for both consumers and developers, and naming your own price is about the coolest thing in the world for broke college students. It's really cool for two reasons: 1)I would never have played these games if they weren't all set up in the same package, and 2) I got 5 games for 6 bucks. The fact that some of the money went to Child's Play, a charity I have been a big fan of for a long time, is pretty cool as well; now I can say I supported the charity, however weak my contribution may have been.

I have a big soapbox position about video game piracy that I kinda felt like talking about, but the point is moot; if you have an opinion on it, I'm probably not going to change it here. But things like The Humble Indie Bundle are a wonderful way to let the people who have the money barrier for games get some good games for a low price.

The money I paid was supposed to be my thanks, I suppose, but I really wanted to do what little I could to thank them more. SO thanks to all of the people who made the Humble Indie Bundle possible, from the developers to the people who put the bundle together.

What Does Scott Pilgrim Mean about Geek Culture in the Mainstream?

The whole phenomenon of Scott Pilgrim vs The World (the movie) is kind of fascinating to me, because as this Cracked article points out, movies that geeks are crazy for do not seem to do well at all. Scott Pilgrim seemed, for a while, to be the great new hope to change that pattern. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

A brief history for those who don't know about the whole thing: the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel was published in August 2004. Written by Brian Lee O' Malley, the book has received generally positive reviews, and if there is such a thing as the underground comics scene, it is one of the success stories to emerge from it. The next 5 books have a similar story (review-wise, not plot-wise), and the whole series has benefited from the movie. According to BookScan's Top 20 Graphic Novels for August 2010, all six books have jumped to the top sellers list, with Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Vol 1) at the number one position, indicating that the movie has fueled a pretty good amount of interest to the series as a whole.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World (the movie) was one of the biggest hype machines that the internet has seen in a while. If you want a physical representation of how excited people were for the movie, look no further than this picture of the Scott Pilgrim Comic-Con panel. The excitement for Scott Pilgrim drew a huge advertising budget from Universal. From billboards to posters on the sides of buses, from commercials to signs on the side of buildings; interested or not, very few people could say they were unaware of the movie. Despite all of this, the movie was poorly received in a numbers standpoint.

Box Office Mojo lists that as of 9/7/10 (the day before this article is being written), Scott Pilgrim has grossed $29,392,215 (Foreign- $9,527,630). This comes after a $60 million budget to make the movie. To put that in perspective, here are two other releases that came out on the same weekend:

The Expendables: Domestic- $94,383,026 Foreign- $90,000,000

Eat Pray Love: Domestic- $70,763,971 (Unreleased outside of the states)

Here's a movie that was released 5 days after Scott Pilgrim:

Vampires Suck: Domestic - $33,367,217 Foreign - $756,000

The Expendables, Eat Pray Love, and Scott Pilgrim all shared similar budgets of 60 million-plus dollars. Vampires Suck was made for about $20 million. I'd like to pepper in some stats for the reviews that these movies have taken. Listing these movies according to Rotten Tomatoes's rating system in order of worst movies to best, we get this result: Vampires Suck (6%), Eat Pray Love (37%), The Expendables(40%), Scott Pilgrim vs The World (81%). The percentages noted are the percentage of positive reviews the movie has received. Metacritic, a similar website, almost mirrors the results of the other search: Vampires Suck (18%), The Expendables(45%), Eat Pray Love (50%), Scott Pilgrim vs The World (69%).

It's difficult to imagine the reasons that the movie did not do as well as people thought it would. Maybe geeks aren't as big an audience that people thought it was. Maybe people are scared of new ideas, and going to the same type of movie that was released last year is comfortable. I'm not really trying to judge here. Eat Pray Love was probably a great movie if it's what you are into, and it certainly doesn't try to hide what it's about. The Expendables's cast is an action movie aficionado's dream, although I'm told it should have been executed better than it turned out. And Vampires Suck... well, you couldn't pay me to spend two hours at at theater watching Vampires Suck. Maybe if it could pay off my college loans, but certainly nothing short of that.

As my title points out, and as much as it pains me to say this, it might be that geek culture does not translate well to the mainstream. It certainly seems like it has its merits, but of course I think that: I'm a huge nerd. I get all of the little in-jokes and what the SNES sounds are. Joe America does not always get those jokes, and he might feel alienated because of it. It is safer to see a more popular movie because you know what you're in for.

But look at the good the movie has done for geeks: a good percentage of people who didn't know about the comics have been motivated to buy them. The movie itself is sure to be a cult classic, and as director Kevin Smith says, the movie's success isn't about the money, it's about the movie itself. Also, Micheal Cera finally got to fight in a movie instead of being a wimp, so that was nice. I know what little money I have to spare on such things is going to a Special Edition Scott Pilgrim DVD, and maybe the comics if I have extra spare money. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game is another huge success story. A $10 game that turned out to be anything but shovelware, it has received hugely positive reviews (Metacritic shows a rating of 77 as of 9/8/10). It even gave pixel artist Paul Robertson a job as lead animator for a video game, something which I personally have been waiting for since I saw Kings of Power 4 billion%.

A box office success or not, Scott Pilgrim rocked the world. It could be that geekiness is best left to live in the world of the geek, but I am personally ecstatic that this project had such an impact on the geek world. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's like they say: trying to please everybody is sure to result in a mediocre product that almost no one will enjoy. This one's for the nerds, I guess, and I for one am glad to be a member of that group.