Archive for the ‘Features’ Category
Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Welcome once again (and again, and again) to still one more edition of the Indie-Dome. This week has been… interesting to say the least. Just skip ahead to the likes of The ADVENTURES of CAPTAIN Becky to see what I’m talking about. Are you back? Okay, good.
So it’s been a weird week filled with weird games, but I like weird so it hasn’t been all bad. It’s actually been fairly middle-of-the-road barring a few exceptions. So anyway, these are the games that came out between August 16th and 22nd and this is what I think about them.
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Soundtrack Spotlight is a weekly CFD! feature devoted to all things VGM. Every week we celebrate the best in game music, highlight new releases and forgotten tracks, and bring you the best in auditory awesomeness.
I could gush at length about how everyone should buy the wrongfully overlooked Blueberry Garden and experience its deceptively simple gameplay and dynamic environment, but our own Scott Thompson has already addressed this urgent matter in his review of the game from last year.
Instead, we’ll focus solely on one very important part of the Blueberry Garden experience. The music in Blueberry Garden was actually originally composed by a UK artist known as Daduk, though these relatively dour piano tracks are a consistent complement to the quasi-mysterious, almost lonesome feeling one gets when exploring the Garden.
Blueberry Garden is currently $5 on Steam, and the music featured in it can be downloaded here. I highly suggest you acquire both.
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Welcome one and all to another CFD! bi-weekly feature! This here is our new bi-weekly report on free games. Not just free games, but free games that are exceptionally awesome and you need to play. Basically, they’re Free Games What Need Playing.
Some may be browser-based and others might require a download, but they’re all free and very much worth your time. They won’t all be brand-spanking new, but just because they’ve been floating around the internet for a while doesn’t mean everyone has heard of them before, right? So with that in mind, I present to you this week’s Games What Need Playing.
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Soundtrack Spotlight is a weekly CFD! feature devoted to all things VGM. Every week we celebrate the best in game music, highlight new releases and forgotten tracks, and bring you the best in auditory awesomeness.
Having played an embarrassingly scant amount of the original StarCraft, the release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was very much a non-event for me. While I’m sure one day I’ll find the time necessary to fully play and appreciate the two games, for the time being I’ll just enjoy the dulcet tones of their soundtracks.
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Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Aaaaand I’m back. I feel much better now, thanks for asking.
It’s been an interesting week for indie games, I must say. There were some typical mediocre attempts at adding to an already over-saturated genre, some shining moments of awesome and even one very unique (and damn near coma-inducing) take on puzzle games. All-in-all, I’ve enjoyed seeing what bizarre/dull/idiotic/genius concepts the Live indie developers have offered up. Let’s hope next week is as varied as this one was.
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Over the last couple days we’ve written about the ins and outs of games that more or less fall into the Western genre. To wrap up our old-timey week of content, we’ll be focusing instead on non-Western games that happen to feature characteristics, values, and themes commonly associated with the genre in question.
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Soundtrack Spotlight is a weekly CFD! feature devoted to all things VGM. Every week we celebrate the best in game music, highlight new releases and forgotten tracks, and bring you the best in auditory awesomeness.
Though we’ve seen a bit of this type of music already, with cuts from Red Dead Revolver and Red Dead Redemption, as part of CFD!’s Wild West Week this Soundtrack Spotlight highlights even more of the best pieces in the genre from a variety of games. So wet your whistle, limber up your whippin’ arm, and practice your Morricone, because it’s time once again to ride into the wild blue yonder that is Western video game music.
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I won’t mince words — the basic, vanilla Western isn’t to everybody’s liking. Some people find the concept of cowboys and indians, the dusty wilds of the American Southwest and gunslingers dueling in the street at high noon to be hokey; anachronistic relics from the childhood fantasies of a generation silly enough to have been born before personal computers could fit in your front pocket.
Let us ignore for just a moment how stupid and wrong these unimaginative people are (and they are, believe me) and assume that the standard Western in video game form is boring on principle (which they generally aren’t). What do you do with something that you don’t especially like on its own? You mix it with something different that you do like and you suddenly find that it doesn’t taste as bad as you originally thought. Or, if you already liked it, you now realize you’ve created something truly amazing… or at the very least interesting.
The following five games take the standard tropes of the Old West and stir in something that changes up the flavor — kind of like Cold Stone Creamery, only without the pretentious highway robbery prices. Seriously, $4 for a small with one extra mix-in!? Where the hell’s my Dairy Queen?
Ahem. But I digress…
Welcome to the Weird West.
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The West is a big place, or so I’m inclined to believe after kicking around in Red Dead Redemption. Between Mexico and the fictional Western-America border states, there’s quite a bit of real estate to traverse, and along with that expanse comes an often overwhelming amount of detail. During my time playing and reviewing the game, I began mentally taking note of these small touches; over time, the list grew longer and ultimately blossomed into this feature.
While this list is certainly not perfectly comprehensive, it does cover a fairly broad range of in-game occurrences, and if nothing else it should encourage you to keep your eyes open to everything as you play the game.
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Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Welcome back again, everybody. Rob Rich is taking a break this week, as he was a bit under the weather. So, being the good boss that I am, I stepped up to relieve his burden by handling the newest Xbox Live Indie-Dome… only to find such a small week of releases that he probably could have done it standing on his head in his own deathbed.
Oh well. Let’s get on to the games, shall we?
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Soundtrack Spotlight is a weekly CFD! feature devoted to all things VGM. Every week we celebrate the best in-game music, highlight new releases and forgotten tracks, and bring you the best in auditory awesomeness.
“Founded in 1999, OverClocked ReMix is an organization dedicated to the appreciation, preservation, and interpretation of video game music. Its primary focus is www.ocremix.org, a website featuring thousands of free fan arrangements, information on game music and composers, resources for aspiring artists, and a thriving community of video game music fans.”
OverClocked ReMix is a community for people who love video game music so much that they aren’t content with simply listening to it. They take it upon themselves to recreate, rearrange and remix thousands of songs from every game imaginable into every genre imaginable, and the results are frequently astounding. It really doesn’t even matter if you don’t like music from games; if you enjoy good music, period, then there’s a good chance you’ll appreciate OverClocked ReMix.
The songs featured in this article are favorites from my personal OCR library, and represent only a tiny fraction of the thousands of songs available, for free, at www.ocremix.org (the bits of italicized texts come from the analysis each respective song is given by the OCR judges). If you like what you hear, I urge you to support the site by making a donation, or by buying one of these sexy, sexy shirts.
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Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Captain’s First Mate’s Log
Stardate: No one ever cares about this part
The crew is holding together rather well, given the circumstances. Morale has slowly been on the rise since Simmons’ vision returned. Even so, I can’t help but worry about our future. I feel as though we may just be in the eye of the storm, as it were.
We’ve just finished our exchange with a nearby merchant vessel. Apart from the basic necessities we’ve also acquired a few data disks with some home-made programs that promise to help ease the passage of time on this long voyage. I hope they keep the crew in high spirits, but the rumors of ships lost in the void due to “bad game mutinies” continue to rattle around in my head.
I think I’ll go check on the crew one more time…
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Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Hey kids! Other Rob is back in the hot seat with a host of new indie games for you to enjoy and/or lament. In keeping with our new format, each and every game will get a mention, but only the really good (or the really awful) will get a full “mini-review.” To be honest, we aren’t off to such a great start; the very first game for this week’s Dome was actually broken. But that’s not to say things won’t get better as the week goes on, right?
… Right?
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(Meet Dustin Stevens – Novice PC gamer and MMO virgin. Dustin decided to sacrifice a week’s vacation from work to dive headlong into the world’s biggest time sink and we’re going along with him. Join us for today’s chapter of Dustin Stevens vs. The World… of Warcraft.)
Date: Saturday, July 24, 2010
Time: 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Beard Status: Inexcusable
Personal Smell: Like Death
Character: Kniveschau (Level 14 Blood Elf Hunter)
I spent the first part of my penultimate day completing simple quests and flying back and forth between the two halves of the Blood Elf starting Zone. For some reason, the class and profession trainers were all in or around Silvermoon City, so I had to keep returning from Eversong Woods to keep up my hunter, skinning, and leatherworking skills. I was learning new combat abilities quickly but the leatherworking advanced a bit slower than I would have liked (I’m not too impressed that I can finally make “embossed leather gloves” if I already found some on a mistbat’s corpse). At least I got to watch this pretty flying animation a lot; it gave me time to refill my glass. I was also slowly filling in the map for Eversong Woods, finding little villages and caves all over the place.
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Xbox Live Indie-Dome is a weekly feature where we sift through the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace to find the best and worst... so you don't have to!
Hey there, kids. You may have noticed that a different Rob (that being me, your long-suffering Editor-In-Chief) is handling the Indie-Dome this week. That’s because we decided to give Rob Rich a break from his usual task of slaving away at a never-ending conveyor belt of releases on the Xbox Live Indie Games Marketplace. The poor guy deserves a little time away to restore his sanity and keep him from dissolving into a weeping, gibbering pile of barely sensate flesh. Plus, I wanted to take a look for myself at what the XNA developers were up to out there.
Also, you may notice another slight change in format this week. We recently decided to cover every game that comes out on XBL Indie Games, rather than just select noteworthy titles as we previously did. However, because of how much of a huge task it becomes to edit and format such a gigantic pile every two weeks, we decided to move to a weekly schedule, rather than our old bi-weekly one. So now you’ll get a more up-to-date look at the state of the marketplace. We hope you enjoy!
Now, without further ado…
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Rob Thomas
Rob Rich
Sage Knox
Beki Sutcliffe
Dustin Stevens
Jason Smith
Scott Thompson
Aubrey Klanecky
Zuri Grimm
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