Indie | Xbox Live Indie Games Round-Up – 16/10/09

By Sonny Jones

Retroheads and platformer fans will find an abundance of excellent titles to lose a few minutes or a number of hours inside on Xbox Live Indie Games this week…

//Jump!
By Arkedo [link]
The silent, unanswered question hovers around Xbox Live Indie Games at all times: why would you bother downloading an indie game when the likes of Call Of Duty and Batman: Arkam Asylum are readily available, and so much more visually stunning and complex than anything a single developer could ever dream of producing? Yet there are games that answer that question with gusto.  More often than not, it is the platformers that, time and time again, stick their fingers up at the latest generation of consoles, knowing as they do that, in the world of jumping over things and collecting stuff, all you need is good level design and a wealth of charm.

Jump! scrambles your Atari, SNES, Megadrive, Spectrum and whatever other bit-memory circuits you’ve got in there, searching for the games it reminds you of. Chucky Egg, Donkey Kong and Pitfall are among many others that dance tentatively on the tip of your cerebral tongue. It thrives on the essence of classic platforming – forget plots, forget multiplayer, forget 3D, forget everything about the kind of games you can buy off the shelves, because with Jump!, as with all great platformers, gameplay is everything.

It starts with a simple, one screen taster that merely asks you to jump around a few platforms and collect the odd bomb, and develops slowly, handing you weapons to slay the crabs and snakes that impede your path, to the point where you will, without fail, lose all your lives trying to crack the exceedingly difficult ones that lay in wait further down the line. There’s nothing new in that. Indeed, most games keep you playing until you’re out of lives; the good ones are those that you immediately start again in an attempt to get further than you did before, and with Jump! you will try again. And again. And again, until you admit defeat and never mention to anyone that you’ve even seen it. Or persevere with until you complete it and can then rave to all your mates about how great you are.

//Pixel Man
By Spyn Doctor [link]
Even more old school is Pixel Man, who, if he was considerably slower, would look more than at home plugged into an Atari 2600 slot. Its simple graphics and simple pleasures bear witness to the naked fact that, yet again, it’s all about the gameplay.

Pixel Man resembles the number eight from an 80’s digital watch face, and his four-colour platform world (white, grey, red and yellow), is made up entirely of right-angled building blocks. Red for danger, grey for floors and walls, yellow for the exit, white for everything else. But looks are deceptive, because although Pixel Man seems devoid of any character (it’s devoid of anything really, except a bit of colour and some rectangles), his lack of visual thrills gives him a certain amount of charm that only comes with simplicity. One jump button, one door to reach, no monsters, no things falling from the sky, no sudden surprises, just the simple challenge of getting from start to finish without hitting a red danger zone – it’s like the videogame equivalent to minimalist home furnishing.

There are thirty levels on offer, and what with any deaths incurred meaning you merely restart the level you were on, there is no need to start all over from the beginning. A short twenty minutes should see Pixel Man’s challenges off with time to spare. And those twenty minutes will fly by with nothing but the sound of Pixel Man jumping to accompany you, which, incidentally, sounds remarkably like a guinea pig squeaking and adds just a bit more charm to the game.

As a game with legs, Pixel Man’s not going to win any marathons, but it harks back to an age of gaming when geeks in their bedrooms were producing some of the finest videogames available. It has the same appeal of a short story – it will only take you moments to read and you’ll never read it again, but you’ll remember it for years to come.

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