PixyJunket

I got in for free but I feel it would have been worth the 800 space bucks.

If you grab it, I'll get in on some games with ya, maybe a DVDTalk Carcassonne night?

Yuh, you mentioned that once before, I've still got fingers crossed for it, it sounds awesome.

chuckd21

At Target this week, games and accessories > $39.99 are Buy 2 Get $20 Gift Card. CAG is reporting that this works on 4000 points cards. Going to try it in a couple of hours...

PixyJunket

Hmm, I'd have to check on the math but wouldn't the Amazon price offer more bang per dollar?

Edit: Yup, just barely though (and without having to commit to 8000 points and another trip to Target).

pinata242

I'll try that too. Any reason why it wouldn't work on the 1600 cards? Is there a minimum price?

Edit: Yup, $39.99 or more.

Decker

I stopped playing that in 1997 after I got married.

Groucho

Try Not to Fart suffers from the same problem as many of the indie games out there. My enjoyment of it lasted just long enough to get me through the free preview.

Raul3

The Target deal works in points. Xbox, PSN and Wii points. I bought two 4000 points cards last week. Yeah, they had the same deal last week.

Kedrix

Same here (except the year was this year ), now we play the game, "Who can fart the loudest?" :

Decker

Joystiq gave it a very enthusiastic review of it, calling it (essentially) the best racer on the service. I'm wondering if IGN is giving it too low a review in the same way that they pretty much trashed the above-average (IMO) twin-stick shooter Aqua a few months back.

chuckd21

My guy gave it an enthusiastic review as well, and he played the hell out of the original.

chuckd21

Here's my take on Indie Games like Try Not To Fart:

A lot of these simple, 80 point games have something worthwhile about them. A gimmick, a mechanic, a sense of humor, whatever. They're not generally games that I would put more than an hour into (especially without leaderboards). So I treat them as I would a street performer. I stop, I watch/listen, and if I like what I've seen/heard, I'll throw them a buck for a job well done. I'm not coming back that same direction though.

Mok

Quick Look Hydro Thunder Hurricane - Giant Bomb

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cartman

"What's the story?"
"Well, you are a boat."

PixyJunket

So, with how many BEYOND EXCELLENT games that came out during Summer of Arcade 2008, I ended up buying Braid but letting it fall behind (along with Galaga Legions, to a lesser extent) due to my obsessions with Geometry Wars 2, Bionic Commando and Castle Crashers (shit, every time I see that lineup it makes quiver, now we're getting Hydro Thunder, Tomb Raider and something called Monday Night Combat, which makes me shudder).

Anyway, I started it up last night and made it through most of the game (fifty of the sixty pieces). I suppose I may just be scraping the tip of the iceberg still but I guess I don't (yet) see the immeasurable amount of praise the game gets. It's a GREAT game with some extremely cool and creative puzzle platform elements, it was worth picking up and it deserved to be along that lineup of Godly games above, but I might be missing what made this game the infallible indie darling it became.

DVDChris

Get to the ending of Braid and then come back and let us know what you think.

Groucho

Here is how I treat a street performer: I watch the entire performance from the front row, enthusiastically. Then when it's time for him to pass the hat, I run like hell.

PixyJunket

Will do! Maybe tonight, even.

PixyJunket

Personally, I feel that, er, "games," like Try Not to Fart only damage the validity of XBLIG as a platform for small guys to make good games. When you simply need to title your game something stupid, steal graphics to make your game look like something else or include some brutally beaten into ground internet reference (like cleverly putting ones after exclamation marks) to get downloads/sales, this will continually lessen the incentive for people with actual talent and creativity to be talented and creative.

And with Microsoft's focus on turning XBLA into a "retail lite" platform, I think new, quality, arcade style games are going to start drying up fast, at least on the Xbox 360.

pinata242

Luckily there's room for both on XBLIG. And Ska Studio's Zombie game is fun, ones after exclamation points or not.

PixyJunket

Absolutely. But I just feel that these desperate "hooks" that people are using to get their games in the Top Downloads section will eventually discourage people. The good games DO tend to end up in the Top Rated section, but I'd bet that these games still end up selling a lot less than games with farts or 4chan jokes in them.

Decker

So much about Indie Games and the way they're presented on the 360 and Marketplace is poorly done in my opinion. I have a hard time even browsing through my collection. I guess I could tidy things up by deleting a lot of the demos, but it would be so much easier if I could just separate my full games from the demos. I know they've tried, but it's still hard as hell to know which XBLIG games are good and which are crap. You certainly can't go off the ratings or bestsellers since cheap 80 point crappy juvenile games always top the list (like the aforementioned Fart game). I know they have "Award Finalists" and "IGN Picks", but both are updated so rarely as to be useless. And there's the other issue, which is a 360 one. Most of these games would be fun to play for a few minutes and then move on to the next one, like one can do on an iPhone. The problem is with the 360's main dash -- to exit one XBLIG game and then browse and select another one can be about a full minute's worth of waiting and loading, making it not worth the time to me. I wish with all the dashboard updates they've had over the year that they could have propagated a Games list a lot quicker than they do. I'm so tired of looking at that rotating circle of dots.

edit: While I was typing this, Pixy posted pretty much exactly the same thing about the recommendation section of Indie Games Marketplace becoming worthless. Guess next time I need to type quicker.

pinata242

But that's true for every form of entertainment. Books, movies, music, etc. It's all about marketing and since XBLIG relies largely on word of mouth to find the gems, most of it is just white noise. So if you can do something that makes your title actually noticeable at the small price of artistic integrity, well, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to make a buck.

PixyJunket

Well, one member over at the NeoGAF site gives pretty good summaries of every XBLIG game released:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthre...342122&page=75

I'm sure other sites/forums may have similar recommendations.

Finding a good site and checking it every week or so would be your best bet to help find gems.

Decker

Don't you feel that a good quality, independently made cheap game has a better chance of gaining an audience on the iPhone than on XBLIG? Between the many review sites, the detailed rating scores and user reviews you see in the Itunes store and the dynamically changing Best Seller lists, you get a really good idea of which new games are worth picking up and which are probably not. It's a far superior system to what the Marketplace has.

pinata242

Yes...?