Tame Gunnel

May as well generalize and go with “Games Suck and Are Really Boring and Derivative”. But that’s too much work. It’s easier to build an MMO.

There’s no shooting, so no.

He’s saying, why not review some interesting stuff.

He’s certainly off the money.

I think Derek *might* be implying that there are a lot of innovative, different, clever indie games out there but the only ones GT focus on are the ones with mass appeal (match3, match4, shooters, turn based RPG) – which is a trait more common in non-Indie (nindie?) gaming mags.

If this is what they’re doing then the message they’re sending is that the indie games are all infact like these select crop – derivitive (not a bad thing in some cases) and generic (mostly a bad thing imo) – which would be a shame.

I’ll happily read both sites since they cover different stuff and I wouldn’t really want them to cover the same stuff. We don’t really need squabbling between sites, flaming isn’t productive.

I’m a bit alarmed about people not having a powerful enough machine to Penumbra though. My machine ran it fine, it’s two years old and only cost me £300 back then. A grahpics card with pixel shader 2.0 support can be grabbed for about the same price as a full price game off the shelf now, there really isn’t much excuse.

GT went down the moment russell joined reflexive. sorry dude, your indie-credibility is gone.

if you can get reflexive to pump money into real indie game development, you might have some sympathizers. else, fuck off.

raigan, you are TEH man, you just said it all.

When someone makes a game DEPENDING on market research, popular trends, etc to please people, so they can buy, then it is not an INDEPENDENT game anymore.Doesn’t matter if it was made by a single girless geek with a 2 Mountain Dew six pack budget.

That’s why, usualy, freeware games are TRUE independent games, they don’t depend on you to buy or even play’em.

Sadly, nowadays, even small developers are afraid of risking their fucking 3 cents budget, so they try to play it safe making a lame ass clone.

So now, these developers call themselves ‘INDEPENDENT’ but they are acting just like the big guys just with lamer and cheaper games. We don’t need that. REALLY.

“I’m really surprised that TIGsource would state that indie games are crap.”

That would be surprising!

But he was saying _your_ site makes indie games look boring and derivative.

Instead of trying to get people to take back bad press, why not be thankful for the honest feedback and improve what you can improve?

>>i’m really not convinced game tunnel does anything other than attempt to convince independent developers to jump onto the bandwagon of developing those few types of games that are perceived to be profitable.<< dessgeega, can you please be concrete then and list "those few" types of games and also all those other that it doesn't cover?

When you really love something, I think you should take a critical eye to it, right? Well I love indie games, I hope that’s obvious. Why else would I run this site and make posts every week?

The majority of indie games are derivative of mainstream games or other, successful indie titles. That sucks! Why can’t I say that it sucks?

And why do I need to play these games, exactly? I have no interest in playing them. I don’t need to put a tack in my mouth to know that it’s going to feel bad, you know what I mean?! And that’s how the rest of the world (i.e. non indie gamers) are going to perceive us – through a glance. They’re not going to download each game and give it its fair shake.

Russ, I appreciate that you don’t take jabs back at us. But strongly reconsider it. The last thing the indie game community needs is an attitude that we have to kiss each other’s butts. We need to be kicking them. Really. Can we just drop this “blood, sweat, and tears” motto? It’s gonna be the death of us.

>>she’s too busy writing for GSW, and will not spare time on talking to you about clones. so go away.<< And who are you? her secretary... telling me that she is busy? And why should I go away, after I asked something?

“I’m a bit alarmed about people not having a powerful enough machine to Penumbra though.”

Yeah. “Requires fancy shaders that I don’t have”? WTF? It requires a bloody GeForce 3. If that’s too fancy for you, perhaps you should reconsider your position as a reviewer for a games website.

Oh, and Derek… when did WW2 FPS’es become common in the indie gaming market? Have you even tried the game? Granted, there’s a lot of negative things to say about it, but it’s definitely not your average WW2-shooter (indie or otherwise), so your critisism is completely off-base.

>>they don’t like talking about clones here.< < did I mention anything even remotely similar to clones in my question? well they seem to like some clonage too: * "Ah, the Metroidvania / Castleroid / Roidcastle / Metrocastle game" * "black cat’s pengo-inspired push-push penguin" * "Sushi Samurai is a Japanese-themed Burger Time" >>you don’t sound like someone who can take criticism< < Nobody criticised me. I still think I just asked one question and you told me to go away. >>so go away, seriously.<< Well I don't have to be told for the third time to go away. Bye Bye

here’s a _great_ example of a color-matching-puzzle-game that would be worth reviewing (were it not made by nintendo): http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n08/bit_g/dialhex/index.html

it has style, plus it adds some cool new stuff — not just superficial differences.

Janko, while you do have a point saying that some games we reviewed are ‘clones’, per the definition, the problem is that we are talking about ‘clones’ of genres that are much more pervasive than, say, Burger Time.

Derek,
If people made a bunch of lame games and somewhat generic clones released in July 2006, and they get reviewed in July 2006 with appropriate comments and low scores, what’s the problem with that?

So I’m curious, what other indie games would belong in the July 2006 roundup, that GameTunnel didn’t include? What July 2006 games would you want to see there that would say to you “they picked the right stuff”?

jankoM: haha, I *swear* I didn’t get the title from you. In any case, no need to leave… (I’ll never understand why people threaten to “leave” a website, anyway! ;)

Thorbrian: Uh, I don’t know… The Blob? The Shivah? Anything! Everything! I mean, how important is a Game of the Month award when only a small selection of available games is chosen and even one of those isn’t scored because the reviewers can’t get the game to run on their comps?

But honestly, I wasn’t even trying to flame Game Tunnel (of course, a little ribbing as always) – my main point was that the July Round-up was pretty uninspired in terms of games and that’s it. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether that’s the fault of the developers for not trying hard enough, Game Tunnel for choosing the wrong games, the Man for holding us back… or maybe you could blame the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Bangladesh, who knows…

Anyway, I don’t have any beef with GT. I don’t have beef with anybody! I just don’t want GT to be what people think about when they think “indie games,” y’dig? I mean, look at their columnists! All middle-aged white people with glasses! They could be from the same family! They need to throw a few loud-mouthed chinks in there to mix it up, you know?

2/11 != 1/5

One error, one warning, ba-rotha!

I think applying the term “polished” to some indie titles is pretty funny. It would be pretty hard not to polish something as basic as a gem dropping game, even if there was only 1/2 a person working on it.

And some classic games, like the aptly titled “Team Penning Game” are so good that they don’t even need polishing. If you’re going to eat a tack, it might as well be a rusty one.

“PoV is an idiot”

Thanks, you’re quite charming yourself.

Now sure, it’s great there’s vocal people that love to speak out about the shortcomings of the so called “innovative” or “true indie” games. But there’s hardly an entity or community out there that encourages and studies the development of different ideas. We have Ludum Dare, 72 Hour GDC, Experimental Gameplay, and several other accelerated compos, but these only encourage people to do something different instead of thinking different. Just be glad the different games do show up, given we have developer communities built around business, shmups, rpgs, adventure games, game development, graphics api’s, and a few motivated individuals.

But as a side note, the idea of a games website run by people that hate games is fascinating. ;). I’m speaking rhetorically, so please don’t act like I’ve just accused a site of being game haters.

Derek Wrote:
> The Blob? The Shivah?
>
hmmm.. those would be great choices :)

> how important is a Game of the Month award when only a small selection of available games is chosen and
>
I think you are right, but practically speaking, the only stuff that’s going to be in there is the stuff that one of the people on the panel is a huge fan of, or a game where the dev went out of their way to be there. Looking through tigsource posts, the only game I see in the last month on both gametunnel’s round-up and tigsource posts is penumbra – while it would be great if there were better games in the round up, I do think it’s to both GT’s and TIG’s credit that they don’t overlap

> even one of those isn’t scored because
the reviewers can’t get the game to run on their comps?
>
eh, as a developer, I say if you aim for the highest newest feature set, and your engine can’t run on 2 out of 3 reviewers computers, that’s the impact of the choices they made, so what’s wrong with saying that? Nobody likes it when they check out a game with rave reviews just to get dialog boxes and crashes due to HW issues

…Bottom line for me is I’m curious, you implied the message of “Indie Games Suck and Are Really Boring and Derivative” is given by the july round-up – but as far as I can tell, all GameTunnel did is have the panel give their short, honest opinion of the independently developed games that got submitted. So what do you wish they did differently?

You know, I personally find that mentally separating these games into freeware, casual and indie helps. Casual games being your highly polished puzzle section, which seem to be what this comment is having a go at. I also am not a massive fan apart from the odd game (Chuzzle :) ), but I respect the effort and proffesionalism that goes into them. Indie I use to mean any other game sold through the net that’s not in the casual space -Rage of Magic for instance. These are the things I’m generally more into. Freeware I use as a blanket for all the games that are available for nothing. 99% of these are dire too, but Tigsource seems to have been very good at picking out the best stuff.

However, if you use ‘indie’ to mean all three of the above, then people are going to get confused or annoyed because people who don’t like casual games don’t want to be tarred with the same brush.

GT doesn’t cover freeware, tigsource ‘mainly’ covers freeware and ‘indie’, but not casual. I don’t see the problem once I see that difference.

Still, there’s only one way to settle this:

FIGHT!!!!!!

Personally, I keep a watch on both sites, for the very reason that has been stated by a few people here; They both have their place on the web. I like that I can go to Game Tunnel to check out the latest commercial indie titles (and a few non-commercial ones.), and I like that TIGSource keeps writing about weird games I’ve never heard about.

I have to say, though, that while attitude is good, it seems to be that TIGSource suffers from a too much of it sometimes. Posts like this one leave me with a slight bad taste, but that’s probably just me.

All I want is for you both to co-exist peacefully. I don’t need to see the two of you linking to eachother with derogatory comments, no matter how much you say that it wasn’t meant as slagging GT off.

My glasses are better then your glasses!