A Series of Tubes

So I went to the GDC with a free pass. There were demos and things to see from the major studios, but the most exciting thing to see were some of the really cool independent games. There were two games that caught my eye, both of them had really cool game art, music, and sound. Since they are independent games it is hard to make a really large and impressive 3d world. Because of this the best indie games were of the 2d variety.

The first game I’ll mention is Iron dukes which is a game about pirates. From this initial description this game is already awesome. It runs on flash and actually requires you to be running a relatively new computer for it to not slow down to a crawl. Since you can run the game in a web browser, if you wanted to, you yourself could go check it out for free. Below is the picture of my crew during one of the games:

Another really cool game was world of goo. You basically use the goo to construct bridges and structures in order to get to your objective. If you preoder the game for $20 you can get the preview/demo right now while the game finishes development. The goo has a personality and you sort of think of them as you minions.

I should also mention that there was a game in the theme of guitar hero and rock band called guitar rising. Basically in both guitar hero and rock band you get really good at playing a plastic guitar. In guitar rising you learn how to play an actual guitar in a very similar format to guitar hero and rock band. It was pretty cool but also needed some development time (their website says that the release date is late 2008). You of course need a guitar to play the game.