Hello Hubski-verse!
I was wondering everyone's favorite indie and arcade games. I don't know about you but my favorite games are rarely made by big studios anymore, I usually pick them up on steam sale or a humble bundle for a couple of bucks. Anyone want to discuss their favorites?
My favorites include Binding of Isaac probably my favorite game of all time. I have close to 300 hours played and I still haven't 100% it. It is one of the most perfect games in my opinion.
I also really loved Hotline Miami it doesn't have huge replay value but its so fun.
I'll come back later and update with more of my favorites.
Definitely minecraft. I've spent thousand of hours on this game. I can just play singleplayer to chill for some time or go on some multiplayer server and build something huge. The opportunities in this game are just infinite and that's what I love about it. And it's one of the easiest games to pick up again after not playing for a while. Doesn't matter how much I'm sucked into the story of some other game, I keep going back to good old minecraft.
The best thing about Minecraft is that, even once you think you've done everything there is to do, there's always more. Tired of the vanilla game? explore mods! In particular, the FTB modpacks are awesome and provide many many many times the content of the vanilla game.
There are lots of great servers, you don't even have to play with your buddies to have fun on most servers because the minecraft community is one of the nicest I've ever seen. Most servers are happy to welcome new members and will also help you if you want to start a big project.
Lone Survivor is a great game. It really captures the feeling of an apocalyptic world. My favorite 2D game so far.
+ Hotline Miami. I loved it. I've been big into indie games for a while. Some of my favorites include: Super Meat Boy (obviously) - one of the best platformers you'll find Broforce - An awesome co-op destruction platformer. It just got greenlit on Steam, but I think the beta is still online. Limbo - absolutely gorgeous atmospheric puzzle platformer Dear Esther - beautiful HL2 mod that is really more of an interactive story than a game. Some of the most visually stunning settings I've seen in a while, with a fascinating story line. You could complete this in one sitting probably, and it's a must-play. Gone Home - another great interactive story type game. A first-person game, you play a girl who has returned home from abroad to find her family home completely empty. It's up to you to discover clues and figure out what happened. Beautiful little story and amazing riot grrl soundtrack. Blocks That Matter - great puzzler Jamestown - awesome vertical-scrolling co-op bullet hell 2d space shooter. Really fun with friends in local co-op. Machinarium - one of the most popular and best indie puzzle games out there right now. It's a point and click adventure game with tons of puzzles on each screen, all of which are fun. But it's really the amazing setting and characters that make it - these little robots in a post-apocalyptic other-world. Very cool. Braid - another classic. It's a platformer that allows you to alter time, which heavily factors into the gameplay and puzzle mechanics. Super cool. Super Crate Box - super sweet 8bit arcade shooter I should note that I discovered a large handful of these games (and many others) through the Humble Indie Bundle, a group that puts out bundles of indie games for pay-what-you-can, some of which goes to charity. It's really cool what they do, and a great way to discover new and classic indie games.
I thought that Braid was pretty good but I wasn't as blown away as people said I would be. Overall I was disapointed by Limbo, and Dear Esther looks pretty but I was bored playing it. Super Meat boy is obviously amazing. And the cause of me ripping out much hair.
I get what you mean by Dear Esther being boring. I think in order to enjoy it you need to drop your expectations of it being a "game" and more appreciate it as an interactive film, or something to that effect. You need to be in the right mood, for sure. Chinese Room, who developed Dear Esther, just released Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, and it quite a bit more interactive than Dear Esther. It's a lot scarier, requires more thinking and puzzle solving, as well as avoiding monsters. It's not as scary or interactive as the first Amnesia, but it's really good nonetheless. I'd check that out if you have any interest.
I loved Dear Esther, it's a one hour game and I put ten into it just to pin together it's ambiguous story, Jessica Curry did a fantastic job with the music, Dan Pinchbeck going all out with the writing, and by fucking god if Robert Briscoe didn't create the best Source Engine maps I have ever seen in my life I don't know who did. Mechanic wise, yes I'd rather be at least running but it doesn't fit the narrative. The Chinese Room did a fantastic job with A Machine for Pigs, but unfortunately the Amnesia fan base didn't like them tampering with their mechanics and I don't really blame them for that, but never the less it was a great game.
Interactive stories are a something I find interesting. I apologize for what follows. Dear Esther is less of a game, and more of a story. It is interactive, but your actions have no effect on the story. The story is conveyed partially through the narrator, and has some added nuance through details in the scenery. Heavy Rain is a interactive story, in the sense that there is a story, and your actions affect it. It's certainly the the most well known of those types of games, recently. (Though David Cage et all have a new game coming out next week). The thing is, while it's almost certainly the game with the best production quality, it's not particularly great. In Heavy Rain, you don't make meaningful choices. One could argue that you don't make choices at all. During the game, you look for clues. Roughly, the plot of the game is that you look for clues, you find them or you fail to, and then you go look for another clue, until time runs out and the game wraps up and ends. It's not presented to you as a choice. You need to find the kid, and you need clues to do that. There's no reason you would want to purposefully miss a clue, so the only way that happens is when you screw up. The most important "choices" you make aren't choices, they're just penalties for overlooking something or screwing up a quick-time event. In a linear story, each plot point leads to the next. e.g. P1 -> P2 -> P3, until the end of the book. In an interactive story, the plot branches, obviously. The more choices a player has, the more interactive the story appears. The problem is, we can't actually give the player infinite choices, since obviously it's impossible to write code to deal with every possible choice a player may make. We don't have anything that can handle the interactions necessary to make the game a sandbox and let the player run wild. Instead, you end up with things like Mass Effect, where the game tracks things like your reputation, previous dialog choices with NPCs, etc. They try to make NPCs react to you in an interactive and organic way, but your interactions are still governed by the limitations of the game. Convergence is a trick used to give the illusion of choice. Rather than write several different plots, for each choice you make, the authors will write a few lines of dialog seperately for the choice you made, and then throw you back into the same plot line as everyone else. If, say, you choose to kill the sympathetic antagonist mini-boss, you get a line about how he had it coming, and if you spare his life, you get some line about how merciful and compassionate you are. And then the plot progresses. The longer the game lets you believe the plot is solely about the outcome of your choice, the plot feels interactive. Often you can see this in plot missions: I'm sure you're also familiar with stories with multiple endings. Choose your own adventure books have them, the movie Clue has them, binary morality system games like Infamous have them. They change the narrative of the fiction, but they don't always do a great job at making it interactive. For example, right at the end of the game, Bastion had a choice. It changed the outcome of the story, sure, but it was a little lazy: nothing you did up to that point affected the outcome. No one would call it an interactive story game. Similarly, Infamous gives you an ending based on your morality. If you were evil, you get the evil ending. It feels better, because it's tied to your actions in the game, but it's also not really very interactive: the plot is the same all the way up until that point. Heavy Rain basically just has multiple endings. All that happens when you fail to find a clue is that the scene ends early and moves you on to the next one. Occasionally, you might skip a future scene or get an extra scene depending on your outcome. It's really an extraordinarily linear game with a few multiple endings (mostly decided on a few quick-time events in the last twenty minutes.) If you really like interactive stories, you should look to text adventures (often called interactive fiction). [IFComp](www.ifcomp.org) is a good place to start, as is Brass Lantern, and aeontech recommended Emily Short's blog here about a year ago. One of the major reasons modern games don't have many choices is because of the high cost of adding a choice. Writing it, scripting a new cutscene, recording voices all costs money. Interactive fiction have some of the most complex choices, because they don't have to deal with that; the cost to add new choices and new scenes is minimized. If you're interested in some theory about interactive stories, I'd highly encourage you to read the book Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling. I read it sometime when I was in elementary school, for fun, and it's remained one of the more interesting books I've ever read. Here's a review of it. By the way, no "interactive story game" will ever be as interactive a story as can be told with actual human interaction, such as Dungeons and Dragons or free form role-playing and storytelling. Façade might come close though, it's probably the closest thing I've seen to organic, unlimited choices, while still being something resembling a game.
Great piece there thanks for writing it. I agree with you a lot. I didn't claim that Heavy Rain was interactive in the way that the player truly makes a big difference. But I did find the story very good, and the fact that you can screw up the story makes a big difference in how much I appreciate the story. I have always wanted to get into Dungeons and Dragons. I found Dear Esther to be just like someone reading an overly dramatic short story with not a lot of plot, with big gaps in between chapters. I could see some people liking it but I did find it boring. Plus it was marketed as an indie game and I think to be classified as a game you need gameplay of some sort.
It might not have come off as it, but I really did enjoy Heavy Rain, but I guess I don't see it as really different from the Clue movie, except with some gameplay stapled on. It's basically a linear film, and the endings you get change. Similarly, recently The Walking Dead** billed itself as "a game where your choices matter". In reality, regardless of which characters died, the plot progressed in almost the same way, regardless, a fact which I found out when my save broke and I had to start a chapter without any of my previous choices. And yeah, Dear Esther billing itself as a game was a misnomer, in my opinion, but I guess it did share more with games than with any other medium at present. It's sort of closest to a visual novel, actually, although not in the traditional sense, since most VNs are just some 2D art and a lot of text. If you're interested in tabletop RPGs (I don't recommend Dungeons and Dragons because it's mechanics push its focus far more on combat than it is on story, but other systems focus instead on encouraging an interesting story), I could point you in the direction of some online games played over Skype or Google Hangouts. Feel free to shoot me a message if that interests you, or perhaps if you'd just like to talk more about tabletop games or interactive storytelling in general.
Check out Eufloria http://store.steampowered.com/app/41210/. (Sorry, couldn't figure out how to make a proper link). It's a strategy game at its core, but different than any other game I have ever played. To top it off, its simple art style is beautiful and the music isn't bad either.
One of my favorite recent indie games was Fez. I know that might bring up a lot of hate and controversy regarding Phil Fish, but the game was really good. The game masquerades as a puzzle platformer, and as you puzzle-platform around the world, you begin to notice strange things, patterns, things slightly out of place. Eventually, you discover the real game: a set of much harder, thinking puzzles, instead of puzzle-platforming. The game reminded me of Myst, the way exploring the world gradually yields enough information to find and solve the puzzles. The game's retro aesthetics brought back memories of my days platforming on the SNES. It was a perfect mix of nostalgia and puzzles, combining elements of two of my favourite eras of gaming. I finished the game in about a week, a few friends and I played and brainstormed together to solve the harder puzzles, and it was some of the best time I've ever spent with them. At one point, recording sound from the game into Audacity and reversing/slowing down/otherwise manipulating the sound sounded reasonable. That's how tough some puzzles were.
For me it's a tie between Braid and FTL Braid reminds me a lot of Super Mario Bros. and I believe it's meant to. Some of the art and level design is obviously a parallel to Mario. The twist is that you can manipulate time. It creates some of the more difficult puzzles I've ever played in a game (the hardest was Space Chem). To keep it interesting, the way you manipulate time changes between each world. Some were easy, but some were incredibly challenging. And to finish it all off, the end of the game was incredible. That's really all I can say about it without giving anything away. FTL is a rouge-like game where you captain a spaceship. What drew me in was how I hoped I could command all the aspects of my ship in battle like Admiral Adama from Battlestar Galactica and I wasn't far off. What kept me playing was how addicting the game became. There were so many small stories to find through it and so many things to discover that I regularly go back to play it. I have to warn you though, it usually takes a long time for your first win. It's difficult and sometimes unfair, but it is extremely rewarding when you finally win.
Braid's puzzles were really, really good. What I loved more than the puzzles was the way Braid taught you how to play. The game basically teaches you each level's mechanic in each world's version of The Pit, then gradually teaches you more. It's never explicit, they let you figure out the way things work through puzzles, through trial and error, until finally, the last few puzzles of the world put it all together to test what you've learned.
I really liked Journey. It's a downloadable game on PS3 for $15.00. The music is beautiful, the visuals are stunning, and the storyline is nice. Definitely one of my favourite games.
State of Decay is probably my favorite indie game. It tried to be an open world zombie survival simulation and absolutely hit the nail on the head. A combination of base building, permadeath, terrifying special zombies, terrifying hordes of regular zombies, and a completely open environment make it a really great survival game. Probably my favorite zombie game period, let alone indie game.
Because it was 360 exclusive up until a week or so ago.
Hotline Miami is such a good game. The gameplay is so fast paced and brutal. I am so excited for the sequel. A game I have been really getting into lately is Gratuitous Space Battles (spelling?). It's a game where you control fleet of space ships to go to battle with other space ships. You can build ships, as well as choose what ships you have in your fleet, and there are multiple different races you can play as. I am absolutely terrible at it, but I still have so much fun playing it. A lot of people in the thread mentioned Cave Story. I am on my third play through of it, so many different ways to play it, and there are a lot of weapons you can use, so you have to do multiple runs to do everything.
Since no one has mentioned it yet: "Beatbuddy: Tale Of The Guardians", a rhythm based music action adventure game that was made by a team of 8 people. It features a beautiful, hand drawn environment, 6 Levels with songs that have been composed for this game (Parov Stelar, Auston Wintory, Sabrepulse, ...) and many funny dialogues and characters. I was a tester for this game and I can tell you that it didn't get boring even after playing it over and over again for almost 10 months. (I just hope that this doesn't sound like I'm advertising it...)
Hey, I was sold on this game when you said Parov Stelar, but then I got to Austin Wintory and went out and got it. If you like rhythm games (especially in unusual mashups), you should check out [Crypt of the Necrodancer], a rhythm-based roguelike. It's not out yet, but I've been ogling it pretty hard, laying in wait.
Cave Story is definitely one of my favorites. Such an excellent little game. Ragnarok Battle Offline is an another one. It started off as a fan game based on Ragnarok Online and impressed the developers so much that it got an official release. Since it was an eastern-only release, not many people seem to know about it. There's an english translation fan-patch for it, so you can play it in english. Minecraft deserves mention. Pretty much everyone knows about it now though. But I ran across it when it was still a tech demo. I was surprised to see it grow into what it is today.
Cave Story introduced me to indie games as well as PC games. Still one of my favorite games to this day. Great story, multiple endings, tons of different weapons, and fantastic music. I still do a playthrough now and then, though the dog finding mission has always felt like a chore. :/
I haven't heavily explored the Indie scene as much as I'd like to. I usually rely on these kinds of recommendation threads actually. However, I am currently following the Overgrowth project, which is still in it's pretty early stages. I remember buying Overgrowth when it was basically just the combat engine with 5 levels, but I loved it from the get-go and I'm enjoying seeing it progress.