I told you it was coming, in fact I told you it was coming a couple months ago after Peter and I had witnessed the early preparations for it at PAX 2010. Still, despite knowing it was in the works, we didn’t know anything else, like when it was to be released or what games would be involved.

Well, it looks like that’s all been blown out in the open this morning as the bundle is aailable right now and features these five excellent games:

Braid
Cortex Command
Machinarium
Osmos
Revenge of the Titans

Not a bad list, if not a bit old. As a seasoned indie gamer I already own most of these games. The one hold out being Puppy Games’ recently released Revenge of the Titans, which certainly looks like a decent pick up, especially at that scrumptious “pay what you want” price.

We’ll be following this as it all unwraps, but until then enjoy yourself some great indie games.

[Humble Indie Bundle]

Bundle Trailer

Direct2Drive has announced the rebirth of its Indie Games Bundle sale. Through next week, interested parties can grab 10 quality, well known indie games in one pack for just $29.95. Compare that to $134.50 if you were to purchase the games individually.

The games in the bundle include World of Goo, Machinarium, Puzzlegeddon, Gish, The Maw, Braid, Cogs, AAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Osmos and Crayon Physics Deluxe. All of the above games are good in our opinion and some are true classics. It’s a deal that you don’t have to steal.

The offer ends Tuesday, August 3.

The Xbox Live Summer of Arcade was first conceived back in 2008, and bore some delicious gaming fruit, including the iconic puzzle platformer Braid. Two years on, and the 2010 Summer of Arcade is about to kick off with yet another glorious indie title which is going to flip Xbox Live Arcade on its head all over again.

Limbo is easily one of the most unique, dark and incredibly inventive puzzlers I’ve ever played. Through every excessively gruesome death and tension-riddled setpiece, my smile was fixed firmly in position. Simply put – if you own an Xbox 360, Limbo is an essential purchase.

GAMEPLAY

This is a physics-based platformer in which physics is not your friend. Taking control of an unknown, unnamed child, your task is to traverse a gloomy yet atmospheric world simply caked in mystery. There are pits to bound over, boxes to push and ladders to climb, and throughout play the game has only one mission on its mind – it wants you to die many, many times.

There is always something out to get you. Bear traps sit around waiting for you to stand on them, giant spiders are keen to have you for lunch and gravity wants to have a barrel of laughs at your expense.

It’ll be you that has the last laugh, however, as dying is usually hilarious rather than frustrating. Like in Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV, death means nothing, as you’ll respawn at the start of whichever puzzle you’re currently attempting. Hence, rather than worry about biting the dust, you can enjoy every cunningly placed obstacle to its fullest, even when it is taking the head off your hero.

PlayDead Studios are devious buggers, leading you into traps again and again. Everything is in its place for a reason, and most of the time I found myself walking straight into setpieces just to see what would happen. I was never disappointed either – there’s no blood, but instead you hear the boy’s bones crack, and his body folds into a mess on the floor. It’s a minimalist style of gruesome, and yet I feel his pain far more than if blood and guts were spewing all over the screen.

The entire game is set out as a single level, connected together for the entire three hour playthrough without any break in sight. It’s a wonderful idea, keeping the player fully immersed in Limbo‘s world from beginning to end, with absolutely no loading times to speak of.

The level of crazy slowly increases throughout, too – without going into too much spoiler material, puzzles are fairly tame to begin with, but eventually rise into the realms of utterly mental. Just when you think the game can’t get anymore twisted, it gives you a firm kick in the groin. There are some real head-scratchers to deal with, yet the action never gets frustratingly difficult, and each moment of enlightenment is sheer bliss. Limbo doesn’t just rival Braid for the Xbox Live Arcade puzzler crown – it swipes the top spot straight from Jonathon Blow’s classic without question.

STYLE

Limbo is presented entirely in black and white, with the minimalist setting providing a hauntingly atmospheric environment. Darkness looms in every corner, and certain sections of play teem with tension, lingering in the forefront of your mind.

While it all looks gorgeous in screenshots, you really need to experience Limbo in motion to understand just how stunning the world is. It’s easily the most beautiful game on the Xbox Live Arcade service, but it would also give a large portion of Xbox retail releases a run for their money, too.

The sound, too, is incredibly minimalist. Music only plays at a few specific moments throughout, usually when some sort of extravagant action is taking place. Yet this is an experience which requires no soundtrack, due to some perfectly-placed samples.

Pulling the leg off a giant spider (if ever such a thing was possible) could not sound any more right than it does here. If a huge circular saw was swiftly heading toward me, I imagine my last thought would be ‘this sounded a lot better in Limbo‘. PlayDead have absolutely nailed every splash, crack and wallop to an wonderfully eerie and chilling degree.

STORY

It is the story – or perhaps that should be lack of – that defines Limbo‘s mysterious journey. Waking up in dark, twisted underbelly of a world, our young protagonist must make his way safely through this place teeming with death.

The game’s marketplace description simply states that the boy has entered Limbo to find his sister. There is absolutely no explanation whatsoever as to where Limbo is, or where he is headed, allowing the player to create their own scenario. Of course, if we take the name Limbo from a theology prespective, this could very well be the edge of Hell. This would not, however, explain many of the strange sightings witnessed throughout play.

However, even without reading the description, it is clear from early on that this is a voyage bound in love. The level of mystery surrounding the boy and this world is fantastic, proving that sometimes a complete lack of words can be more powerful that a fully scripted experience.

OTHER

I’ve tried my hardest, but I honestly cannot think of a single bad thing to say about Limbo. Is it too short? Possibly, but then again with a single play clocking in at around three hours, and a second playthrough to bag all the achievements offering another two, it’s far from an abrupt length.

Perhaps it’s a little too difficult in places. I found myself stuck twice, but the answer quickly came to me both times. Puzzlers like this are my forte, however, and other gamers may stumble with certain solutions.

Yet compared to everything on offer, this matters not a jolt. Limbo is the best indie game – hell, the best game – I have played this year, and I would wager that will not have changed come December. It’s clever, it’s gloriously mental, and it should have a place on your Xbox 360.

Pass this up at your own risk.

Stuck on a puzzle? Check out our full walkthrough and achievement guide for Limbo.

Second day of the round of 16 and we’re already seeing strong responses to our polls with Shattered Horizon taking an early lead in front of indie fan favorite Knytt. On the other front we’ve got a a dead-tie in the Love vs. Ben There, Dan That match up. Which will prevail, we’ve still got 6 days to find out.

But enough about yesterday’s match up, let’s get to the first match up for today, and let me remind you… it’s a big’un! N vs. Braid.

Up first we’ve got the brilliantly made and extremely popular N games (note: never ever mention this game as Ninja, you’ll never hear the end of it). As a long standing free flash game, the series has also enjoyed great success on consoles and handhelds in the more recent past.

Not to be beaten so easily, however, comes Braid, a game that many will argue brought upon the current interest in modern indie games and developers. In Braid you play as Tim in his quest to… wait I never quite figured out what the story was. Regardless, the game has some of the best time-based puzzles ever created.

So which will come out on top? Cast your vote now!

Check out the Round of 16 Bracket!

Other Tournaments Running:

Shattered Horizon vs. Knytt/Knytt Stories
Love vs. Ben There, Dan That

Way back in 2004, Microsoft launched a, then practically unknown, digitial distribution channel on their popular Xbox gaming platform known as the Xbox Live Arcade. It was the very first digital distribution platform on a major console and, even today, it continues to be the best. But that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect.

Earlier this month, we reported on a highly controversial news piece that claimed Machinarium was refused by Microsoft be allowed onto the Xbox Live Arcade platform, citing that they (Microsoft) did not want to publish a game that was not exclusive to their own platforms (Machinarium was released on OSX and Linux as well as PC, originally). What was not widely known at the time was not that Microsoft was simply disallowing Machinarium from appearing on the channel, it was that Microsoft requires a publisher in order to be on the platform, whether it be through themselves or a 3rd party publisher ala Activision, EA, etc.

What this essentially means is that Microsoft, based on the rules it had set for everybody putting games on the XBLA, hadn’t really acted in the wrong, it had simply acted in its own best interest. After all, do we expect Sony to publish a game that appears on the Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii? No. Microsoft is competing in the desktop OS space just as much as Sony is competing in the console space. So, naturally, it should be their choice with whom they publish.

But why does an XBLA game need an established publisher at all?

Microsoft has made no qualms about it, XBLA is for higher valued, better established franchises and Xbox Live Indie Games is  for hobby games/unknown smaller titles. This is how Microsoft has seemingly divided up the digital downloadable titles over the years. But there’s two problems with this method of distribution.

1. There is a middle ground in between the established developer/publisher titles and the hobby/unknown titles that are getting the shaft with this method. A game like Machinarium is easily of XBLA quality. It has the charm, the appeal, and the production values. It also has a raving fan base and an established PC version to back up it’s sales claims. Beyond even that, however, Machinarium was created by an established developer, Amanita Designs, whose been around for years creating high quality games.

Now sure, Amanita could simply go to a new publisher and use them to get their game onto the channel, but at that point they are now allowing both Microsoft and, let’s say EA (just as an example) to each take a significant cut. This would make sense in the physical retail world where Microsoft supplies the console and EA supplies the distribution, packaging, disc making etc. but in the XBLA world what would EA do? There’s no physical distribution or packaging or anything. They would simply be a name that is leaching money from Amanita simply because Microsoft requires it.

This means that if Amanita wants to keep the majority of the profits and continue to be on the Xbox console it has only one other option, Xbox Live Indie Games. And here is where our second problems lies.

2. Xbox Live Indie Games is not meant for high production valued games. There I said it. It’s not and probably won’t ever be. I love the XBLIG channel, but I’m not going to pretend that the service is offering anything comparable to the XBLA in terms of production value.

But this is also a good thing for many gamers. With XBLIG we get an awesome channel filled to the brim with plenty of hobby/small games of which most are a single dollar and where the most you’ll ever spend there is either $3 or $5. That’s awesome! Dollar gaming on a console is something that was unheard of prior to the XBLIG channel launching.

Unfortunately, Machinarium (like Braid and ‘Splosion Man before it) is not a $1, $3, or $5 game. I know many of you are probably hoping that it would be, but it simply is not. The game is a masterful work of art filled with puzzles and gameplay that far surpass most things on the XBLA channel, let alone the XBLIG channel. And if it were priced higher on the XBLIG channel, it would be ignored, criticized, and lamented because we’ve been trained to think otherwise about XBLIG pricing.

Going beyond even simple pricing issues, Microsoft simply does not market their indie channel enough to really make it a viable option for anything larger than a hobby game. So many games get put on the service each week, and so little money is used to market them that often times games sink below the fold before ever being noticed by gamers. Additionally, I’m not even fully convinced most gamers even know about the service. I’ve mentioned it a couple times to a few of my Halo/Call of Duty friends and they didn’t even really know what it was, and had never been there prior.

This makes the channel completely unusable for self-published titles the size of Machinarium.

So there’s my argument, and really, who is going to lose out by doing this? I’m not saying Microsoft has to allow every game that wants on the service and I definitely believe in having a continued approval certification process for the XBLA. But why should independent games of high production value be rejected simply because Microsoft doesn’t want to publish it themselves? They don’t have to at all!

Microsoft had a lot to gain by allowing Machinarium on the channel. Perhaps monetary, perhaps not. But what it would have done was seriously shown that Microsoft does not just pay token lip service to indie developers. It would have shown that they are truly interested in titles that portray the kind of production value as is the standard on Xbox Live Arcade.

Nobody is asking Microsoft to put their name on the game, market it, or do anything else. All they have to do is allow the game on their channel (of which still shares many games with the Playstation Network) and then take their share of the money as gamers buy it. It’s as simple as that.

Microsoft, it’s time to allow self published games.

P.S. And yes, I’m well aware that Amanita or whoever else can simply go to the Playstation Network where Sony allows self-published titles. That is a bright spot for the PSN, but there’s also a reason developers want to be on XBLA. It’s a proven distribution channel that consistently receives better marketing and higher sales.

What do you think? Should Microsoft allow self-published titles or should they continue the way it is now?

Steam has released a small but notable update for Jonathan Blow’s superb puzzle platformer Braid, which is now available for owners of the digital PC version.

The patch enables Steam Cloud support for saved game files, allowing players to save their games onto Steam’s Cloud servers and retrieve them on any computer that can run the game and the client. The update also brings a graphical glitch fix when users would open the menu.

The file will automatically download for owners of the game upon starting the Steam client. From the change log:

Braid

Enabled Steam Cloud support for Braid saved games

Fixed a graphical glitch when opening the menu

Some of the typical themes to indie games, and art games, and deconstructionist games in general, include violence, death, and loss. I find it interesting that the deeper problems of game design, toward which the more thoughtful game authors are drawn, so closely mirror a boilerplate list of human concerns. At least, metaphorically speaking.

Of the three, death and loss, and the association between the two, are the bigger concerns — perhaps because in the short term, with such a narrow communication bottleneck, it’s more worthwhile to hand out monosyllabic verbs for the player to sling around: shoot, run, jump, grab. Let players use the grammar they know, while you precisely sculpt a context to lend the discussion an illusion of eloquence. Thus we have Half-Life 2, and Resident Evil 4.

Grim Amusement

In classic design terms, death and loss are the same. You either win a game, or you lose. (Early on, “winning” just means you haven’t lost yet.) You lose a game by dying; loss means at least an existential death, in that you’re no longer playing. If you’re allowed several lives, then often death is the metaphor for even a small loss, in that each death sets you back — indeed, it’s often the only setback that matters.

Later on, battery backup and memory cards changed things a little. Instead of games being an all-or-nothing challenge, they were a slow and awkward slog to the top: keep chipping away, keep saving at every opportunity, and eventually you’ll be king of the mountain. A player’s progress became a sort of permanent virtual property, rather than a matter of fleeting skill and experience. And now loss takes on a bigger meaning. Since starting over would mean losing all their hours of “hard work”, games got longer and larger so as to feed the player new “content” for as long as he retained interest — thus further reducing the chances of a replay, as that savefile grows all the more priceless.

Granted, on the surface of it death and loss barely factor into social games like Animal Crossing or certain text or graphical adventures like Myst, but those are specific and defiant structures, with the former laying bare that modern relationship between property and progress (in videogames as in life) and the latter born from the imaginative, exploratory side of role playing games — as compared to the simpler systemic representation (your points, your rules) with its focus on violence, loss, and death.

Entry Fee

Today, with so much investment in the content, designers like Hideo Kojima want players to see the whole game — which creates a weird conflict, since the only real fail condition that people are accustomed to in a videogame is death. How can designers tell a huge, linear story if the player keeps dying and getting booted out of the game — or at least thrown back, to replay the same sequence over and over again? The goal and the method don’t match.

Some games, such as Naughty Dog’s later platformers, stick a band aid on the problem by eliminating lives. Others just make it nearly impossible to fail. Others put the responsibility in the player’s hands with unlimited quicksaves. You can find clever examples everywhere in between, from smart checkpoints to the teamwork-focued revivals in Gears of War. Really, though, no one has a clue what to do about death and loss.

The most progressive games — Dead Rising, Pac-Man: Championship Edition — spend their time experimenting with it, and sometimes they find some narrow, specific answers. Gradius V finds an answer that suits its own premise, though it wouldn’t really work in Super Mario Bros. I guess that’s the best that anyone can hope for; a specific solution to the specific problem at hand.

Introspection

And that is, I guess, where indie games come in — generally very specific problems explored by specific people in a specific way. And gee whiz, do they spend an awful lot of time exploring this issue. Braid exists to undermine the sense of absolute consequences that you’d expect from a glance at its format. Passage is just one long trundle toward death, with a few gamey metaphors for our individual pursuits and hang-ups on our way to the grave.

Uin, which we reviewed last week, abandons the traditional life/death structure in favor of a weird afterlife cycle. When you lose all your energy, you wake up in an unsettling zone far above the normal gameworld. An inscrutable figure, all shadow and flicker, looms over you. Tiny shadows of everything you’ve ever killed skitter around your feet. To the left is an enormous door, with bolts that progressively glow when you exterminate a species. If you jump off the cliff to the right, you wake up by your latest save point. It’s easy to take this area as pure metaphor, until eventually you unlock that door and the lines blur. Evidently this purgatory zone is a real area, in relation to the rest of the game’s space. Or it has a consistent and tangible component. It’s inscrutable, which fits the odd dream logic of Matt Aldridge’s games. It’s also uniquely functional.

Hero Core also stops counting, and lets you save at any time. When you die, you retain all your progress and simply reappear at your latest save point. When you pass a save point all your energy is restored, and by holding in both buttons you can warp from save point to save point. The effect is that death is only a momentary setback, and that the tools for preventing loss also serve to prevent repetition (a more tangible form of loss, in the form of lost time) by allowing the player to hop around at will and within reason.

Love+ is another two-button game: jump, and set your respawn point. You get a hundred lives, and you can spend them however you like. So you do your own cost-benefit analysis; what’s more important; one life, or — as above –five minutes of my own very real time?

The Feeder Bar

I’ve this mantra that I pull out whenever it’s convenient. The worst thing a videogame can do is assume I’ve got nothing better to do than to play videogames. What I find refreshing about indie games is that they tend to be succinct in a way that games used to be up through the mid-1980s. Rather than assume I’m invested by virtue of the fact I’m playing a videogame (or perhaps by virtue of the fifty dollars I’ve plopped down), they make their point, they elaborate as much as they feel they need to, and then they move on.

And yet 1980s designs are typically overwhelmed by a model of loss dictated by a simple financial model. In the arcades, the most clever games — like Gauntlet, in which you never stop dying — were the ones that got you to keep pumping in the quarters. Even home console games have their heads in the same place; the only difference is that removing the moment-to-moment demand for spare change makes the loss model a little arbitrary.

You could argue that failure and continual replay justify the large up-front investment by preventing the player from playing through the whole game at once. By the time the player has finished with the game, he has practically memorized it. Old-school gamers brag that they can practically play Super Mario Bros. blindfolded. This kind of rote drilling, though — in its way it’s just as much of a time sink as the linear, content-based design that memory cards brought about. And once memory cards did arrive — well, pretty much from the moment that Zelda hit — it became clear that playing at will, in the comfort of one’s home, dictated a different kind of approach.

Limiters

So until fairly recently, death and loss have been more associated with financial models than with the expressive needs of design or consideration for the audience. Little surprise, then, that the basic language is so eccentric and absolute. Compare with the record industry, and its constant battles against convenience and flexibility. First audio tape was the villain, then it was clumsily exploited. Then CD-Rs were the villain, and then the Internet. The concern isn’t so much about playing to natural patterns of use and modes of communication as it is about constraining the audience, controlling the message so that it fits what you know has worked before.

Granted, game design is effectively behavioral psychology in a can. It’s always about convincing the audience to do what you want, and making them think it’s their own idea. It’s just that the motivation behind that puppetry tends to reflect on the form it takes. So long as the form keeps looking pretty much as it does now, with its limited, black-and-white pings and largely specific and pre-determined pongs, and its enormous games demanding enormous investment from all parties, I’m not so sure there’s a real answer to the problem.

When commercial designers like Keiji Inafune (Dead Rising) start to experiment, the audience tends to look at its financial outlay and balk. If they just paid sixty dollars for a game, why should it keep telling them to restart and lose all their progress? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to milk the game for everything it’s got? What a rip-off. And the people who complain do sort of have a point. By paying such a huge fee up-front, they put a certain amount of trust in the game, and they dictated what they wanted from it.

Shades of Gray

In the circumstances of their design, indie games tend to do give the form space to breathe and to tinker, that isn’t really available in the commercial sector. A person whose only concern in communicating is illustrating his own ideas will tend to speak freely, and more or less as an equal. In design terms, death and loss have been central concerns, often central annoyances, from the start. Give a life-long player a chance to reexamine the form and it’s only natural that those are amongst the first structures under the microscope.

I would say that the first step toward growth, in art as in life, is doing away with absolutes. That means separating loss from death, and allowing the two concepts to breathe. Failure doesn’t mean the end of everything; it’s just a setback. And there are all degrees and types of failure, each with its own unique implications. This is how we learn. In videogames, death is usually our guiding force; the sole way we learn, or the major threat at our heels. In life, death is the end of learning and rarely so much a threat as an eventual fact. In life, our guiding force is our emotions. We act to minimize unwanted feelings and to reinforce positive ones. It’s the secret weirdness of our emotions that makes our behavior so erratic, so strange, that determines our understanding of the world.

Absolutes are facts, and so not particularly compelling. It’s the capacity to make things better or worse — that’s what makes a life, and the lack of it is what makes a videogame a poor model of a life.

New week, new tournament match-up! Before we begin, we have a quick update. It would appear that Shattered Horizon has deftly defeated its opponent, Crayon Physics Deluxe, in our first match-up. Congratulations to Futuremark Game Studios for making it to the round of 16!

OK and now onwards to today’s tournament!

Our first opponent today is none other than Braid, the premiere platform puzzler which took the world by storm in 2008. For those who have heard nothing of it (where have you been?) Braid is a platformer which emphasizes the use of time mechanics to solve puzzles and, eventually, save the “princess.”

On the other side of the ring, however, is one of my personal favorite indie platformers: Runman: Race Around the World. In Runman, you play as a tiny star-like creature, named Runman, who simply wishes to race around thew world (it’s all in the title!). The game is incredibly charming, offers simplistic yet adorable graphics, and features gameplay that is fast and incredibly challenging.

So which will it be? Vote now!

Check out the Bracket!

Other Match-Ups running right now!

N vs. Minecraft
Knytt/Knytt Stories vs. Altitude
Love (MMO) vs. Adanaxis

Arsen mentioned it briefly in his promotion of Jumper yesterday, but I wanted to dedicate a posting to Ogmo being an unlockable character in Super Meat Boy.

It initially looked like an April Fool’s joke, but multiple claims of “not an April Fool’s joke” seem to indicate it’s true.

The special feature of this character is the double jump, which should come in handy for a run through of the game.

That brings the total of unlockable characters to:

*Flywrench from…Flywrench
*Commander Video from Bit.Trip.Runner
*Tim from Braid
*Alien Hominid
*Ogmo from Jumper

Am I forgetting any?

Check out the warp zone screen that gets you the character:

While the indie game development community has been spoiled with success stories over the past few years with small and even one-man teams creating both successful and popular games, the truth is that the vast majority of indie titles rarely earn a profit or get the notoriety they deserve. Now a handful of the more successful developers are teaming up to create a new funding source for their peers.

The Indie Fund is simple in name and simple in message: “to help indie developers get financially independent and stay financially independent.” The backers of the fund include the two man team of 2D Boy, makers of World of Goo and Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid.

The first game projects to receive funding from Indie Fund will be announced soon, More info about the venture will be announced next week at the GDC.

Here’s the full list of founders:

Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler, 2D BOY (World of Goo)

Jonathan Blow, Number None (Braid)

Kellee Santiago, thatgamecompany (flOwer)

Nathan Vella, Capy (Critter Crunch)

Matthew Wegner, Flashbang Studios (Off-Road Velociraptor Safari)

Aaron Isaksen, AppAbove Games (Armadillo Gold Rush)