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This February is proving to be a fascinating month for non-traditional development and funding paths in game design. While Double Fine's Kickstarter proposal has been in the news, indie title Dear Esther has been making small waves of its own. More »
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Dear Esther is a terrible video game. More »
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There's been article after article about how gaming culture (and perhaps all of nerd culture) is typically and fundamentally a straight, white, cis-male dominated scene. However you look at it, it's hard to deny the fact that the character landscape in video games is a little monochromatic. More »
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There's retiring old video game characters by not using them any more, and then there's retiring old video game characters by building little models of them and destroying them. More »
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Black Mesa is an independent remake of the original Half-Life that's been in development since the end of the First World War. It hasn't been seen for years. Most people now assume the remake, like Half-Life 3 itself, is an apparition. A mirage. More »
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Polytron's Fez, a world-shifting indie platformer that's been coming to Xbox Live Arcade longer than some of you have been alive, might actually be out soon. Why? It's been rated by the ESRB. More »
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I'm not normally one to get that excited over iOS games, especially ones in development, but then Oceanhorn isn't like most other iOS games, because most iOS games aren't like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. More »
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Considering the source, it's an unlikely statement. When Oregon was marching to a No. 1 ranking and a berth in the national championship game in 2010, Richard Hofmeier was running an art gallery in Eugene's funky Whiteaker neighborhood. Where nearly every video game treats all-star status and on-field glory as the player's birthright, Hofmeier built a game to put you in the shoes of a guy selling hot dogs, far away from any stadium lights. More »
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Booted off Kickstarter for who-knows-why, Oak-U-Tron 201X, the rolling, battery-powered arcade cabinet meant to provide R&R to Occupy Oakland's weary soldiers, is nonetheless complete. It's scheduled to roll out during the Move-In March planned for ... oh, how about nowish? Assuming Oak-U-Tron survives the invasion of Occupy Oakland's new digs, people can "play the wonderful 50-player co-op game that Auntie Pixelante made just for this event!" More »
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Dark Reign Redux, a remake of 1997's Dark Reign: The Future of War, a real-time strategy game for PC, just published on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel yesterday, without Activision so much as stapling a flyer to a telephone pole or putting up a card on a café barter board for its marketing. More »
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Well, that didn't take long. The foaming outrage over the arrest of Kim Dotcom and the shutdown of his MegaUpload empire needed all of five days to result in this, MegaUP: Upload If You Can, a protest title released Wednesday on Xbox Live's Indie Games service. Proceeds from the sale of the game (after Microsoft takes its cut) benefit its maker. Kim would be so proud. More »
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The Other Brothers is an upcoming game, aimed initially at the iPhone, that's "a pixelated family fun adventure" featuring stuff like "running, jumping, collecting, racing against the clock..." More »
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If your typical San Francisco convention-goer is cruising for anything when he's in town, he's probably up in the Tenderloin scouting hookers. Not Fork Parker. The CEO spokesmascot for Devolver Digital (publishers of Serious Sam) will be trawling SoMa outside the Moscone Center in that there bus, listening to new pitches for the next great indie game. More »
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Call him a sell-out. Call him a suit. Call him too mainstream. It doesn't change the fact that Mario was jumping and saving imperiled females before it was cool. More »
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The Oakland branch of the Occupy movement is moving off the streets and into an abandoned building later this week. In doing so, they get facilities like kitchens, meeting rooms, etc. All that's missing is an arcade machine. More »
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The last time we say indie PC game Cube World, it looked interesting. Fast forward six months and a lot has changed. For the better. More »
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Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about getting an indie game made, had a pretty successful debut at Sundance over the weekend. So successful, in fact, it's already been picked up by HBO so it can be turned into a TV series. More »
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French artist Remi, aka Afekay, has landed a rather pleasant little gig doing the concept art for work-in-progress zombie survival sim Project Zomboid. More »
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What was once a fancy, moody Half-Life mod looks to be one of 2012's fanciest, moodiest games, as Dear Esther - up for four awards at this year's Independent Games Festival - lulls us into stillness with this new trailer. More »
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Slightly Mad Studios made the white-knuckled, if flawed Shift 2 for EA. They're now making something a lot more interesting: a racing game, Project CARS, where they're getting help from fans to not just pay for the game, but to code it. More »
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After crafting some of the best games in the Xbox Live Indie Games program and branching out to both iPhone and PC/Mac development, RadianGames is ready to take the PC indie gaming scene by storm with the launch of not one but four brand new titles. Did I mention RadianGames is just one guy? More »
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Abobo's Big Adventure takes the Double Dragon villain and sends him on an epic, if a little tough, quest through a whole bunch of other video game characters' worlds. More »
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What if Mario were a janitor instead of a plumber? Find out January 17, when Hitbox Games' 2D sweep-em-up Dustforce hits Steam. More »
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The independent publisher Icon Games Entertainment, a week ago, looked back on 2011 and counted up how many copies it had sold of games such as Bashi Blocks (pictured above) and Arcade Air Hockey. Icon's Richard Hill-Whittall found that he'd sold 255,763 copies of games in all, a pleasant surprise given he figured they'd only moved around 100,000 copies. He published his sales figures, broken down by platform. More »
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Vector Tanks was around for at least three years on the iTunes App Store and looked a lot like Battlezone the whole time. It isn't there anymore. Atari recently sent legal papers over to the game's developer, Black Powder Media, which now warns other indie developers that "anything that has even a passing resemblance to an Atari classic," can expect to see a copyright infringement claim. More »
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Sauropod, a two-man indie studio from Canada, is working on this interesting little PC game called Castle Story. More »
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Circular Geometry Studios loved the gameplay of the Street Fighter Alpha Series, and seeks to develop in a space where indie games don't get much attention: the fighting genre. More »
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As someone just playing through the awesome Gemini Rue now, news of A Science Fiction Saga, another indie sci-fi adventure game, is very welcome. More »
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Nearly two years ago, Leigh wrote a great column on a dating game called Katawa Shoujo being made by members of a 4chan group. What made it stand out were two things: one, it's been on the drawing board for over a decade, and two, it was a dating game based on girls at a school for disabled teenagers. More »
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When I was a journalism student at Columbia, there was a guy on 112th Street and Broadway, the most unobtrusive homeless person I've ever encountered in New York. He had no sign and I don't ever recall him verbally soliciting passersby. He just sat there, obviously homeless, with a strangely placid expression. One day I finally gave him 75 cents. More »
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You remember Happy Wheels? Free flash game, dangerously fun/funny. Well, this being Christmas and all, its creator Jim Bonacci added a Christmas theme to it. Where you control Santa and some Elves. Then kill them, repeatedly and without mercy. More »
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The latest Humble Indie Bundle, which offers farcical bang-for-buck, has been for many a great way to get a load of great games for a reasonable price. Sadly, for others, it's been a way to try and scam a very lucrative competition. More »
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Stasis is an upcoming indie adventure game set in space. It's for the PC. It's played from an isometric perspective. And it looks all kinds of dark and moody. Me and Stasis are off to a very, very good start. More »
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After 48 hours of super-rushed game development, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has released a new game. More »
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While modders have been working tirelessly since Skyrim's release to improve things like the game's graphics and inventory, one mod has set its sights a little higher: adding multiplayer to the decidedly singleplayer game. More »
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It's been over four years since the Great Line Rider craze of 2007. In internet terms that's an eternity, but don't tell the community of dedicated fans still churning out amazing levels for the simple little flash game. More »
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Void is a game about time travel. That's been done in games before, I know, but it's never been done like this. More »
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If you count the directions keyed on the D-pad (or the left stick) it takes 17 button presses to reach the Indie Games section of the Xbox Live Marketplace under the new Xbox dashboard, which released this week. It takes only eight buttons to get to the Xbox Live Arcade and Games on Demand catalogs. More »
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There aren't enough adventure games on the iPhone. Well, new ones, at least. So thank you, House On Fire, for working on an adventure game for the iPhone. More »
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We get to see behind the scenes at big game development studios all the time. Independent studios working on the sequel to a mod that was made for someone else's game? That's a side of game development we don't normally get to see. More »
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