Indie

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

There are some games made to just be weird, hilarious, and satirical all at the same time. They are few and far between, but it's great when they show up on the gaming radar. It means that there's a new hilarious game to play, and that's always a good thing. The game this week is one of these kinds of games. It's a satire of Japanese role-playing games, internet culture, and the absurdity of sequels. For a good laugh at the expense of these different things, Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the HoopZ Barkley SaGa is the best.

The gameplay trailer for Strong Bad Episode 103, Baddest of the Bands shows off the competition and what Strong Bad can do to deal with them... along with some of the consequences of those actions.

Download HD Strong Bad CG4AP 'Baddest of the Bands' Gameplay Trailer (50 MB)

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

The biggest fallacy you can run across in a game project is thinking to yourself, "why golly, design is an easy job! All I have to do is come up with ideas and implement them!" There is no trap larger than this, and its one that many an aspiring developer has fallen into. So what can you do to prevent this from happening? Know the basics of design, marketing, and writing. They are pretty important to learn no matter where you end up in a development cycle, and you can apply those same concepts to other jobs as well. So here we go!

"Project Aftermath is an Arcade RTS game where you command up to four squads of soldiers in exciting battles in a retro-futuristic world. Equip your squads to suit your playing style, researching new items using the spoils of war; choosing from over 100 different weapons, armour, power-up augmentations and spell-like special attacks."

Download Project Aftermath Demo (197 MB)

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Much like food, there are games that we always go back to after performing an excursion into the vast wilderness of the frontier. These are our comfort games, the ones that we can always depend on to be full of replayability and excellent game mechanics. The kind of game that we sit down and play between rounds of Team Fortress 2 or after a long marathon session of Oblivion. Kenta Cho's shmup games, like Torus Trooper and rRootage, are comfort games thanks to their endless replayability and arcade-style addictiveness. Gaming comfort food. And Gunroar is among their ranks as well.

"Gravitron 2 is a retro styled arcade gravity shooter in which you must pilot your way through some of the most devious terrains ever devised."

40+ Stages packed full of enemies and traps.
3D Sound in a 2D enviroment.
Online HiScores (requires internet connection).
Configurable controls.
Stylized neon vector graphics.
Bucket load full of particle effects.
Dramatic musical scores.

Future expansion packs and updates (FREE)

Download the Gravitron 2 Demo (12 MB)
Download the Gravitron 2 Linux Demo (13 MB)

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

The indie crowd in any group of artists is usually very fickle. Oftentimes they operate on a whole different level, making constant inside jokes, speaking in meme references, and speaking in an overly critical way regarding outsiders entering their dark, sunless realm. This makes entering into such a social group daunting. This is as true of indie gaming as it is of indie art or indie music. Thankfully, though, the people in any social clique are just that: people. And they are willing to explain things to you to gain another comrade in arms. However, there are a few great ways to begin to network with indies, both of the gamer and developer variety, beyond just walking up to them and saying hi.

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Before Cave Story, there was a Metroidvania that really caught the eye of the indie community. It was a superbly polished gem of a game, and also incredibly hard. During development it was highly anticipated among a fair bit of gamers. Most fans of indie games, after playing it, realized that they had never played an indie game with that much polish. No game really approached its level until Cave Story a few years later. The game in question is Eternal Daughter, made by Jon Perry and Derek Yu (who is perhaps even more well known for the award-winning game Aquaria).

Welcome to the Indie Showcase, a semi-regular column on Big Download that takes a look at games we haven't covered on the site that we really think you should play.

Just recently, TIGSource held and finished a Bootleg Demakes competition on their forums. The goal? Make a game that is a backwards version of a recently released game, such as Gears of War on the Atari 2600. Not only that, but make it like an old Chinese bootleg, with glitches, silly names, and older systems! The community showed up in force, offering up a whopping 68 entries for voting. Because of the sheer volume of entries, we haven't decided on our picks for Indiedaze yet. But here's some of the games we think you should take notice of!

The follow-up game to the acclaimed independent game, Darwinia, Multiwinia lets people play competitively using flat Multiwinian soldiers across a variety of maps and game types.

Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest is "the ultimate retro-arcade multiplayer experience! Choose from a selection of six hilariously fun, action-packed game modes, set in one of the most beautiful game environs you will ever set eyes on. Challenge your opponent to a game of stick-man slaughter, and watch digital-war unfold, as your Multiwinian army struggles to complete a chosen task faster and better than your rival's."

Download the Multiwinia Demo (49 MB)
Check out all the Multiwinia Downloads

Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

The rhythm genre is one that seems to be exploding, especially with the advent of Guitar Hero. Everbody loves to wail on plastic guitars and pretend to be a rock god! Just look at the bevy of knock-offs, as well as the war between the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. For the PC, though, there's a great Guitar Hero freeware clone for those who want custom music in their game. That clone is the excellent freeware game Frets on Fire, which also happens to have the most ridiculous logo known to man.

This casual arcade style independent game, created by the same team that developed the Gumboy: Crazy Adventures, lets up to nine players compete against each other over LAN or Internet. There's also support for 4-person split screen action. Or players can treat it as a single player game and compete against bots. This demo for Gumboy: Tournament includes all the features of the full game but only has six stages.

Download the Gumboy Tournament v1.8 Demo (80 MB)

The Political Machine Express Edition is a free-to-play version of The Political Machine 2008 with reduced features. Players select political candidates and race to win votes, ultimately to be elected President of the United States.

Download The Political Machine 2008 Express Edition (177 MB)
Check out the Political Machine 2008 Review

Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie.

Much as in the indie subgenre as well as the mainstream, marketing is everything. Getting yourself known is the hardest part of being an indie. It's not so much a concern for those making freeware games, like cactus, but for those aiming to make a pretty penny off of their hard work, getting good press is essential to the well-being of their business. But how does one go about doing this?