Weekly Xbox Indies - 9/18/09

Yay
- Sol Survivor - 800 MS points. Sol Survivor is the best tower defense game in the Xbox indie games, and most likely will be for the foreseeable future. The game gives you multiple commanders to choose from, each with their own distinct towers and strategies. On top of your towers though you also have support abilities like orbital lasers to keep you active when other tower defense games would just have you sit there and wait. There's a great single-player campaign, and the game would already be worth getting if that's all it had to offer, but the multiplayer is spectacular. Two players can play through the game in co-op, assisting each other to build new strategies. But if you take the game online the player count jumps up to eight players in co-op, and a competitive multiplayer mode opens up. The competitive multiplayer is a real treat, as you balance building defenses and offensive units to send to the enemy base. There's a reason why Sol Survivor was a finalist in this year's Dream.Build.Play competition. If you're a tower defense fan, then buying Sol Survivor is a no brainer, but even non-fans of the genre should give it a try. You might just be pleasantly surprised.
- Green Island - 80 MS points. Green Island is joy in downloadable form. You control a little green-haired girl as she blows bubbles to create platforms, which allows her to collect colored bubbles to beat the level. All the while upbeat music is playing in the background and the whole game is displayed in a pixel art style that just makes you want to smile. It doesn't hurt that the game's core mechanics are very well done, and get you addicted after only a few levels. Play some Green Island, and you'll be wearing a smile the rest of the day.
- Enemy at the Gate - 80 MS points. Enemy at the Gate is a great defense game where you protect your military base from waves of enemies. To defend yourself you have access to three vehicles: a jeep, a tank, and a helicopter. Each vehicle has it's own attributes, for example the jeep is very fast but has a short range of fire. What makes the game stand out is that each vehicle is assigned to a face button while you control a crosshair to tell them where to go like an RTS. The simultaneous control keeps the action fast-paced and makes it feel unlike anything else in the Xbox indie game marketplace.
- Filler - 240 MS points. Filler is a game in the vein of classics like Qix and Jezzball. Your goal is to fill 2/3 of the screen with bubbles while avoiding having your bubbles popped by the balls bouncing around the level. The bubbles will shift around the level based on a physics engine, adding another layer to the gameplay. Those looking for a higher level of difficulty will also enjoy the 40 challenge levels which give you specific goals to complete. It's a very simple game, but that doesn't hold it back from being a very satisfying experience.
Ay?
- Graviton AI - 240 MS points. Graviton AI is a side-scrolling shooter that eases up on the difficulty level by using a health bar for the ship instead of the typical one-hit kill style. If you're playing Graviton AI, the first thing you're going to want to do is turn the sound effect volume very low or off (which the game's options thankfully let you do). They're that bad. But once the sound effects are gone, the game is much more enjoyable with a shop to upgrade your ship's weapons, and a nice variety of enemies. The on-screen bullet count can get pretty unforgiving, and you'll take a ton of unintentional hits. But the ship's health bar is big enough to compensate, allowing the minor hits to add to the tension without causing a game over.
- Hollow Ball - 80 MS points. Hollow Ball is a Pong clone that breaks the mold by actually being fun. You can move your paddle anywhere on your side of the screen, and all movements are physics-based so building momentum before hitting the ball will make it fly faster. Power-ups appear occasionally to keep things interesting, and overall it's a good multiplayer game. My only issue with the game is that it's only a multiplayer game, so solo players are out of luck.
- Origin - 400 MS points. Origin takes the classic Breakout formula and spins it around, literally. You move the paddle along a circular path around the target bricks, which adds a fun new challenge to the game. For an extreme challenge there's also a mode that gives you two paddles, each controlled by an analog stick on the controller, which requires far more coordination than I have in my thumbs. The only real drawback of Origin is that I'm not sure it's at the right price point since there are much deeper gameplay experiences with more graphical polish selling for much less. But if Breakout is what you want, then give Origin a try.
- Pulsar - 240 MS points. Pulsar is a music creation tone board. You are given a grid, with each activated square playing a different sound or musical note. It's fun and relaxing to create the music, and there are seven different musical themes ranging from percussion to a synthesizer to fit your mood. It is a little cumbersome moving along the grid with the Xbox controller, but not enough to completely take away from the experience.
- Dead Meat - 80 MS points. Dead Meat is a top-down zombie shooter with a bit of a slower pace than other Xbox indie shooters. Zombies aren't usually known for their speed, but in this game you can literally run circles around them. As the game progresses things get a big more challenging and fun as the zombie swarm grows in number, but it takes a good five minutes of play time to get to that point.
- Charlie Cat's Hot Air Balloon - 80 MS points. This is a side-scrolling shooter for kids and obsessive cat fans where you control a cat in a hot air balloon shooting apples at evil space cats. There's an adorable charm to the overload of cats in the game, but it's not enough to fully redeem a game that is lacking in any real gameplay depth. That being said, kids would probably get a kick out of it as a "my first shmup" game before they can move on to the more difficult games in the genre.
- Words Search - 240 MS points. Unsurprisingly, Words Search is a word search game. Surprisingly, it's a good one. Though I can't say that I've seen them all, the game claims to have over 10,000 words which it randomly places in four sizes of word search puzzles. The presentation is as bare bones as it can get, but it's functional and easy to navigate.
Nay
- 2GoVids Rachel Star Stunt Show - 80 MS points. Do you wish the show Jackass starred a woman instead of a bunch of guys? If so, then this is for you. 2GoVids features 3 "stunt" videos: Bikini Paintball, Skate Park, and Knock Out. These are less so stunts then they are ways for her to go out of her way to inflict pain and make a fool of herself. In the trial version of the Xbox 360 app all 3 videos are locked until you purchase, but thankfully (or unfortunately) those videos and many more of her's are available on her youtube page (http://www.youtube.com/user/rachelstarlive). For your own good, please don't watch them. Each video takes away 3 minutes of your life that you can never get back.
- Azubi's Pool of Bethesda - 240 MS points. Pool of Bethesda is based on a biblical passage in which angels healed the sick through a pool of water. In the game you select one of 5 sick people and place them in different parts of the pool trying to find hidden angels to heal them. It works a little like the board game Battleship, although without a second player the game is far less interesting for more than a few minutes. I will say that it's the best biblically inspired game I've yet to play, but that's not saying a whole lot.
- Johnny's Skydiving Lessons - 80 MS points. Johnny has dropped his parachute right before he was about to go skydiving, and jumps out of the plane after it. You control Johnny, a smiley head with hands, and follow an arrow at the bottom of the screen indicating where the parachute is below you. The first time you play it's actually decent fun. But after the first level, every level is exactly the same. When I finally did miss the parachute and lost there was a sense of relief that the game was over, and not in a good way.
- War: The Card Game Advanced - 80 MS points. Most people know the classic card game War, in which each player puts down a card and the one with the higher number wins. War: The Card Game Advanced is almost the exact opposite. Each card has a number on it, with that number next to a picture of one of the face buttons on the controller. The first player to press the designated button the right number of times wins the hand, which usually means the lower number has a huge advantage. Some cards will have two or three buttons that you need to press to add some more challenge. Ultimately though, the game breaks down to a race to see who can mash a button the fastest, which just isn't a whole lot of fun.
- The Headsman - 80 MS points. Everything about The Headsman is like a bad cliché of goth metal music. You play as a hooded executioner and pull the right trigger to drop your axe and lop off a head, trying to time it so that the head falls into a point basket. All the while there is a music video playing a laughably bad song about beheadings. For those interested, the band in the music video is called Deathlike Silence, and the song title is the same as the game.
- Crazy Coins - 80 MS points. Coins fall from the sky and you need to collect them in your piggy banks. There's a 2 player mode where each player controls a piggy bank on the right and left side respectively, or you can play solo and control each side's piggy with the corresponding analog stick. The former is too easy, and the latter is missing that essential "fun" element of a game. The complete lack of any ability to pause the game is also questionable.
- Fire - 80 MS points. A video of a simple fire effect. It even has advanced options like "play" and "pause."
- Hypnotizing - 80 MS points. A video of a swirling design. It's made by the same person as Fire above, which shows in the use of the exact same menu and "options."
Updates
Little Racers
Math Aerobat - price drop to 80 MS points.
ダウンタウン激凸ドッジボール!
Spirit Whirled - price drop to 80 MS points.
Galax-e-mail
Track Architect
Type Attack - price drop to 80 MS points.
In The Pit
Arbor Vitae
Gogs
Battle Ball - price drop to 80 MS points.
Heli Good Spelunker - price drop to 80 MS points.
Constructor360 - price drop to 80 MS points.
Pocoro
Jigsaw World - price drop to 240 MS points.
StrikeForce-Psi








Sol Survivor is amazingly good. But we need more people playing the multiplayer! Fairy, Brute, and any of the rest of you editors, hit me up on XBL, and lets play sometime! Same gamer tag as my profile here.