Hi, & Immortal Defense v1.1, & Name Some Old Obscure Indie Games

By: Paul Eres

On: October 22nd, 2008

Hi, Derek will be gone this week, I’ve heard he’s going to some type of “hotel” – some time of “game” “hotel” – but he told me to fill in for him while he’s gone. I’m going to post mainly about obscure, old indie games that nobody has heard of but which are still pretty good, on the premise that independent gaming did not begin with Cave Story.

I know a lot of those, particularly Ohrrpgce games (if you know what those are you are probably shuddering right now), but I don’t know about every obscure indie title out there, so if you do, please name some in the comments section so I can go through them and post about them. The qualifications must be: nobody should know about it, it hasn’t been mentioned on TIGSource yet, and preferably it should have been released many years ago.

And now for some self-promotion: Derek was actually going to post about this himself, but fell asleep, and told me to go ahead and do it, even though it feels pretty weird to post about one’s own game here (feel free to mock me for that in the comments section if it bothers you).

Immortal Defense v1.1 is out, has a lot of changes (level editor, 50% more levels, etc.) and its price has temporarily been lowered to $15, so go try it out if you like the terrible tower defense genre.

Posted in Abstract, Strategy

JW

sup paul

I recommend some old darthlupi games (Y)
VeaaC

Immortal Defense is quit superb, I can only recommend buying it.
Paul Eres

Good suggestion, maybe I’ll review Mage Craft (by darthlupi) — it and Zeldarius were the games that got me to try out the Game Maker in the first place.
JW

I’d go for raging skies or legend of shadow, but nice. (:
some guy

How about some System’s Twilight if you are up for some mac emulation. http://www.eblong.com/zarf/twilight.html
Mazapán

Has anyone played any of the Arfenhouse games? True brilliance or just annoying crappy games?
Bill the wife beater

No offense, but this game looks very… strange. I fear things I don’t understand.
Malasdair

Immortal Defense is one of the best games! Period!
Paul Eres

“Has anyone played any of the Arfenhouse games? True brilliance or just annoying crappy games?”

I’ve played them all, and it’s both. They’re very good if you get them and like the humor (they were designed to make fun of bad newbie games by being the worst game possible).
Benerhos

I recommend Two Tail and the Pea-Guy series from Astral Entertainment. Well, they made a lot of nice freeware games.
Quetz

Woo! Just bought it. It’s the first indie game I’ve yet payed for, because I am a poor college student ;-;

Warm fuzzy feelings, and an awesome game I can’t wait to play. What more could I ask for?
Fishy Boy

May I suggest Maziac? It’s a pretty awesome exploration based platformer made in Game Maker. I’m not very good at it, but it’s a good game regardless.

Maybe the Johnny series?

Maziac:
http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=view&id=3185

Johnny 2 (there’s over 20 of these games at this point!):
http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=view&id=246
RoboCicero

So on the new levels, very mind-blowing or merely semi-mind blowing?

Also I heard that you’re a big scripter as opposed to object…er in GM. Is it a habit or do you feel that there are legitimate benefits to scripting?
architekt

OK, first time I’ve commented here, but I couldn’t not.

Scripting all the way man. It’s the only way to unlock GM’s potential, and it’s infinitely more efficient. Once you start there’s really no going back to boring and confusing old drag and drop. Just force yourself to start scripting, and read the help file whenever necessary (read: a lot at first).
architekt

Oh, and in terms of old indie games, anyone ever played 3D Painter War (GM)? I guess it’s not that old, but the gameplay was pretty good, and it had some hilarious campy elements to it too. I think I got it off Game Maker Games at one point, but I’m not 100% about that.
greywolf

Gunner 3 is a classic platformer in the click scene.
Ravine

oh god it’s Immortal TD’s creator !
oh god it’s Immortal TD’s creator !
…

Ok, let’s say it now : Immortal TD is one of the greatest TD in the TD Genre, if not the greatest.

The “points” (the towers) are greatly designed, and their synergies are one of the most interesting idea of gameplay i’ve seen in a TD : it’s powerfull, but not unbalanced. Their’s a challenge, it’s not so easy, and it’s not that hard. The ambient is nearly perfect, thanks to the sfx and the great musics. And graphics just blow your mind.

For me, the most astonishing part was the “hey dude, it’s done with Game Maker”. As a programmer, I often take Immortal as the example of why GM shouldnt be overlooked by programmers.

Grats for the 1.1 release
…
oh god i left a comment to Immortal TD’s creator !
http://www.sophiehoulden.com GirlFlash

the oppertunity to mock and nobody takes it? whats wrong with you guys =p

anyhoo, how old are we talking about and how unheard of? as I could list a ton of flash games most of you guys will have never played and are really awesome.
bateleur

Yes! List awesome Flash games!
http://www.auntiepixelante.com auntie

your qualifications are impossible. how can i tell you about a game i don’t know about?

you should post about nineties shareware all week long.
sinoth

Immortal Defense is so good. Even if you don’t much care for tower defense, the story and music make up for it. Also, “try it out if you like the terrible tower defense genre”? Way to cast this update in a positive light, jerk :P
PHeMoX

Yeah, I ‘mock’ you for making this awesome game. That’s all, thank you.
Moose

Oy. Immortal Defense gets a free pass from the “terrible” bit of the tower defense genre. Its gameplay is tactical enough to be creative, the graphics are just Minterish enough to be cool without being a rip-off, and the plot would stand as a Twilight Zone episode. A _good_ Twilight Zone episode.

Calling it a GM game is a bit much though, as I’ve heard, it’s 90% low-level scripting and calls to linked libraries. Just as long as it runs in the GM harness they can use it to sell GM though ;)
Paul Eres

“Also I heard that youâ€™re a big scripter as opposed to objectâ€¦er in GM. Is it a habit or do you feel that there are legitimate benefits to scripting?”

I just prefer scripting, for me it’s faster than drag and drop, and there’s a lot you can’t do with drag and drop — I do think you can make great games just with drag and drop though (Mr. Chubbigan’s games use drag and drop almost exclusively, as did Seiklus I believe).

re complements on the game: Thanks, although most of the praise belongs to wynand / John Thornton, the writer of the game, without his writing it’d be a pretty bad game.

re Minter: I actually never heard of Jeff Minter or his games until I finished the game, although I can see the similarities.

re 90s shareware: A lot of 90s shareware wasn’t too independent — for instance wasn’t Doom 90s shareware? And Commander Keen? And Jazz Jackrabbit? Back then, large companies with a lot of funding made a lot of the shareware. But no, I will not review “Snood” or even Steve Pavlina’s games! :D

“anyhoo, how old are we talking about and how unheard of” — Before Cave Story! :D
Paul Eres

Oh, and:

“and how unheard of”

Anything I didn’t hear of, I guess.
Moose

Rinku, I wasn’t accusing you of copying Minter, it’s just that I’m from the generation (and country) that always thinks of him when they see good, psychedelic, procedural graphics ;)
Moose

Oh, and the way the level maps become more fractured as the protagonist’s mind does is artawesometastic, too.
http://www.auntiepixelante.com auntie

the people who made doom and commander keen and jazz jackrabbit have a lot of money now. they didn’t back then. tim sweeney, the guy who manages unreal now, his first game was an ansi adventure game he distributed on diskettes out of his basement. if we’re going to get into a discussion of what is and isn’t “indie” – and i don’t think either of us can rightly make those kind of judgements – don’t those darwinia guys have offices and suits and ties? i think early nineties shareware has a lot of the bootstrap mentality that i find so admirable in what we now call independent game development.
shockedfrog

I’m kinda predictably going to say Fugue again – not on Zara’s site anymore, but it’s still available at http://hov.verge-rpg.com/files/detail.php?id=260 though that zip still has someone’s save data with all the levels unlocked in it, and I’m not sure if that was the last version though it does have the better music (of which a remixed version was used in Zeta’s World! total highlight there.)

Uniball (http://www.uniball-central.net) still deserves a lot more attention than it gets, I think. I sometimes wonder if everyone’s playing something better and none of them are telling anyone, because that’s the only sensible reason why the game’s community hasn’t grown for years.

Q-Lat 2 by Piste Gamez (http://www.pistegamez.net/game_qlat2.html) got a little attention when it came out, but it’s been pretty much forgotten compared to Pekka Kana 2. It’s another of those rare games that manages to be casual without being crap, and still gets the occasional play from me years later.

3059 (http://people.umass.edu/jvight/3059/), a simplistic but fun roguelike, is also well worth a look. I particularly enjoyed the ease of building stuff and I’d love to play something which expands on this a bit without going Dwarf Fortress crazy.

The original version of PuffBOMB was pretty good, but not sure where to get it now. Wasn’t quite as keen on the new prototype, but I’m still interested in what the final version’s going to be like. The page at http://www.puffbomb.com seems to have updated recently, so that’s kinda like old and new news.

This lot is pretty obvious (to me), but I’m sure there’s a bunch of truly hidden gems on a cd or hard drive somewhere around here.
Mazapán

Thanks Paul, I’ll have to check them out! I love the movies for the same reason you mentioned, so I’ll probably enjoy the games too.
Paul Eres

I’ll have to look into the specific histories of those games, but even though we shouldn’t get into an argument over what independent is, including every game ever probably isn’t a good idea. So it’s not as if I’m trying to exclude those games, it’s more that, for the time, those games *were* the mainstream, whereas today, the type of games this blog tends to cover are not the mainstream. They did have a bootstrap mentality, but everyone who played games back then knew about those games, so they don’t really need any *more* exposure from me (if that makes sense).
Paul Eres

Oh, and I didn’t think you were accusing me of that, Moose — ID is fairly derivative of the tower defense genre (which I got into via Starcraft mods, not those generally horrible Flash TD games), so I’m not trying to say I wasn’t trying to emulate anything, just that I wasn’t really trying to emulate Minter in particular.
ElTipejoLoco

I’d suggest Purgatory, City of Dreams, and Boundless Ocean+, but, uh, that may be redundant…

I can’t think of any truly obscure indie games at the moment, sadly.
Paul Eres

Ha, all the games you mention are on my site (I didn’t make them, but my friend Orchard-L did), and I don’t want to just review games on my own site, or else this would be “self-promotion week”. :D
Moose

Auntie, ZZT (Epic Megagames) and Kroz (Apogee aka ID) were basement titles, it’s true. But by Commander Keen 2 and Wolf3D, they were kind of pushing it, and there’s no way Doom could be considered independent.

Shame they stopped updating ZZT, really. It was a user generated content game years before its time.
Septagon

I have a couple recommendations:
Spout
Cho Ren Sha 68k
Septagon

That was supposed to be “Spout, Cho Ren Sha 68k.”
Obscuratron

How about Silver Knights by Teshima or Gun Hound? Or maybe Second Age by anno room?
Obscuratron

Any of the games made with the Sphere engine?
Trotim

Wait, there’s no entry on Cho Ren Sha yet? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS?!
Mischief Maker

Way to go on 1.1!

Here are a few suggestions w/ links

Decker (Fantastic Shadowrun Roguelike with an easy-to-use interface):

http://www10.caro.net/dsi/decker/

fRaBs (Fanmade expansion of the indie DOS game Abuse):

http://abuse.plasmafire.org/

Critical Mass (Turn based Starfighter simulator):

http://www.windowsgames.co.uk/critical.html

I can’t believe all the blah shmups that have been featured on TIGsource but never a peep about Blue Wish Resurrection Plus:

http://www004.upp.so-net.ne.jp/x_xgameroom/Works/works.html

And I could be wrong about this last one, but I’m pretty sure TIGsource has never mentioned Armageddon Empires:

http://www.crypticcomet.com/games/AE/armageddon_empires.html
Craig Stern

Since RPGs in Flash have been largely ignored on this site so far, I suggest featuring a few good ones. FlashRPGs.info is a good place to start looking. :)
Joseph

The music sounds great, I’m intrigued by this game…
Paul Eres

If you like the music, we have the soundtrack posted somewhere in our forums as a free download.
Paul Eres

Although these two tracks are not actually in it yet, because that soundtrack was posted before these two tracks were included in the game (and the first of these tracks was written very recently, just for the trailer, and is a remix of the title screen music). I’ll add these two in soon.
Cooper`

For obscure indie/shareware games – how about Moraff’s World? Psychadelic DOS rogue-like at its best…
Larry Martin

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