Indie Games

Do you want to smash the cultural hegemony of big game companies and end the dominance of big money corporations over your console? Me, neither! (And I don't even know what "hegemony" means!) But you should vote on the "Audience Awards" for the the 2009 Independent Games Festival, anyway. All the finalists for the award have qualified by being a Main Competition finalist and submitting a playable public demo of their game. The 15 finalists were picked out of 226 entries by an "esteemed panel of industry judges." In short: These are the best indie games of the year.

The winner, however, is decided by you, the gamer.  Your mission: Visit the site. Download each game you're interested in and when you're done, place your vote here.

Personally, I like The Graveyard. In no way, am I trying to sway your vote toward this enigmatic meditation on the frangible nature of human life.

Just like the indie movie scene offers an alternative to Hollywood, the independent game scene offers an alternative to anyone who's burnt out on the offerings of the "mainstream" gaming world. Indie games are quirky, personal, innovative and usually have loftier ambitions than selling a lot of copies. But no matter how well intentioned their creators may be, most indie games -- like most low budget movies -- are kind of sucky. That's where the Independent Games Festival comes in. For the past 11 years, the Festival has celebrated the best in independent games by giving out coveted awards. The 2009 Independent Games Festival Finalists are all good enough for the IGF seal of approval, and they are as follows:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

• Blueberry Garden
• CarneyVale Showtime
• Dyson
• Night Game
• Osmos

Excellence in Visual Art:

• Cletus Clay
• FEIST
• Machinarium
• PixelJunk Eden
• Zeno Clash

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Still waiting on that terabyte drive to come in the mail? Tired of loading screens to get to your zombie apocalypse paradise?

Enter game programmer Markus Persson with Left 4k Dead, his 2009 entry for the Java 4k Competition. Challenged with the task of creating a game under 4 kilobytes in size, Persson has created a top-down, minimalistic version of the Valve co-op zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. You can check it out for yourself here.

Mr. Persson... well done, sir.

More news to upset the music industry..

Who would've thought that someone would come up with a way to make money off of unwanted MP3s?

A start-up site called Bopaboo lets users set up their own mini store to upload music to sell for a profit.

The only type of songs you won't be allowed to sell are ones that are Digital Rights Management (DRM). So if you got a song off of iTunes, you can't sell it on Bopaboo, unless it was purchased off their iTunes Plus program.

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Game developers and publishers need to find ways to stimulate their revenue by boosting sales of new games.

To do that, they're trying to simultaneously figure out ways to dissuade gamers from purchasing used games.

Mike Capps from Epic talks about fighting the secondhand market, "I've talked to some developers who are saying 'If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay $20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free'."

Whereas the world's largest video game and entertainment software retailer, GameStop, recognizes that used game sales have been a crucial component in their successful business model.

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Polarity is a Carnegie Mellon developed game that jumps into the world of magnetism and how you can make it work for you. You'll make choices about the strength and direction of your own magnetism as you navigate your way through a 2-D side-scrolling, metallic universe.

Polarity was also a Top Ten pick at the most recent Penny Arcade Expo, so, you know, it's good and stuff.

Play Polarity

More Indie Games

Kevin lets us know about a great new game called Fantastic Contraption and it's all about generating your own little engineering solutions to the simple problem of getting a ball in a box. It will either be incredibly frustrating or a fun challenge, depending on your personality.

Remember, patience is a virtue.

Play Fantastic Contraption

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We’re heading back from the Penny Arcade Expo and we’ve got a lot of great gaming content coming your way. Be sure to tune into X-Play at 8PM ET this week for their amazing coverage straight from the Floor of PAX 2008.

As for G4tv.com, we’ll be bringing you hands-on impressions for huge titles like Resistance 2, StarCraft II, and Guitar Hero: World Tour. We’ll also have updated impressions on games like Dead Space, Far Cry 2, and more.

As always, we’ll be rolling some great interviews on titles like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Dead Space, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift, The Conduit and an update on what the boys at Bungie are up to (hint: it’s not all Halo) and much, much more.

We’ve got PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, DS, and Wii coverage straight from the biggest public gaming show in the US.

You should have been there, but you weren’t. That’s why we’re here.

Shred Nebula is an Asteroids-inspired shooter, created by CrunchTime Games, which is a small studio made up of CEO James Goddard and small group of first time developers (many of whom are still students). Goddard, who cut his teeth on the Street Fighter franchise, was kind enough to speak with us about his studios first title. Shred Nebula is scheduled for release for Xbox Live Arcade on September 3rd, 2008.

For more on Shred Nebula and CrunchTime Games, be sure to check out X-Play, Tonight @ 8PM ET!

Check out some new photos from the floor of the 2008 Leipzig Games Convention.

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Kevin takes us back to a happier, hippier time when music had colors, man. Music Catch is a deceptively simple game where music notes tumble on to the screen and your job is to catch the yellow ones while avoiding the red ones. The best part is when you do well, you get rewarded with pop-ups like "Fabulous!" and "Splendid!" Hey, it's free, right?

Play Music Catch

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Let's say you're in one hell of a dogfight and the fate of the world rests on your ability to lure one heat-seeking missile into a head-on collision with another heat-seeking missile. Can you do it? Sure, you might be able to wing it, but wouldn't you rather have some practice? Well, that's why Kevin Pereira is here with Missile Matador. Check out the video and grab the game for yourself.

Tony Krvaric, head of San Diego’s GOP Committee, is a co-founding member of a computer piracy group that began in 1987.

The group, Fairlight, was one of the biggest gaming warez groups on the scene, but was eventually busted in 2004. Krvaric had left the group officially in 1994.

In an e-mail response to other Republican officials, Krvaric said:

"Apparently there’s a hit piece floating around on me, “exposing” my wild high school, teenage years where I was in a computer club where we swapped Commodore 64 games (similar to how kids swap mp3 music files these days). This was in the 80’s, on a computer that’s long since defunct!"

What should you take away from all of this? When your parents tell you to stop spending all that time on the computer playing games and hacking, you just say, "One day I could be the leader of the GOP Committee in San Diego. Also, I'd have a weird name."

GamePolitics: San Diego Republican Boss is Former Game Piracy Ringleader

As part of its one-year anniversary effort to expand its “____ or Die” franchise, Funny or Die will add a videogame site to its roster over the next six weeks.

Glover kept mum on most details of the new video game site, but did spill a few tidbits. “The videogame site will not be a game-playing site,” said CEO Dick Glover. “If we became a game-playing site, that actually limits who we could partner with, who we could align with, and advertisers we could get. We want to do a very broad-based site. Whether you’re my age and playing Pac-Man is your idea of a video game, or you’re younger and at the highest levels of Halo 3, or you’re in a retirement home, we’re going to have something for you on this site.”

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The cutest li'l hack n' slash Greek adventure is the indie game Achilles, and you're going to feel like quite the heel if you don't play it. Get it? Heel? Achilles? We slay ourselves, but you'll be slaying soldiers in this indie game.