An underrated area of Xbox Live, the Indie Games section is full of proper obscure, DIY titles that wouldn’t have made it onto a major console in the past.
Maybe Im still annoyed that I cant play Journey any time soon, or maybe I just couldnt find any arty gaming news in time to write this column, but this week we are taking a look at the Xboxs Indie Games selection. An underrated area of Xbox Live, the Indie Games section is full of proper obscure, DIY titles that wouldnt have made it onto a major console in the past. These are the polished and well developed games like Braid or Limbo, but those guys are in the Xbox Live Arcade area. Although there are some big titles that could be labeled as Indie games, Xbox Lives Indie games or (XBLIG for the cool kids that say it so often they have to abbreviate it) are really underground, with titles like I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1, Attack Of The Zombie Horde or The $1 Zombie Game. Oh, hang on, there are games that arent about zombies too, I presume.
XBLIG has a very Indie or underground feel, with all of the games being created by users or very small developers, usually made up of one or two people. Games are created by the community for very low cost through a Microsoft development app. This low pressure environment is a great breeding ground for would-be-developers to try out their craft and get their games out into the world. Without this system, we wouldnt have such Indie classics like Zombie Invasion, Zombie Turkey Outbreak or Yet Another Zombie Defense. Oh, no there must some non-zombie games too, I hope. It used to be call Xbox Live Community Games, but Microsoft changed the name to make it sound less lame. Personally, I didnt find the XBLIG for a while, it wasnt until I started looking through the menus to see what else my Xbox could do when I came across this treasure chest of games like Zombie Estate, Zombie Death Car or I, Zombie. Ok, there are a lot of zombie games. If youre looking to take a walk into the wonderful world of XBLIG, I would certainly recommend it as all the games have free demos. All you need to do is navigate your way through those coloured blocks on Xboxs interface (which we are not allowed to call windows for some reason). Anyway, if you are going to check them out there are a few that you should start with, and why not? They are cheap! Soulcaster, BloodyCheckers, Dead Pixels, Avatar Legends and Cursed Loot are some great RPGs. There are loads of options for the action adventure fan; Miner Dig Deep, LaserCat, Wizorb and SpeedRunner HD. CastleMiner is a block-based sandbox game similar to Minecraft which had a sequel by the name of CastleMiner Z. The sequel was very much the same game but had Zombies in it. Oh god, all the Indie games are about zombies. What the world has come to? I cant be bothered anymore.
