I watched the first public preview video for Owlboy yesterday after it got a mention on the IndieGames blog and Destructoid. Having not known about it before then, this took me by surprise…

I absolutely love the music - heroic and sweeping with a great mix of 8-bit blippiness and orchestral accompaniment, something any modern indie game would be proud of. The sprites and pixel artwork is superb, too. Even at this early stage a lot of polish is showing already, so I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on this!

Check out the D-Pad Studio homepage for the dev team’s news.

These days I find it a little hard to call Introversion truly “indie” - where do you draw the line between successful independent developer and small commercial software house, if in fact there is a difference? - but for the sake of argument I’ll call them that for this post, and you certainly can’t argue that their games do try to break the mould in some way.

In any case, the PC version of Multiwinia was released a little over an hour ago and does a sterling job of adding a frantic multiplayer element to the world of Darwinia. Sadly the demo version doesn’t allow any online multiplayer, which is a bummer (bah - even Defcon let you into some hot netgaming action in its demo), but there are still some competent AI opponents to test your mettle against.

Haven’t had a games round-up lately, so let’s see what shinies catch my eye over the past week.

Huzzah! Fans of The Underside rejoice! A new gameplay trailer was released today (see below). *drool*…

No self-respecting fan of remakes could possibly ignore Urban Interactive’s new rendition of 3D Starstrike. Anyone who enjoyed the original will surely be blown away with the snazzy graphics, creative audio and huge amount of polish. Personally I’ve never been one for rail shooters like this but I’d still give two thumbs up for sheer effort.

Atum, Slithens and Ratoney go forth to save the world of Appalathia in Ghost of Aliens

In the world of RPGs we find Ghosts of Aliens into which the author has poured six months of toil. I’ve not had chance to play through this yet, but it’s one I’ll be checking over the weekend if I have time. Hey, it has a character in it called Slithens, a “British snake” - crack on, sir! The world needs more games with Brits in them The full info and download link are over at this Gaming World Forums post.

And to round things off - well, it’s great when developers come up with short, catchy names for their projects. Arrogancy Games have got it spot on, and are soon to release their XNA title An Awesome Game Where You Shoot Stuff and it Blows Up and Then You Win the Game - The Game, or otherwise known as the much easier to pronounce AAGWYSSAIBUATYWTG. If you’re interested then why not watch An Awesome Video Where You See How the Game Looks and Plays Before it is Available and Then You Want to Buy the Game - The Video? It’s right here!

Somehow I managed to miss this on my daily RSS trawl, but I’m happy to report that the much-vaunted timewarping platformer Braid by Jonathan Blow was released to the masses on XBox Live Arcade yesterday and has already racked up some quite impressive reviews, including a 10/10 from Eurogamer and an 8.8 / 10 from IGN. Spiffy stuff!

I’m looking forward to the PC release; the graphics remind me a little bit of Aquaria’s style, although with a more obviously hand-drawn feel. Having watched some of the videos I’ll definitely be checking the demo out whenever it’s available.

9/8/08 update: There’s still more rave reviews coming in, giving Braid a pretty respectable Metacritic score of 92. Is this the best indie game of all time?