Gaming’s underground: an indie games primer

Like most commercial artforms, video games have a vibrant community that exists outside the commercial realm. People are making games that are less influenced by the marketability of the graphics, the concept, and the gameplay conventions—and in many cases they are not influenced at all by these factors. This gives developers and artists a blank canvas to create games that you could never find on the shelf at...

Three great gaming blogs (two new to me)

Awesome gaming blogs are coming out of the woodwork. I have found two excellent blogs in the past week that were not at all on my radar before. The first is Play This Thing! That’s their exclamation, not mine, but it is well-deserved nonetheless. The blog covers games that are otherwise starving for coverage. They cover indie games of all kinds including downloadable games, Flash games, and even board games...

City Rain: Awesome twist on city building

IndieGames.com spills the beans on City Rain—a cross between a city-building sim and a falling block game. It sounds to me like just the twist to bring new life into this sub-genre that has remained virtually unchanged since the release of the original SimCity. A Flash demo is available now, and the full game is set for release soon on Direct2Drive. I must say the music is wonderfully relaxing. City Rain Available...

The Legend of Princess

The IndieGames.com blog highlights a new indie release entitled The Legend of Princess. Unfortunately, I can’t fire it up right now because the  Windows partition on my Macbook Pro died a horrible death and will no longer boot or mount. The video looks really cool. It looks  little like a 2D Castlevania with more colorful sprites. The developer describes it as a “one-level arcade interpretation of...