Xbox Live Indie Games Round-Up – 02/12/09

By Sonny Jones

The Xbox Live Indie Games market can be a pretty soul-destroying place for gamers, with the majority of releases being of a fairly low quality, but there’s always something that offers a glimmer of hope…

//Alderman
By Alder Han [link]
By rights there should be some kind of function built into every Xbox controller whereby users could provide physical feedback to any developer who releases any game onto the console. Some way in which we can all let them know exactly what we think of their game. Perhaps some kind of electric stimulus that gives out just the right amount of electric shock to be pleasurable if a user likes the game and damned painful if he doesn’t.

Because when you’re faced with the futility of a game like Alderman you really need something that really lets your feelings known. Hurling a controller at the TV and shouting abuse isn’t enough, and besides, that kind of behaviour is better suited to those times when you’re losing badly in a game that’s utterly addictive.

For the record, Alderman sees you astride your trusty steed, lance in hand, riding through the battlefields, laying waste to all who stand before you. Of course, it would be more honest to describer Alderman as a total waste of time and effort; a game which takes the absolute basics of FPS games – point and shoot – and blue tacks them onto some sub-standard graphics and some god awful sound effects. You’d think there was at least some satisfaction in seeing a knight smashed in the face with the tip of your lance, but then people once thought going to the circus was a good night out and not a sad, depressing carnival of animal cruelty and saggy tights.

What possesses anyone to put a game up for sale on Xbox Live when they know it is so bad that anyone else would be embarrassed to say they made it is anybody’s guess. But for everybody’s sake it would be a lot better if they didn’t. If only they had the sense to realise that they’d done bad, learned something from that and gone on to make something better without letting anyone know what they’ve done. If you made a cake for your mum’s birthday and it turned out tasting like lard with some navel fluff in it, you wouldn’t go round her house and let her eat it, you’d make another one and never mention it to her. So, developers of shonky indie games, remember, if you think it’s bad, you know it’s dreadful. Go back and do it again.

//Wool
By Milk Stone Studios [link]
Wool’s not going to win any prizes, nor is it going to shake up the indie scene, but in this fortnight’s crop of new titles, nothing else comes close.

The idea’s nothing new – you control a sheepdog, your job is to herd the flock into their pen before the time runs out – it’s just that after trying out another ten utterly contemptible recent releases, Wool was one of two that was actually enjoyable.

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