Tag Archives: Indie

Project Zomboid Review – Dying Is Fun

Posted on by

Written 21/11/2011. First posted here.

The word of the day, boys and girls, is ‘bleak’. Synonyms include: desolate, dismal, disheartening, and dear god let it end.

Today’s colour will be purple; as in prose. Not quite ‘limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound’ but with more than a touch of the ultraviolet nonetheless. This is purely because it fits the feel of the game, and isn’t the slightest bit really fun to write.

Project Zomboid is a post-apocalyptic survival game from Indie Stone. It’s in open development, so this review should be absolutely useless by Christmas, but as I type this we’re on version 0.1.5d, it’ll cost you £4.99, and the developers were robbed just over a month ago and could really use the cash.

Continue reading →

Indie Games Can’t Move Forward If They’re Always Looking Back

Posted on by

Written 08/11/2011. First posted here.

Some would say that opening your career by taking a pot-shot at gaming’s darling is unwise, and those people would be right. That said; if something’s worth doing, it’s worth screwing up and there are issues with the indie market that need to be talked about.

Before we can start, ‘indie’ needs to be defined as a genre. Do we count titles that came out as indie but were later picked up by publishers (Mount and Blade, The Ball), or are they disqualified and stripped of their Indie Status? More controversially, where do we put the multitude of wildly popular games which started as mods, only to be picked up and nurtured by Valve: the Patron Saint of Modders? For the purposes of this article, ‘indie’ will be used to refer to games produced entirely by independent developers, and those that were bought up after completion. This is purely for the sake of clear communication and there are indie games which fall outside these rough parameters.

Continue reading →