Indie

The latest video to come out of Multiwinia Monday introduces the King of the Hill mode. All players have to do is amass an army of Darwinians to take and hold as many control points as possible, for as long as possible. Sounds simple until your opponents make a carpet out of your soldiers.

Download the Multiwinia "King of the Hill" HD Trailer (67 MB)

For the indie and amateur developer, a shmup is a great way to learn the ropes of the industry. The engine is easy to build, you must make it interesting and unique, balance it to provide a good challenge, and the concepts are very simple to understand. A student team at KobeDenshi have followed this philosophy and created Border of Life, a grapple-mechanic horizontal shooter. The graphics are effective, but the gameplay could use some more refinement. It's hard, mostly because the controls are difficult to get used to.

[Via Lithium Leaf]

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden: Chapter 1 of the HoopZ Barkley Saga is one of the strangest, goofiest, and altogether fun freeware RPGs you can play. A bizarre sense of humor, decent gameplay, and well-made sprites and environments made it an instant classic in the indie scene. Following in the footsteps of this incredibly strange endeavor, Ghosts of Aliens takes this sort of surreal humor and applies it to traditional RPG tropes. You are the ghost of an alien, given a second-chance at life as long as you kill 5 Doom Beasts. The gameplay is traditional JRPG stuff. Choose option, hit enemy. Altogether, not a bad game.

[Via IndieGames]

Sometimes you just have to sit down, get some drinks, and plug away at an addicting strategy game. Exercise your mind, either against computer or human opponents. I know this need very well, and as I haven't featured many strategy games on Freeware Friday, I present to you Battle for Wesnoth. It's an open-source strategy game that is one of the best freeware releases you can find, strategy or not. However, unlike Freeciv, it can be played in nice, bite-sized increments.

Nothing like traversing your roots to make you all nostalgic. Genetos is a freeware shmup that goes back and takes a look at all the old styles of shooter, getting players in touch with their shmup roots as it pushes forward the generations. The gameplay is simple. You play it like any other shmup, only collecting green items will push you towards a "generational shift". When you shift (which is always during a boss fight), you are suddenly using a ship from the next generation to fight a boss of the last generation. It goes from Space Invaders to Galaga to Raiden to Bullet Hell at the moment, with one stage still left before all the stages are finished.

The very first thing you can say about the folks over as Mechafetus (NSFW) is that they are positively insane. The second thing is that they really know how to make funny, yet great, art. Combining these two qualities has created the thoroughly bizarre Hikkikomori Quest. Playing a hikkikomori (a Japanese term for a recluse), you must adventure out to find the love of your life. Featuring bizarre (and definitely mature) imagery, multiple endings, and incredibly hard gameplay, it's not for the weak of heart. The game is much like Earthbound, Phantasy Star, or Dragon Quest, only done in the Mechafetus style. You will have a laugh playing it. We guarantee it.

A sequel of sorts to the incredibly unique You Have To Burn The Rope, You Have To Fertilize The Egg is much more... interesting. Taking place inside a vagina, you play a top hat wearing sperm on his way to fertilize an egg and "make the princess". It's all rather silly, especially since the song, instead of urging you on like the You Have To Burn The Rope song, describes your exact situation. Thankfully, nothing is actually explicit, instead being rendered in cute black-and-white cartoony graphics. It's there for a giggle, and it definitely elicits one, especially since there's nothing else to the game.

[Via IndieGames]

Here we have first looks at Multiwinia, the much anticipated follow-up to the independent strategy game, Darwinia. The flat stick figure people continue with excellent strategic gameplay, this time with multiple modes and multiplayer options. This video demonstrates Domination mode, where players need to take control of spawn points in order to grow a bigger army and win. More modes will be revealed every week over the next month or so with Multwinia Mondays, ramping up to the game's eventual release.

Download Multiwinia Domination HD Trailer (61 MB)

Since indie competitions are such a large part of the independent community, ignoring them would be very foolish. There's lots of undiscovered talent out there as well as established masters, and indie competitions are the best way to bring them out of the woodwork. They are held everywhere from TIGSource to poppenkast, and always bring together lots of great talent. Indiedaze takes the best entries from a recently finished indie competition and showcases what we think are the best of the best. Sometimes they coincide with what the original competition's top three were, sometimes they are completely different. In any case, they are always the games we liked most, and worth all the attention you can give them.

TOJam, otherwise known as The Toronto Independent Game Development Jam, is a three day annual marathon of game-making, intended to make developers create a reasonably polished and executed game. They must create the concept, graphics, and code entirely during the three day period. Needless to say, it's like an endurance trial for game developers. The third annual TOJam occurred two months ago, and the games were released for general consumption just last month. After savoring all of the delights of the competition (and trust us, there is a lot of great content), we have decided on our favorites!

Sometimes a game is just plain weird. There's no escaping that sometimes you just want to play a game that confuses you to no end. Look at how popular the Metal Gear Solid series is, after all! Stench Mechanics, a new adventure game by cactus, definitely falls into this category. Featuring cactus' minimalist pixel art, surreal and confusing plot, and multiple endings, it's definitely an interesting entry into the freeware adventure game scene. Much like most of cactus' games, it's little more than a concept, but that's not a bad thing. It's very well done for a game made during a casual get together of Scandinavian developers.

[Via IndieGames]

The Spirit Engine is an amazing freeware RPG that was released way back in the age of internet adventurism, also known as 2003. The creator, Mark Pay, has released the second chapter in his RPG series, only this time, it's not freeware. The demo contains 2 chapters of the full game, and the full game has 9 chapters in total. For RPG fans, this is a definite must play. The sprites are beautifully made, the combat refined and addicting, and story is interesting. You can get the demo or buy the full version for $18 from Mark Pay's site.

[Via IndieGames]

There are some games that are incredibly intriguing by virtue of their control scheme. FIG is one of them. A freeware puzzler game, your goal is to get the little green-clothed man to the end of each level, collecting the blue stars along the way to unlock the final 5 or so levels. However, you can't actually control him. You must do things like blow out lights and scare crows to get him to move the direction you want him to go and avoid the obstacles. There's a total of 30 puzzles in the game, and they are all entertaining and challenging.

[Via IndieGames]

Shacknews is reporting that Good Old Games, CD Projekt's digital distribution source for classic PC games, will be delaying its beta, which was supposed to launch on August 1. Additionally, GOG marketing VP Tom Ohle has said that, due to a "huge response to the site announcement," GOG has been forced to rethink its beta plans -- namely, the beta has been changed from closed to open, and should launch in a few weeks.

Though anyone who signed up for the beta will receive access to the GOG site, Ohle is hesitant to confirm whether or not all participants will receive a free game. "We're not sure if we're going to be able to offer everyone in the beta a free game, but ...we're definitely offering everyone who's signed up early access to the site."

GOG is still taking sign-ups for the beta, so if you haven't submitted your email address, do so now -- you'll get beta access at the very least, and possibly a free classic game of your choice.

Big Download recently interviewed Ohle, who divulged a thorough explanation of all that GOG will offer. With its line-up of classics such as Fallout, Fallout 2 and Descent, GOG is still scheduled to launch in September.

Talk about a game that makes sure you paid attention in physics! ColourWise, an entry in Eegra's Game makin' Shindig, is a game about combining colors to match the color required to exit the level. It's a very simple puzzle game, but makes up for its simplicity in greatly refined gameplay. It's also somewhat of a mind bender unless you have all colour combinations memorized. The music is also pleasant, bringing back memories of ages spent wasted away in SimCity 2000. It even has goofy cartoon cutscenes! If there is one complaint about it, it's that the colors are hard to distinguish sometimes and the color combinations are confusing at times.

We promised some deeper information on the Eegra Shindig games, and here we are! The first place winner in the competition is the minimalist bullet hell shooter Go Beryllium. As we are huge shoot-'em-up fans, this is good news for us. The game itself is rather simple for a bullet hell game. You shoot down enemy ships while dodging bullets. It's simplicity belies its addictiveness, though. Your bomb repels enemy bullets, the entire game is atom themed (bosses are large uranium atoms, you collect quarks, etc) and the usage of the colored quarks is genius. The music even syncs with your attacks and the destruction of enemies. This is a must play for any fan of vertical shooters and is a great relaxing-but-challenging game.