Direct2Drive’s crazy spring sale has hit the indie world. You can now snag a copy of Dejobaan’s freefalling game Aaaaa! for a pocketful of change. That’s $1.95 for anyone wondering exactly how much a pocketful of change is. Unfortuntaly, Direct2Drive does not accept loose change (unconfirmed as of press time) so you’ll probably have to pay with a credit card.

Between our review of the game and my excitement over the iDevice versions of the game, you’re running out of excuses not to play it.

Their Spring Sale also includes 75% off of Eufloria, so you can snag that title for $4.95 as well.

Dejobaan Games does a lot of good things as an indie developer, they make great games with only one letter in the title and they announce funny fake games on April 1 like 14. DRUNKEN ROBOT PORNOGRAPHY. Now they’re bartering a free game in exchange for your fan dedication, a fair trade indeed!

The free title, TAPtapTAPtapTAPtapTAP is just an incentive to get those interested to join the dev’s ‘we will never send you news’ Fan Club. Instead of sending updates the club has been formed to give interested parties games, alphas, betas, prototypes and “Fan Club ONLY special offers on new games.”

If you’re interested in signing-up head on over to Dejobaan’s site and punch in your email, of course it’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time, as cool as you’d expect it to be from Ichiro and the gang.

On One’s Own is a column about, you guessed it, independent gaming. The wayward wanderings of DIYGamer’s James Bishop might lead to probing art, gameplay, design, reception or a number of other aspects related to independent games. But you can rest assured that all things indie will be carefully considered on a weekly basis.

This past weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time walking, reading subway maps and fiddling with my Pokéwalker. The first annual Penny Arcade Expo East was held in Boston and I was, of course, in attendance as I cannot manage to keep myself away from these things. And while on the show floor, I considered it my mission, my responsibility even, to play each and every independent game I could get my filthy mitts on while there.

And I so did. I managed to drag my tired body through the expo hall a great many times in order to play everything I possibly could. Before the article goes any further, I’d like to apologize to the creators of Miegakure. When I came past the booth, people were playing, the game was down or I was on my way to another appointment. I was unfortunately unable to play it so I feel like I somehow let the ball drop. But I did watch it for a good deal of time and feel like I got a grasp of what the game was about.

But even though I managed to miss Miegakure, I did find the time and energy to play (deep breath): Slam Bolt Scrappers, Dearth, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, Waker, Turba, Shank, Charlie Murder and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. As well as a huge smattering of mainstream titles of which none will be discussed here.

But what kind of impression did all these games leave on me, in total? Well, it further cemented the idea in my head that indie games are necessarily quirky and their creators are, for the most part, human in nature. The product of the minds of a very small group of people tends to be more specifically unique than one that requires a bureaucratic entity to govern it and even indie developers want to play the next biggest game.

But those are all broad, general statements. The specifics are of far more interest to you, Constant Reader, so get to them I shall. The first annual PAX East was actually host to their very own Boston Indie Showcase, which collected a number of local indie developers together to show off their games. The first six in my list above, Slam Bolt Scrappers, Dearth, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, Waker, Turba and Mieagakure all sat together in a little circle near the edge of one of the halls. And, besides the previously mentioned Mieagakure, I played all of them over the course of the convention.

Of the six, the first I managed to get some time in with was AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! by Dejobaan Games. If you don’t already know what the game’s about, you’ve clearly not been kept up to snuff on indie game news. Sufficed to say, it’s been out for a bit and has garnered some positive reviews. If you haven’t played already, you really should.

In the game, you fling yourself from the top of a building of some sort and try to accomplish a number of tasks on the way down before gracefully landing in a predetermined zone. Hugs, kisses, flipping the bird and giving thumbs up to different sections of the level will net a varying amount of points depending on your timing. Like old-school arcade games, the point is to get as many as you possibly can. It’s fun, has huge replay value and one of the developers mentioned, off-hand, that he must have been drunk when coding one of the levels. I wasn’t actually sure if he was joking, but I like to think he wasn’t. It’s way more amusing that way.

After AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! came Dearth and then Waker. I lump the two together here as they were both developed by MIT Gambit Game Lab. If you can’t already tell, this means that both games have somewhat ulterior motives: academia. It’s all so ingrained, however, that you’d be hard-pressed to know that they were trying to gather data if they didn’t tell you so up front.

Dearth is full of sketched out Egyptian or Mayan imagery wherein you and a partner can control tiny fish people and run around in circles attempting to get the water beasts chasing you to crash into each other. You heard me. The express intent of the game is to reach the next level but the game is actually trying to gather data on how to make artificial intelligence. I’m not entirely certain how it works, but it does. And my playing through of a couple of levels with another human, dubbed Random Stranger #117, further proved to me that having two brains trying to solve one puzzle at the same time leads to confusion, hilarious confusion that has only bad consequences.

The second of the two MIT games, Waker, has two versions: one with and one without narrative. Otherwise, they’re exactly the same. The idea is to see if gaming narrative actually helps engage children and have them learn easier. The game follows a little black shadow of a thing with a tail as it tries to make it from one end of a stage to another. Imagine Braid but instead of time puzzles, it all depends on how fast your little creature is moving. The intent is to help kids learn about velocity and all that good stuff on a mostly observational level. See how it works, understand it better and therefore be able to use the concepts more easily later. You run, and drop the orb when you want to solidify the line you’ve created so you can traverse it to the next stage.

Turba by Keith Morgado was the second-to-last game I gave a go. It’s reminiscent of Bejeweled and a number of other puzzle games that have you match three but it has one little twist: the puzzle moves to the beat of whatever mp3 you happen to have available. Keith was luckily at the station as I began my play to Gorillaz, as I’m not exactly a puzzle game junkie, as he explained to me some of the more specific functions like clicking three of a couple different colors to knock them out at the same time and so on. I’ve never played a single one of them before so this was all new to me. After helping me to actually play the game, he admitted that he’d made the entire game in his room and that, due to using the player’s music, it avoided any copyright infringement. Either way, my time with Turba went entirely too quickly, but the timing just so happened to coincide with the line ceasing to exist in the booth right next door.

And that was rather fortuitous as the line had been going strong since the first day I’d put my eyes on it. Fire Hose Games had brought the best of the litter and the line to play proved it. They’d brought Slam Bolt Scrappers. The gameplay is an intoxicating mixture of a simple fighting game with a large dose of Tetris and some influences from the tower defense genre. You beat up enemies which then turn to a colored Tetris block, which you then drop on your team’s area in order to build up towers of the same color. Red makes rockets, purple makes lasers and blue makes some kind of shielding mechanism. The point of the game is to decimate your opponent’s tower and destroy their gold-rimmed blocks.

And goodness, did I destroy some blocks. I was teamed with an odd fellow who only spoke in broken English so we communicated almost entirely through yelps of joy and high-fives. The opposing team was composed of two middle-aged women. I couldn’t make this stuff up. Our first match started and me and my English-butchering partner won within three minutes. Our opponents had thought they were supposed to beat our two avatars up, not build a tower to beat our tower. The developers even let us play another round which wound up being pretty similar.

In the end, each game was quirky, imaginative, interesting, surprisingly addicting and just plain fun. After watching a good deal of Mieagakure, I can safely say the same of it as well. If these are the kinds of indie games we have to look forward to in the future, the future sure looks bright. Here’s to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle at the end of the year and its, hopefully, equally amazing lineup of indie titles.

Just in case you haven’t read our GDC coverage on what the guys over at Dejobaan Games are up to, I figured I’d lay out a prime piece of news for you right here in the open. Ichiro and Leo, from Dejobaan, have confirmed that their popular indie hit: Aaaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity is coming to the iPad.

What this means exactly? Can’t say, although our own Peter Eykemans did get a chance to check out the iPhone version of the game where by you stand up right and look down at your iPhone, using tilt controls to control your fall. I’m assuming this will be similar to the iPad version but with a higher resolution and larger screen… Whoa I’m almost getting a sense of vertigo just by thinking about it.

By the way, did you know that we are giving away ten copies of this game for the PC right now? Check out our super cool forum contest for more details!

P.S. I’d like to thank Dejobaan for providing an excellent argument against my recent editorial on how crappy iPad gaming will be. Touche’ guys, touche’.

We’ve reviewed AAAaaa! and have been in close contact with Dejobaan games in their series of nominations at both the Indie Game Challenge and here at the Independent Games Festival. We’re even giving away 10 copies of their hit game in our forum contest.

So while they’re showing the game here at IGF, I wasn’t quite ready for what they were showing. I met up with Leo and Ichiro on the show floor, where they casually threw out the fact that AAAaaa is coming to the iPhone and the iPad. They had a playable build of their iPhone version, which isn’t complete just yet. I must say, it’s strangely compelling in a way the PC version never can be.

Imagine standing up straight and staring downward at your iPhone’s screen. You slide yourself off the top of the building with your fingertip, and then the tilt controls take over. So here you are, peering downward into a simulation of plummeting from the top of a tall building. I found myself immersed in the experience, having to blink myself back to the show floor at the end of each run. This sense of immersion, of falling into the phone, excited me to the idea of being able to play the title on an iPad. It could be an experience that triggers a players’ vertigo by simulating the true elevation and speed of falling, really falling. I’ll admit that the tilt controls are more difficult than a mouse and keyboard, but the perspective alone makes the switch worth it.

Ichiro also hinted at what’s next for them. They’re working on their rhythm title (I believe Ichiro dubbed it OOM OOM OOM OOM) which allows players to create their own music based on the elements in the game (which plays similar to AaaAAAa), rather than follow a set pattern of preordained notes. Their project beyond that is a mystery to me. It involves math and “making math your bitch.” That’s enough of a selling point for me.

We’ll keep you posted on all the news surrounding these new versions of AAAaaaAA as info is available.

Mega-mod site and soon to be digital distributor ModDB have announced the winners of this year’s Mod of the Year Awards, with three indie notables taking home some metaphorical hardware.

Editor’s picks included AAAAA! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity taking Best Indie Game, with Overgrowth garnering the most votes for Best Upcoming Indie. Impressively, Natural Selection 2 grabbed the player’s choice (open voting) Indie Game of the Year award despite the fact that the game is yet to be released.

What’s clear about the awards, regardless if it’s an editor pick or a player’s choice, is that creative art direction and/or higher end graphics appear to be a theme among the winners. Congrats to all the indie devs and mod teams on the recognition of their excellent work.

The development team that came out of nowhere to wow us with their base jumping PC game AAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, has revealed that they’re already hard at work on their next title. Dejobaan Games has officially announced Musorqua.

The game, the team concedes, looks quite a bit like its previous effort, but in fact will be a completely different and unique music-puzzle themed title.

Steam has dished out this week’s Mid-Week Madness deal, offering up Dejobaan Games base jumper Aaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity for 50% off. It bests the 30% off sale Impulse ran recently, so if you were on the fence then, now seems to be an opportune time to jump.

The title has the player diving off skyscrapers simply for the fun of it and to impress the judges that will determine your score based on style, the stunts you pull on the way down, and whether you stick the landing, or stick all over the pavement.

Aaaaa! can be picked up for only $7.50 now through Thursday, November 19. Check out our review on the title.

Every once in a while there comes a game that just absolutely floors you. You go into the game expecting one thing and you end up with something completely different in all the right ways. This is what happened to me as I played through Aaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.

Aaaaa! is a very weird game wrapped in a very simple concept: falling is fun. It’s not weird so much in it’s actual gameplay as it is in the presentation. While the game is largely about falling from very high places whilst attempting to rack up as many points as possible, it’s presented to you in such a way as to be a real head scratcher. Through out your many, many plummets you’ll be treated to weird sayings and even weirder voice overs as you browse the menu. Underneath all that though is the crisp, satisfying gameplay that makes this game oh so much fun to play.

Dejobaan Games’ base jumping free-faller Aaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity has been given a 30% discount off the standard price through this weekend on Impulse.

The title has the player diving off skyscrapers like a diving board in the Olympics and as you fall judges determine your score based on style, the stunts you pull on the way down, and of course whether you stick the landing in one piece or several thousand pieces.

A Reckless Disregard for Gravity is available through Sunday, November 1 for just $9.99.