59 - Public Service Announcement

The latest Xbox Live “Deal of the Week” (more like Deal of the Weak, am I right! I’ll be here all week!) discounts the Xbox Avatar Gears of War COG Armour to a incredible 240 points, and the Helmet to an unbelievable 80 points!

If you find joy and solace in spending real money on superficial junk for a fake man who lives in your TV, please head straight to your Xbox 360 and purchase this content now. Don’t let me stop you. Hey, the complete COG set will set you back £2.72. Not a huge amount - you can’t buy much from McDonalds for that.

But what you can buy are Xbox Live Indie Games.

I’m doing an investigation of these cool homebrew projects so they’re on my mind at the moment. Sure there are massage games and plenty of garbage in there, but do a little digging and you’ll find tonnes of awesomely inventive and high quality games that will give you much more enjoyment than a fake hat with a brand name plastered on it. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed so far:

The Arkedo Series features three incredibly beautiful games designed by the team behind Big Bang Mini (a cool DS shooter all about fireworks). 01 JUMP! (240 points), which looks and sounds like an Amiga game on acid, is a super cool little platformer that mixes traditional block-jumping with time-management bomb disposal. 03 PIXEL! (240 Points) is another platformer, but this one looks like a Tamagotchi projected onto a giant neon bulb - you can see that one pictured above. Doesn’t it look better than a whole bunch of XBLA games?

I Maed a Gam3 w1th Z0mb1es!!!1 (80 Points) is like Geometry Wars on a shoestring budget. Up to four players fend off against zombies, giant green blobs and insane strobe lights in this mental twin stick shooter. The real kicker is the background music, where designer James Silva belts out the line “I made a game with zombies in it” until his voice goes hoarse. Worth the 70p for that alone.

Two great shmups, a genre that both died and was resurrected this generation (with next gen graphics making 2D side scrolling shooters a dormant genre, but cheap digital downloads being a perfect home for them), are Leave Home (240 points) and Shoot 1UP (80 points). Another random game that I enjoyed, but can’t see myself actually buying, is Along Came a Spider (400 points), a platformer with a bungee-jumping mechanic straight out of Worms.

I’m still planning to check out many more games on the system as I write the article, and I’ll let you know what I find.