I hardly get time to get my consoles out because of uni, so I play waaaay too many of these games. Here are a few of the games (click titles for links), and you should be able to find videos of pretty much all of them on youtube:

free games:

-Cave Story is easily in my top 3 games of 2005. Resi 4, DMC3 and Killer7 came out in 2005. I don't need to say anything else really

-Inyou Douji Monogatari is a puzzle/platformer by MIR, a Japanese Ikaruga player. It's easy to pick up and play, but gets ridiculously hard later on. There are a couple of videos of it on my youtube.

-Guardian of Paradise is a clever Zelda-like game, with a strong emphasis on dungeons and puzzles as opposed to RPG elements.

-La-Mulana is really hard to get into, but amazing once you do. You explore tombs and hit things with whips and die a lot. READ THE MANUAL FIRST - it explains how you should go about playing the game as there are lots of ways you can make puzzles permanently impossible to solve and so on.

Omega has made loads of great games, such as:
-Every Extend - I assume the PSP remake doesn't have any secret speedcore bosses, so play the original instead
-Dan Da Dan - An easy shooter with vague puzzle elements. It's sort of relaxing for some reason.

games that cost money (a lot of them have free demos, and unless they're out of print the full games should be pretty cheap from Palet Mail or Himeya):

Anything by Platine Dispositif, especially:
-Hitogata Happa - A ridiculously hard shmup with a kamikaze play mechanic
-Bunny Must Die - A metroidvania with parrying
-Dicing Knight for the WonderSwan, although this is probably pretty rare.

Anything by Twilight Frontier, especially:
-Megamari - AMAZING danmaku Mega Man 2 homage starring Touhou characters
-Immaterial and Missing Power - Weird projectile-heavy fighter starring Touhou characters
-Eternal Fighter Zero - Fighter starring characters from various anime series'
-Higurashi Daybreak - Gundam-like game with online multiplayer and characters from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.

Any of the Touhou games. Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night are standard vertical shooters apart from the scoring systems, Phantasmagoria of Flower View is like Twinkle Star Sprites with 100x more bullets, and Shoot The Bullet (no website/demo, but you can still buy it) involves dodging bosses' bullets while trying to get close to them and take photos.

French-Bread are awesome too - they've made:
-Ragnarok Battle Offline - basically Guardian Heroes. Here's a combo video.
-Melty Blood - a great fighting game where everyone moves so fast that zoning goes completely out the window and you basically fly around trying to poke each other to get an opening for a 20-hit combo. It's actually a bit deeper than I'm implying and the most recent version (Act Cadenza ver. B) has been released on Naomi and PS2.

-Samidare is one of the most addictive games I've ever played. It's a vertical shooter with a rechargable shield and amen breaks all over the soundtrack. Here's a youtube video of the extra stage - it has to be seen to be believed.

-Finally, Mawaru Maidsan wo Nemigi is like Wario Ware but with minigames based on other doujin games instead of Nintendo titles.

I can't believe I just typed that much text. Anything to put off starting this programming coursework, I guess..

Thanks Mr Peckerston (sos for getting your name wrong in the original post)

I'm not so interested in stuff that's a homage to a mainstream game, but the more quirky and original stuff sounds like WIN

Part of me wishes I could program and program well. I'm too lazy to get off my arse and do something about it though. I probably need some sort of massive life change to refocus my mind and strengthen my resolve.

'Indie' gaming, surely?

I thought it was going to be a thread about everyone's favourite adventurer

SHITE!

Can't program and certainly can't spell BALLS! XD

If 'someone' can be arsed could they fix the title please.

its wuvvably wrong.

I thought it was a thread about Henry Jones' dog.

I'm gonna check out some of those games mentioned above.

Sometimes with Indie games, you have to scrape past the presentation naiivity to get to the game, which can be somewhat taxing in itself.

Mola Ram will be pleased!

- Thats what the arcade game said when you died...
______________________________________________________________________________
When's 'Wii Carlton' coming out?

Says the man who wanted a vector graphics version of Outrun2 . Seriously if it's a blank screen with just one sprite, as long as the gameplay is good, I don't really care what it looks like.

No problem, and don't worry about getting the name wrong.

I know I described half the games there as "_______ with bullet hell", but the stage/system design often really sets them apart from the originals. Watch these videos of Megamari and Bunny Must Die

I wish I could program well too - I'm getting to the end of my first year at Imperial so I'm not exactly bad, but I'm not quite good enough to make Disabled Cyborg Adventures yet

we'll you're at least one year closer than me.

It's frustrating, because I have ideas for games that I write down, but I can't realise those games even in a conceptual form. I'm sure there are many who share this burden of creativity without skill

Mad's making a game is simple these days go install Firefox 2 if you haven't upgraded. Then learn some basic "Canvas" it'll reinvent how people do stuff on the web, as it's still in its baby phase so there's only a few commands.

The easiest way to think of it is as "open gl for the web browser".

demo : http://developer.mozilla.org/samples/raycaster/RayCaster.html

Very wolfenstein 3d, but still proves what can be done very simply and puts stuff out to the widest audience.

Or maybe some flash programming could be for you?

I had the craziest idea for a shmup a couple of nights ago but then i fell asleep and when I woke up I forgot it's "hook".

I've actually been contemplating moving away from web developement to see if I can become a game producer. But I'm hoping everyone goes through a phase of hating their job and wanting to do something fun. Or maybe someone in the industry telling me it's as poo as what I'm doing now so it's pointless moving.
_____________________

Hehe you need to talk to Cacky. He'll put you straight. I certainly don't covet a job in the 'industry' If I was to do it I certainly wouldn't be operating within the existing games development, publication, distribution infrastructure. What we need is something like www.magnatune.com but for games. Essentially slicing out the middle man and moving to digital distribution, whereby the artist gets an equitable slice of the profits. Steam is close to this, but its not quite there yet. Ideally you'd shift it all to the browser and that opens up other platforms like PDA's and mobiles, plus Steam is really just publishing without the plastic DVD boxes.

Now you see this is where stuff like browser based gaming could come to the fore as it's essentially the same as the magnatune listen before you buy concept.

An online digitally distributed indy [sic] games label. Hey judging by my current run of ideas someone will have done this in 1995

I think you need proper quality control. A Seal of Quality. Because alot of homebrew stuff is just bobbins... and the stuff bubbling into semi-commercial realms is also bobbins.

Basically we need a council of people who decree if a game is tha don or not. Unless experimentation and finding the "one" is where its at?

Wait, wasn't that what reviews were meant for. Darn.

They're worthless now, these plebs wouldnt know a good game if it hit them. You need a Seal of Quality you can trust -

Yeah, the main problem seems to be that there's so much crap out there and no way of telling what's good. A few places like Manifesto Games have tried to do the whole 'Indie Game Label' thing, but they NEVER seem to get a single Japanese-developed game so they end up trying to sell a load of sub-XBLA/Steam shite. So the idea's been attempted before, but the position's still open for you to move in and make millions

And seeing as I didn't mention a single western game in that first post, here's a few decent free ones:

Hero
Lyle in Cube Sector
Knytt
Within a Deep Forest

Hmm I can see the problem.

For reference here's the magnatune mission

It's an evolution on from the shareware model, which is why it seems like a good idea. They don't 'sign' any old guff either. The stuff on there is actually pretty darn good and certainly professional, but not mainstream. Whether it's turning over any business is anyones guess.

The recipe for success then might be the following:

1. Develop tech to allow games to be demo'd within the browser without the need for porting or specific demo code. This is critical as it's the USP and what could deliver step 2.

2. Sign good, no very good games and talented indie devs up to produce content. Subject to quality checks. The sell is marrying their content with the immediate demo and digital distribution/purchasing tech developed in 1. Possibly budle this with promotional packages and fiscal management solutions. Again a we are not evil approach and equitable split of income is key

3. Establish small experimental in-house dev team to maintain and develop (1), but also to push out fresh new game concepts and keep a reasonable release schedule going.

4. Take over the world.

I hadn't heard of magnatune before this thread, so thanks for the description. It sounds like a great site, and I'd kill for someone to make a games equivalent..

As for step 1 you could just igLoader, although the prices can be a bit steep.

The rest of the plan sounds pretty much perfect as long as you can find enough great games to sell, and I wish someone would get around to actually implementing it

Simple option is for "Open Senses" to put on the hat of judgement and award indie games approval and give them a sticker.... making sure we stand for truth, justice and the gaming way. And give a sticker out once every 4 years or soemthing....

That sounds like the ideal PC game purchasing rate to me

That's about my current rate too.

The last PC game I purchased (in a box) was Half Life 2. Since then I've Steamed Rag Doll Kung Fu (Oh dear) and Sin Episodes (which I never played as my windows install went on the wonk).

There's just something inherently nasty about the Steam way of doing things that I can't quite put my finger on. It's new and yet somehow feels like it's still very much in the old model of how games should be sold.

If I was doing this I wouldn't limit myself to just PC stuff either. The Magnatune model could be as easily applied to DC and GBA games which could be physically shipped out on disk and cart. Hell I even purchased a copy of QUAK the other day on GBA, which was delivered on a little GBA flash cart.

The risk is going to be finding enough quality stuff that people are happy to pay for. You wouldn't want a load of Last Hope style slightly broken, but well intentioned stuff, you'd want proper games built around a killer concept.

I just found a few hours' footage of a Melty Blood tournament on Youtube, although it's from an old version of the game so there are a couple of infinites. If any of you don't think an indie game circle could make a fighting game that holds up to high-level play, you have to watch the last round of this match :jawdrop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp0xTdyd_-M

I so thought he was going to make a come back. Some insane blocking skills going on there.

He must have been hammering buttons like mad to survive the combo where the other guy poured an entire super meter into him, and I've got no idea how he pulled off that heat activation (which freezes the clock and recovers health) with 3 seconds left without it being blocked. If he got a single hit in after that he would have won

Streets of Rage Remake then.

Surprisingly good. It's been a long time since I played the original, so I can't really compare and contrast, but honestly SORR feels right. All the characters are there and there's a choice of combo system too. It looks like a streets of rage game. It sounds like a streets of rage game and it darn well plays like a streets of rage game. Certainly worth a look.

Chalk is a new free game by Joakim Sandberg, and it's great. It's got S-ranks and chaining and great level design and so on, and its mouse/keyboard controls are perfect so you don't have to buy a PC gamepad adapter. Tablet PC owners seem to be praising it too, so I guess it could work well as a DS game.

Here's the site:

http://www.konjak.org/chalk.htm

And here's me S-ranking the main game (follow the video responses to watch the later levels):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4jbPd30wHQ

Oh that's lovely. I love the chalk sound effects, absolutely spot on . Some nice 'freestylin' by you in that vid to

Bike Bandits -

This game is wicked!!!! XD - it's a really nice horizontal shoot em up.

Vid;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBIxBWnDMeI

There's a trial version here;
http://mirror.fuzzy2.com/french/

________________________________

That looks amazing! For some reason I never got round to buying that game, even though I love Melty Blood and Ragnarok Battle Offline (both in my big post further up) and Lunaria (link a bit further down the post) by the same company. I'll have to request a copy from paletweb.com or buy it from himeyashop.com the next time I order a bunch of games.

anyway. Lunaria is a free game, it's by French-Bread and/or Hot Pulse (have those 2 groups merged? I don't get it..), and it's basically a horizontal-scrolling Star Soldier caravan mode. It's the big link on this page, and you can unpack .lzh files with 7zip or winrar or whatever:

http://www13.plala.or.jp/french/hot_index.htm

video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Z3T-7AE28

Banana Nababa is a series of great boss fights in the style of pretty much any platform shooter for the NES or PC-Engine. Follow the link below and you can download it for free or see videos of me completing it without taking any damage

http://tigsource.com/articles/2007/08/12/banana-nanaba

PHOENIX FROM THE FLAMES!! XD

Sorry for bumping this old thread but I just wanted to go WARRRGHHH!!! somewhere since I've only just got into Cave Story. Jesus, it's taken me long enough. >_<
*slaps wrists*

Man this game is so awesum my head nearly popped from all the awesumitude. The music is wub and it looks... fantastic. 0_0 Why the fuck didn't I play this earlier?! Forgive me Mr Peckerston.
I'm enjoying it so much I haven't even touched the massive piles of games I've been reserving for the weekends. Now, I'm just considering whether I should purchase a gamepad for this? I'm a bit shit with keyboard controls, see.

*goes back to game........

Installing the Linux port now... This sounds too good to miss, I know Mr P has been singing the praises of this one for a while, so I'm highly expectant

Oh it's brilliant! I'm just fixing up my pad for it now. I got pretty far using the keypads, but it's picking up a bit now. I'd reached this large boss in the Sand Zone last night. Can't wait to get back to it. ^_^

Edit: and regarding a pad, I was unaware I could just use a 360 pad with the usb connection. It's installing now though, so I shall have to take this logitec pad back to Argos now...>_<

OK This is Bloody good Ya! It's taking me back whilst still being totally fresh

Hmm. The Save game feature doesn't seem to work in Linux, me smells a permissions problem. This will need some fiddling.

The save file is Profile.dat, in the game's main folder. At least that's what it is in the Windows version. Hopefully you'll just need to chmod it, but I've never tried playing it in Linux.

And I'm glad you guys like it; it's one of my favourite games ever! Just wait until you get to the
later stages and you find strong hints at ways to make your next playthrough very different, things get ridiculously epic to say it's such a short game.

Yay! I'm off for 2 days straight so I'm gonna be playing this ALL DAY tomorrow. I was getting grief from Monster X last night. Finally managed it with mixed use of machine and bubble gun.
Thought I had a problem with a character not appearing but that's sorted now. I'm loving this so much I'm gonna spend some time on the weekend doing some fanart.

Game is

Thanks working now I just created my own Profile.dat and gave everyone read/write permissions.

Loving Cave Story. It's a bit bloody addictive! Where did games like this go eh? I could write half a page of wub on the bubble gun alone.

what's more upsetting is how a game with retro graphics and a fusion of elements from the classics can captivate me more than pretty much anything I've played in the last six months or so. It's like I'm back in the 80s playing Wardner again and loving every moment of it.

Oh and that music is going round and round in my head already

You HAVE to download these piano covers of the music:
http://e-moe.net/~pripas/cave/cave.html#music

And this:
http://snuffles.shii.org/stuff/toroko.mp3

Anyway, I just saw a video of the latest trial version of Es. It looks a lot better than the alpha version did, and everyone is comparing it to Gunvalkyrie and ZoE but I wouldn't know because I haven't played them. But the main reason I care about is is that it's 3D and it looks incredibly well-made; a couple of years ago there wasn't a single 3D doujin game worth playing, but they've been getting better at a ridiculous rate. I love platformers and shmups as much as everyone else, but I can't wait until an unknown group of students makes the next God Hand/Super Monkey Ball/insert fun 3D game here

http://arthearts.net/9th-night/Es/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHBdAz62DNU

various 3D doujin games:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5RR7kBphzE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsYQA0KBcrM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AELMPhNQ1hE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kF3HkGoxkQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbAWcErfuO4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgATtXW__1s (hahahaha)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3O-RsrtQk (HAHAHAHA)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q639Amln4MY
http://egs-soft.info/product/gunners_heart/gh_demo.wmv

After watching those vids I know exactly what you mean! All really good stuff there, it's that Ether Vapor that totally blows my mind though - that looks insanely good fun. I'm tired of the Fisher Price gaming we get these days, it's brilliant to see stuff so fresh.

________________________________

- "Your hair looks like shit."

That's the kicker isn't it.

With Indy gaming you get a singular vision. With the bulk of commercial games it's design by focus group.

need to dl those Cave Story tunes. I stuck another hour or so into it this weekend. I totally cocked up the flooded section and missed a load of secrets . Also I'm feeling that I shouldn't have traded the Polstar Gun for the Machine Gun >_< BALLS!

Doing the second Egg Corridor next.

Yeah, that's the thing. Even if a committee somehow came up with the design of one of these indie games, I can't see a publisher approving it either because you can complete it in under 5 minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Epn5p19Hv8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DAi3uLkh7A

The focus group of 10 year olds can't figure out the puzzles:
http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=193
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odQ3HaasXNk

Or about a million different reasons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLRVLs5MqU

And even if it got past the concept stage, it'd get terrible review scores unless they added a co-op story mode, normal mapping, unlockables and achievements.

Anyway, back to Cave Story. The 2004 'music' link on Pixel's page is a little program that plays the soundtrack, and the one from 2002 plays old versions of the music including a bunch of tracks that weren't in the final release:
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/storehouse.html

(also, the '2007' game link is an awesome Star Soldier-like game he made)

You can get the current/beta soundtracks as mp3 too:
http://doukutsu.rdy.jp/stored/up0031.zip
http://doukutsu.rdy.jp/stored/up0129.zip

And I love the machine gun; at lv3 it makes a better jetpack than the Booster v0.8! But you might want to keep your polar star next time to see what happens

Yeah, I'd picked up on the machine gun flying. That's pure magic

That article you linked to is so spot-on on so many levels!

I especially loved;

Brilliant!

This is exactly how I feel about gaming these days, the devs are so terrified of hurting these little shit's feelings that we have to put up with utter garbage to keep them happy. Every so often something comes along which truly takes me to that special place, but these games are always slammed by the dickhead massive out there for being too hard.

Most of the time I don't even know why I bother, infact with this gig I'm doing writing guides; games have become simply "a job" - I don't play for enjoyment (even in this example my stuff is MASSIVELY cut down from what was originally written). Even the devs themselves don't seem to have any faith in their products - look at Soul Calibur 4; Namco have so little faith in the merit of their own brand they've stuck fucking Star Wars characters on the packaging and shoehorned them into the game (which is going to be just as much of a horrible broken mess as the last one)...

________________________________

- "Your hair looks like shit."

Oh WOW! Cheers for all these links Mr P! ^_^

I was gonna DL the soundtrack the other day but forgot. >_< What's that Remix Project like?
Gonna hold onto my Polar Star this time. Also, bring it on Ma Pignon!! XD

Don't get me started on why so many kids/reviewers hate hard games! The worst thing is that it's all in their heads, and most of them would be able to complete God Hand etc if they used their heads and put some time into it.

I'm a mid-skill league-level scout on Team Fortress 2, and I play a lot of matches:

http://wotr.wherestheflag.org/index.php?file=Wars&tid=9

You can see from those results that sometimes we win easily, and sometimes the opposing team steamrolls us over and over again for AN ENTIRE HOUR (most matches are time-based). It can be frustrating as hell, especially if you're only losing because one of your teammates is having an off day. But it's extremely rare to come across anyone who complains, even if a guy like me rips through half their team, taunts in their last guy's face (through bullet-proof glass), captures their final control point and wins the match:

http://media.putfile.com/tf2-10 (I recorded that tonight and I had to find an excuse to post it )

Not only that, TF2 is by far the most fair and forgiving FPS I've ever played; just go and watch any UT3/Warsow/Painkiller/Q3 match and you'll see whoever gets the first kill nearly always wins the match because they can keep grabbing all the powerful weapons/armour the moment they spawn:

http://www.quadv.com/content/view/46/61/
on a side note, watch this match if you're interested in TF2:
http://www.quadv.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&vs=93e097e319c2db13edf06f45c4dff4f741394c0d&Itemid=61

In Counter-Strike, probably the most popular competitive online game ever, you can die in a split-second because you were looking the wrong way at the wrong time and someone headshotted you from half a mile away. And every time that happens, you have to wait 2 minutes for the next round to start before you can carry on playing. Yet hundreds of thousands of the same kids who these focus groups target play it for thousands of hours each, and there are a staggering number of amazing players out there.

It's just that, for whatever reason, even though they're happy getting headshotted over and over again, they've have been conditioned to think that 'losing' in a single-player game is unacceptable. I used to think it was an ego thing and these guys aren't mature enough to accept that a computer beat them at something, but Jonathan Blow ranted about the subject in an interview and he reckons it's just because everyone's so used to easy games:

http://www.gamehelper.com/magazine/features/jonathan-blow-says-fuck-that

Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. The same people who pan games for being too hard often spend hundreds of hours playing competitive online games with steeper learning curves, worse design, and far less indication of how to improve when you lose, and they have loads of fun doing so. But I'm not sure what you can do to make them see it that way

OTOME CRISIS aka Viewtiful Joe VS mode is being released in 2 weeks!

If you like your fighting games with simple-but-deep systems (a la Smash Bros) and huge Red Hot Kick combos then read this article and watch the embedded youtube clips:

http://blog.seiha.org/?p=714

Apparently it's part of the 'Savior' series, but I hadn't heard of it so this came completely out of nowhere for me

You Have To Burn The Rope is a hilarious commentary on how easy modern games are. It's a flash game that only takes a few minutes to complete, so play it:

http://www.mazapan.se/games/BurnTheRope.php

If you get stuck, here's a walkthrough and a video walkthrough:

http://www.indiefaqs.com/index.php/YouHaveToBurnTheRopeWalkthrough
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSmuaDvnCWI

LOL

Try right clicking on the flash game too.