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Cell: emergence version 1.1 reacts massively on XBLIG, PC
If you're going to play something on Xbox Live Indie Games that doesn't involve mining, it might as well be an organic, massively reactive, cellular strategy game from the principal writer of the original Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti. Cell: emergence takes place in the body of a sick child, where players inhabit a nanobot fighting the smart germs of futuristic biowarfare. It's beautiful, for a battlefield.Cell: emergence 1.1 drops on XBLIG today and is out for PC via Desura, both on sale for $1 through February 4. Version 1.1 addresses the weak tutorial and steep difficulty curve by throwing in visual tutorial screens."The difficulty curve remains steep, but for most players it should now be challenging rather than mystifying," Pacotti says. He also wants to see Cell: emergence break out on Steam, and today began a campaign to get it approved through Greenlight.If you're interested but not sold, check out the free demo on Indie DB.
Indie Royale Stuffing Bundle crams together Dream Machine, Puzzle Agent 2 and more
Before the holidays have you engorged to the point where the only game you can play is called nap, Indie Royale wanted to proposition you with a new tempting smorgasbord of indie games. The Indie Royale Stuffing Bundle groups together Dream Machine: Chapters 1-3, Puzzle Agent 2, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Children of the Nile and Adventure Apes and the Mayan Mystery. Dream Machine uses cardboard and clay to tell the story of Victor Neff and his wife who just moved into an apartment building that just isn't quite right. (Dream Machine is a five-part series, so keep in mind you won't get the entire award-winning point-and-click adventure experience in this bundle.) Puzzle Agent 2 is the 2011 sequel to Telltale Games' and Graham Annable's original adventure/puzzle outing and Pilot Program winner. Anomaly: Warzone Earth you've probably heard of since it's on every platform ever invented, while Adventure Apes and the Mayan Mystery is a Metroidvania game with lots of exploration. Finally, Children of the Nile is a city-building sim set in ancient Egypt – the Enhanced Edition is a Steam key, while the Desura/DRM-free code included in the bundle is based on the 2004 original, Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile.
Indie Royale Halloween bundle includes Home, full Sam & Max season
The latest Indie Royale bundle has arrived just in time for Halloween. The Halloween Bundle is on sale now for the next five days, and includes Home by Benjamin Rivers, all five episodes of Telltale's Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, Ice-pick Lodge's Pathologic, MacGuffin's Curse by Brawsome, and EvilQuest by Chaosoft Games. Those that pay more than $8 for the bundle will receive a bonus chiptune album by C-jeff called "Preschtale."Additionally, the top bidder for the bundle will win the Home: Old-School Collector's Edition signed by the game's creator. The top bid for the previously sold-out collector's edition bundle is just over $160 as of this writing.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Brand
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Guillaume Boucher-Vidal, founder and CEO of Nine Dots Studio, talks the craft of customization, XBLIG sales and launching near Diablo 3, with Brand. What's your game called and what's it about?The game is called Brand and it's about building a sword fit for a king. The game is in 3D, but the gameplay is in 2D. It features three large explorable levels, in a somewhat similar fashion to games of the Metroidvania genre, although a little simpler.How do you support yourselves, working full-time at Nine Dots with no salary? Is it worth it?I had saved up about $25,000 before starting the business, and I started doing a few consulting jobs to fill in my pockets a little whenever I can. Some guys work on the side, while others get support from their parents. It's not an ideal situation for anyone, but we try to make the most of it.We're all young and it's the right time to make these sacrifices. I think it's definitely worth it. The experience is unique, and even if Nine Dots was to fail, we'd still have a very strong portfolio piece, a unique background and we'd be of the very few developers who could proudly say: "We made the game we wanted to make, the way we wanted to do it." Some people have been in the industry for 15 years and can't say that.%Gallery-169115%
Indie Royale celebrates Oktoberfest with six-game bundle
Indie Royale is back with a new Steam and Desura six-game bundle. The Oktoberfest bundle features Zoe Mode's Chime and all three episodes of Hector: Badge of Carnage by Telltale Games.Smudged Cat Games' The Adventures of Shuggy also makes an appearance in the bundle along with Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble and "story-driven interactive drama" The Witch's Yarn by Mousechief. The Network by AquaFox rounds out the bundle.Those that spend more than $8 on the bundle will also receive two chiptune albums by Savestates, "Calm Your Nerves" and "Chip unDeath." The Oktoberfest bundle is on sale now until Friday, October 5 for its usual "pay the minimum" price, which is currently $5.21.
Gone Fishin' indie bundle now live with seven indie games
Indie Royale's latest gaming bundle is now live, and features seven indie games. Labeled the "Gone Fishin' Bundle," the pack will be available for the next full week, and includes Seamless Entertainment's SOL: Exodus, All Zombies Must Die! by Doublesix Games, and Squids, the colorful RPG from TheGameBakers.VectorGeddon and Cubemen from 3 Sprockets are also included in the the bundle, alongside two platforming games by Magiko Gaming: Platformance: Temple Death and Platformance: Castle Pain. Each game in the bundle is available for PC, and some are on the Steam and Desura platforms. Check out the trailer for the entire bundle above, and head over to Indie Royale to buy it.
Indie Royale launches The Summer Bundle with 8 games and some chiptunes
The latest in a long line of Indie Royale bundles is now live, this time named after the hottest, most miserable season of the year: Summer! The Summer Bundle includes Harvest: Massive Encounter, The Journey Down: Chapter 1, Serious Sam 2, Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadliGne, Hitogata Gappa, Acceleration of Suguri X-Edition and Dino Run SE.Patrons will also receive entrance into the AirMech Steam beta, as well as an Indie Royale in-game pet. Anyone who pays over $8.00 for the bundle will be gifted Pixeljams Volume 1, a chiptune collection of music from Pixeljam's catalogue of work. As with all previous Indie Royale bundles, the price you pay is based on the prices of the transactions that have come before you, so get in there and ruin the bell curve.
A Virus Named Tom looks pretty adorbs, downloadable now on Desura
A Virus Named Tom is one of those under-the-radar indie titles that we've been secretly following for a while now, and we finally have a valid reason to talk about it. A Virus Named Tom is an action-puzzler from Misfits Attic following a mad scientist attempting to destroy civilization with a -- wait for it -- virus named Tom. Check out the intro trailer above.A Virus Named Tom is now available for pre-order and beta download on Desura, and is set to launch in full version soon on Steam, OnLive and, of course, Desura.
Indie Royale offers up five NinjaBee titles for PC at one low price
Indie Royale has posted its latest bundle, and this time it's developer NinjaBee that's getting the spotlight. NinjaBee is probably most known as a developer for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service, but this bundle includes PC versions of its biggest games, including the recent Ancients of Ooga puzzle platformer, XBLA classic Cloning Clyde, sandbox builder A Kingdom for Keflings, space station simulator Outpost Kaloki, and a bonus title, the strategy RPG Band of Bugs.That's a solid oeuvre for sure, and at the current bundle price of $3.44 (remember, these indie bundles raise in price over time, or go back down if someone kindly pays over the minimum), it's an excellent deal as well. As is usual with these things, all of the titles are DRM-free, but they're only available for a limited time -- the Ninja Bee bundle will end in just a few days.
Q.U.B.E. review: Questionable Understanding of Block Extrusion
If someone had told me I'd be spending a peaceful night this week in a stark white room playing with bright blocks, I'd have run before they could wrap the straightjacket around my shoulders and throw me into the back of a windowless van. Instead, I spent a few hours positioning primary-colored cubes around a vast test chamber from the comfort of my own home -- with full mobility of all my extremities -- and I enjoyed my time immensely. Toxic Games' Q.U.B.E. (Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion) joins other puzzlers as the crossword of the plugged-in generation, stimulating spatial, physics and reasoning skills in a direct way that shooters can't touch (or shoot).
Indie Royale's next bundle available for pre-order, and we have no idea what it is
Indie Royale, the new indie bundle that allows you to pay anything above a minimum (which changes depending on what other people pay), is launching a "New Year's Bundle" of PC and Mac games, which you can pre-order now at a minimum price of $3.99. The trick is that you won't know what you're pre-ordering. It's a "blind pre-order," with only descriptions of the available games given. The identity of the games will be revealed sometime later this week. "We first started the blind pre-order for Indie Royale for two reasons," Indie Royale co-founder Simon Carless told Joystiq. "Firstly, we did it because the popularity of Indie Royale was crushing our website when we launched, thanks to the 'ascending price' model - although we've improved our systems a lot since then! And secondly, because the price is variable for the bundle, we found our users were stressed about being in front of a computer when the bundle launched." Also, Carless added, "We find that some people have fun guessing the games in the bundle! More power to them!"
Q.U.B.E. enters our space December 16
Toxic Games will be the first to get an Indie Fund-backed game out, when its abstract first-person puzzle game Q.U.B.E. is released on December 16. It'll be available for PC on Steam, Desura, and Playism for $14.99. A Mac version will follow "shortly after PC." Q.U.B.E. asks players to navigate a series of puzzles by manipulating colored cubes they find in the environment, all with their own unique properties. You may have played it at our last Joystiq meetup! It was the one with the cubes.
New Humble Bundle features Frozenbyte games and prototype
Humble Bundle's third, pay-want-you-want indie games collection, "The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle," is now available from the official site for the next fifteen days. As the name implies, the new set features the works of Finnish developer Frozenbyte, including the platformer Trine and the top-down shooter series Shadowgrounds. The bundle also includes a pre-order license -- no, not for Trine 2, but for Splot, a mysterious (yet adorable-looking) title that's still under development. Most intriguing, Frozenbyte has tossed in the source code for a canceled project called Jack Claw. According to Edge, the developer hopes to crowd-source the game to completion and offer it for free to everyone that helps. Like past Humble Bundles, this one is DRM-free and -- with the exception of the Windows-only Jack Claw code -- all the games are available to download for PC, Mac and Linux. Additionally, purchasers are entitled to Steam, Desura and OnLive product keys for compatible titles, as well as the soundtracks for Trine and the Shadowgrounds games. Oh! And how could we forget? Any two portions of your purchase can be donated to the Child's Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest nonprofit that protects consumers' digital rights. Check out the Frozenbyte Bundle promotional video after the break to find out more about this most awesome offering -- or just go buy it already! [Thanks, Luis!]
Humble Bundle 2 adds Steam & Desura support, revenues top $1.17M
Somewhere in a dank Cold War-era bunker, a gathering of suits is plotting to use the "pay what you want" business model for evil. For now, the strategy continues to make the Humble Indie Bundle #2 initiative a startlingly good success -- for all! If you can't resist wrapping your bundle in a layer of Steam DRM (worth it for the achievements?), you can now redeem a registration code through your HumbleBundle.com download page that adds Braid, Machinarium and Osmosis to your Steam Library. (If and when Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans are released on Steam, they'll automatically be added to your Library, as well.) Humble Bundle #2 purchasers will also notice a button on their download pages to redeem their games through Desura, the indie-focused digital distribution platform launched by ModDB earlier this year. Speaking of purchasers, the Humble Bundle #2 has been bought by more than 158,600 good Samaritans (and/or deal seekers) for an average cost of $7.41, as of this morning. Total revenues have topped $1,175,000 since the bundle's release on December 14 and appear poised to surpass the first bundle's contributions of $1,273,613. And speaking of contributions, Markus Persson's chart-topping $2,000 payment was recently bumped by a generous gift from "grflwitz," which came to a nice round number: $3,141.59. [Image credit: Paul Smith]
ModDB presents Desura: an indie take on digital distribution
As Steam shows no signs of slowing its dominance of digital distribution for PC (and Mac!), it's only natural that more niche services would arise; not really to oppose, but to compliment Valve's service. Enter Desura, a distribution platform similar to Steam, save for one important aspect: It's focused on independent game developers. Primarily, Desura will try to give a home to those games turned away by Steam. Though the service won't just open the floodgates to everything, its creator (and indie mod site) ModDB says it hopes to make acceptance or rejection much more transparent than Valve's process. Desura is described as a community-based service, intended to foster better, more symbiotic relationships between developer and fan. Desura isn't slated to go live until April, but you can get an early look over at Rock Paper Shotgun. [Thanks, Ramy]
