A little while ago it was the Indie Music Bundle to titillate your ears with fantastic vibes, but right now you have a choice of not one, or even two… but four different game bundles to check out – and they’re all asking you to pay as little or as much as you like! One is even completely free to download!

Since a couple of them are also supporting charity, now is a great time if you’re just starting to dip in to the world of indie games and are looking to snag some great deals at the same time as helping a good cause. While it’s possible to take the dimmer view that it’s an easy way for an organiser to make a quick buck, that would be pretty unfair – if you believe in the charitable roots behind a couple of these bundles then they’re doing a lot of good at a time of year when it matters the most. Even if a bundle doesn’t donate part of its proceeds to charity, it’s still a good way to get some games you might otherwise have overlooked for an excellent price. Stocking fillers ahoy!

Read on to see all of the currently running bundles that are clamouring for your attention…

First we have The Humble Indie Bundle #4. From the people who started the whole bundle phenomenon off, this is actually their eighth compilation of games that they’ve offered up, and it’s a darn good one too: Visually sumptuous bullet hell shoot ‘em up Jamestown, pixelly reflex tester Bit.Trip.Runner, acclaimed platformer Super Meat Boy, gritty tale of revenge Shank, and rolling stone NightSky HD as standard. There’s also strategic explosion factory Gratuitous Space Battles and magnificent adventure Cave Story+ included if you pay more than the average price. Eek! That’s a lot of adjectives for a lot of games!

Next we have Indie Royale’s Christmas Bundle. For some titles that aren’t quite so well-known you may want to give this a look – it contains The Blackwell Trilogy: Remastered, a quality series of three point ‘n’ click adventures; Eets, an endearing puzzler that’s far more cerebral than it looks; Dino D-Day, a FPS exploring an alternative WW2; and The Oil Blue, a satirical action simulator of the oil business. Ticks all the right boxes and covers all bases pretty darn well.

Third up is the Little Big Bunch, a newcomer to the bundle party but boasting a juicy selection of five classy indie titles. It features polished platformer Explodemon, the only game I know of with a self-exploding hero, and Frozen Synapse, a fine turn-based strategy game set in a strange blue cyberverse. It has more, too, in the form of New Star Soccer 5 for all you football fans, Munch’s Oddysee for those who love helping aliens, and Serious Sam Double D for those who just want to shoot aliens with literally stacks of guns!

Last but certainly not least is the free-to-download 99 Percent Bundle, a pack of games from developers that you almost certainly won’t have heard of. Does that mean you should ignore them? Absolutely not! It includes a ginormous thirteen games to enjoy, including NeonPlat Adventures (by AGameAWeek’s Jayenkai), pleasant Flash game Diamond Hollow II, and the fantastically-titled Next Time I Won’t Trust The Man In The White Van. I dare you not to check out this pack just through sheer curiosity!

Surely somewhere amongst this selection of 31 titles is a game to tweak your interest. But if there isn’t… word on the street is there’s probably another bundle coming out next week. Just you wait and see if I’m not right

Happy bundling!

Developers Trendy Entertainment have had something of an epic journey in getting their hybrid 3PS / tower-defence / action-RPG game up and running. Initially created as an Unreal Development Kit prototype before games such as Sanctum or Orcs Must Die loomed large on our collective indie radars, the characterful Dungeon Defenders was slated for a release around this time last year. But suddenly… something happened. Something bad. Yep - Microsoft and a bankrupt third-party publisher happened, that’s what.

Fortunately the Trendy devs were able to keep their heads above water by releasing an iOS and Android miniversion – Dungeon Defenders: First Wave – while the console and PC side of things was being resolved. The wait has been a strain but now we can look forward to the action beginning later this month – on the 18th for PSN and the 19th for PC digital platforms like Steam, Impulse, D2D and GamersGate. No doubt this will bolster the already impressive-looking launch title lineup for Sony’s PSVita handheld, something they arguably need to make people forget the events of earlier in the year…

But I digress. I’m hyped again, even though I didn’t think I would be after having to wait this long (yes, I’m an impatient git who frequently demands instant gratification). Roll on the 19th!

Once again it was The Gnome’s Lair that enlightened me with the knowledge of this particularly sparkly treasure, and I can safely say the game’s creator nyarlu labs (also known as brandon and, on Twitter, @cucumberoneye) has played an absolute blinder with this one.

This game is nuttier than an almond nutcake with cashew and pecan topping. For an unrelated sidenote, forget about the whole game aspect, it’s great fun to just leave running in the background for amusement purposes since it provides an excellent audio accompaniment to whatever you may be typing: As I write this, I am being serenaded by a beautifully bonkers selection of 8-bit noises upon each cursor key tap and each press of the WASD keys…

But, erm, yes. Read on after the break for some words that actually pertain to the gameplay!

Forget-Me-Not is a game crying out to be put into an arcade cabinet. While the developer says that their inspiration was an obscure type-in C64 game called Crossroads, to a layman it acts like a psychedelic lovechild of Pacman and Wizard of Wor that caught a bad case of fractals in its youth.

You must help your square hero to wend his way through a series of randomly-generated levels in an effort to pick up all the flowers growing within, racking up bonuses and claiming your rightful place at the top of the scoreboard in true arcade style. The more flowers you pick consecutively, the more points you get. There are monsters to dodge, of course, but otherwise it’s perfectly simple! Hold on, though, I feel a “but” coming on…

To complete a level you still need to grab the key to the level exit, probably from one of the enemies that decided to start lugging it around behind them. Apart from having mundane, lock-opening properties, the key is also quite handy for protecting yourself where you have to travel down a wrapping corridor – since it’s apparently made of laserproof metal, your constantly-fired bullets will fizzle harmlessly on it, rather than burning right through your backside.

As you dash and weave around the chaos that inevitably erupts around you, there’s a neat mechanic of wall-grinding that heats you up, making you whiz along at a nippier rate and letting you bosh enemies up close and personal by crashing into them. A useful thing, and sometimes the only way to attack certain obstacles.

In the later levels things get downright zany and completely unpredictable as more vicious flavours of enemies start to appear. Some will leave a gelatinous goop behind them encasing the flowers you’re trying to collect; others that look suspiciously like wizzrobes will amuse themselves by flinging mortar-like fireballs of death across the arena; and yet others will go berserk when you shoot them by running off and self-destructing, taking a part of the maze with them. Oho, ha, yes – and don’t get me started on the plague-like diamond wotsits that simply clone themselves everywhere if you try to shoot them…

The mazes of each screen are suitably dynamic. With a steady flow of low-res destruction taking its toll on the architecture it pays to keep your plan flexible as new corridors are created and others become spontaneously guarded by monsters. Through it all, traditional blippy sounds go hand-in-hand with my favourite style of graphics taken straight from the early 16-bit era of “hey, we can do full-on rainbow strobes now!” school of thought, bringing back to mind great times spent with Llamatron on the Amiga. It’s bright, bold, and completely unafraid of being as retro as it gets.

If none of this has convinced you, well, I can do no more except to suggest that you download it now for either Windows or Mac and have a damn good chuckle at some rip-roaringly pure oldschool goodness. You can also support the author and buy it for your iThing of choice for just £1.49 at the time of writing.

It may kill you with a horribly unfair level or it may smile on you with a perfect chain of flowers – either way, Forget-Me-Not should surely be remembered as a unique arcade blaster of rare quality and playability.

Then, swooping through the internet with such speed and stealth that I only heard about it on a chance browse through Twitter, D-Pad Studios released a teasingly short but sweet demo a few weekends ago! Wonderful but frustrating, since I didn’t get chance to play it straight away – you can, though, by grabbing it right here. Lots of folks have since given it a shot and their views and critique have lead to the possibility that there may be a new, refined demo some time soon.

But rather than wait, I decided to go ahead and write this up anyway – how else can I preserve this blog’s true spirit of being weeks behind everyone else? Without any more blather, read on after the break to see how favourably the gameplay compares to the trailers.

The first thing to say is that the demo gives away only as much as it needs to, leaving you with just enough idea of the gameplay to draw you in while hiding its more grandiose plans in the folds of the hero’s cloak. It teases you with hints toward its storyline in a similar way to a kindly but mischievous grandparent offering you the last tasty sweet from the packet, just before they snatch it away for themselves with a gurning grin on their face. And y’know what? I love it for it.

All we know is that our hero, Otus, is a young owl apprenticed to the venerable master Asio in a peaceful realm of floating islands and big clouds. Life is fine and the sun shines brightly, but one day, a horde of sky pirates descend upon his small village of Vellie, wreaking havoc under the orders of an evil pirate commander. With the help of a cast of wildcard characters and his Owl Cloak that allows him to fly, Otus must make a stand against the pirates and drive them back from whence they came.

Although he can run, jump, and fly, Otus himself doesn’t have any way to fight his enemies directly. In a fix he can whirl around with his cloak and knock danger away from him, but his main form of attack is to carry a gunner while flying who can aim and fire at any angle. In the demo this part is played by Otus’s friend Geddy the mechanic, but in the full game there will be several to choose from, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and upgrades.

Best described as an action platform adventure, some have commented on Owlboy as simply being “Aquaria in the sky”. I get irked by such blanket statements when they’re made in a derogatory way – isn’t it allowed for a game to be similar in play style to another? – but I digress. Admittedly, the two games share many things. You run, jump and fly (rather than swim) through a selection of environments, having fun solving a multitude of puzzles along the way, just as you did in Zelda, and in Metroid… and even as you did in Castevania. But let’s get this straight: Owlboy is its own game made unique by several things. As an example, when did you last save your game by smiling at a fish wearing a top hat?

It’s a horrible, cop-out cliche to use the phrase “words can’t describe…” – yet that’s close to what I am forced to say when I try and summon up the lexicon to do Owlboy’s music and graphics justice. They’re utterly stupendous and are created in complete harmony both with each other and with the story that D-Pad have created. The pixel art is on a level that I haven’t seen in any game, let alone one made by an indie team, for a good number of years, and the situation-specific animations breathe life into Otus and his companions along their journey. The music – an often-neglected element of setting the atmosphere of a game – is a memorable, soaring, and heroic arrangement that actually sent shivers down the back of my neck when I first heard it.

To temper this hyperbole, though, it should be said that there are still some rough edges. I found that the dynamic camera was a bit hyperactive for my liking, and restrictive in showing me what I actually wanted to look at; the view distance when moving in any direction was a little short. The game’s beauty also suffers slightly at the hands of the zoom-out effect that happens whenever Otus is flying. There are also some gaps in music and sound effect coverage during certain cutscenes.

Nevertheless, these are things that I’m sure D-Pad have already heard about and will hopefully take on board to polish out before the full game is released – and that day, dear reader, is one I will very much be looking forward to. Indie game of the year? It’s a serious possibility…

Since they’ve been around since slightly before the dawn of time, particles aren’t especially a new phenomenon in gaming. However, over the last year or two, developers seem to have cottoned on to the fact that 3D graphics cards coupled with some clever coding can produce an environment where literally bazillions of the little devils can invade your screen at once – and what’s more, that they can actually be used as a proper gameplay element in their own right!

Enter the two most recent indie advocates of such thinking, Swarm Arena and Ion Assault. Both games wield an eye-watering amount of particles to make them look good and play good. But today, dear reader, I’m here to ask one thing: isn’t it all just a bit of a gimmick?

Ion Assault
Aha! Well, what we have here is a clever particle-based ploy. A very clever ploy, in fact, and because of its cleverness, the ploy succeeds in making you think – not very cleverly – that you’re playing a game that isn’t just a shiny revival of Super Stardust (or any other Asteroids-with-added-enemies title of the last 15 years). The similarities are, after all, blatantly obvious: Kill stuff and get points, kill lots of stuff at once to get extra combo points, then die horribly due to colliding with the one lone enemy that was hiding behind all the explosion effects…

Yet, as if to spite my unreasoning cynicism, this game does something very cool; it makes you feel like a dragon weaving through the chaos of battle, gradually drawing in your breath and then exhaling a storm of fiery obliteration to annihilate everything unlucky enough to be in your aim.

Each arena is filled with a wonderfully fluid cloud of particles that your ship can attract when nearby. As you move around, so you collect more particles, until at a time of your choosing you release them in a concentrated blast ahead of you. Destruction ho! The superheated particles will cook anything they hit, with a satisfying heat glow telling how close an asteroid or enemy is to being kersploded. You can also destroy things by simply by skimming past them while your aura of white-hot particles rages around you like a tornado of berzerker hornets.

Ion Assault isn’t without flaws – it could certainly benefit from another stage or two in the campaign mode to justify the asking price – but otherwise, the real clever ploy here is how well the swimming pool of particles feeds both addiction and frustration. You must move swiftly, aim carefully, and brush within pixels of enemies in order to accrue the highest combos… and while spectacular failures will be frequent, the blissful feeling of success is as sweet as in any of the best shooters I can remember. Nice job, Coreplay.

Swarm Arena
From a game developed by a team we go to this, a one-man production by Simon Galle aka Dedication Games. What trickery could be lying in wait for us here? What traps await us in the cold, unforgiving darkness? And where can I get a cup of tea at this time of night? Far more than anything, this is indeed a competitive arena shooter that’s purer than the clearest mountain spring water… but can its tactical use of particles add enough flavour to make it interesting?

There are no outrageously over-the-top visual effects here, except for the foregone conclusion of the dreaded particle swarm itself; the limited single-player “campaign” – if it can even be called that – introduces you to the theory of the game and how to play it, as well as a few incidental challenges. After you’ve finished this, you’re left to finish off hunting achievements in either the Score Challenge (i.e. the typical endless survival of N. E. Other Shooter) or the Battle Game, a 1v1 duel played to the best of five rounds. It took me the grand total of about one evening’s playtime to fully explore everything the game could offer.

You control a… thingy (technical term, sorry about that) which has a circular area of influence upon nearby particles of your colour that act as bullets to destroy enemy thingies and their retinue of shiny yet evil minions. You can use one of two special powers – Circulate or Shoot – to indirectly control the flow of your particles, though while doing so, your area of influence will slowly shrink, making it more difficult to defend or attack. Circulate will cause particles to spin faster and radiate outwards from you in a spiral fashion, while Shoot simply speeds particles along whatever course they were following, requiring you to “drag” them in the roughly desired direction before activating the power.

The gameplay itself isn’t bad. I particularly liked the inclusion of an AI player that learns from you and which you have to teach to become the strongest AI; it’s not ground-breaking but still quite innovative. Sadly, though, the game is just too flavourless to be anything other than a passing interest. The music is bland and doesn’t fit, sound effects are sparse and, sadly, there don’t seem to be many people playing online. Even were this not the case, £7.50 is sky-high expensive.

Both games take the use of particles in a somewhat new direction and prove that shiny points of light can serve more of a purpose than simply luring you to your death by an enemy obscured by a glowing ball of glare; while Swarm Arena is a respectable one-man production, for the extra couple of quid, it’s an easy choice; I would have to recommend Ion Assault as the superior game. Just watch out for the evil space squid!

Jamie Woodhouse has followed in the trend set by World of Goo and Crayon Physics and decided to run a “Pay What You Want” special sale offer for Qwak. Whatever you decide to pay you’re going to get a lot of fun for your money! Don’t hang about, though… the deal ends on January the 22nd.

Normally you’d be paying £12.99 – still an excellent bargain – but for now you can purchase the PC or Mac version of Qwak for whatever you think it’s worth through  this ordering page. Marvellous!

Many people who submitted their game for the competition this year have posted the feedback they received from the judges on the TIGForums, and some of it is pretty gasp-inducing. For an event that’s become so prestigous in recent years, to see that games might be accepted or cast aside based on a one-sentence critique is really quite an eye-opener. The gory details are right here – you might have to dig in a few pages, but it’s all a stimulating read.

Of course, there’s always another side to the coin – if you are curious to know a little more about how judging for the IGF really works then I’ve got just the article for you. Entitled “Demystifying the IGF Judging Process”, Jens Bergensten (of Harvest: Massive Encounter fame) offers a considerably detailed insight into the proceedings and includes a couple of alternative opinions from Alex May (Eufloria / Dyson) and Michael Rose (editor of IndieGames.com), all of whom are judges in this year’s contest.

I hope your holiday season went well. It’s been a pretty good year for indie games and I’m expecting another great list of titles in 2010. Stay tuned and I’ll try to give my usual sporadic coverage of yesterday’s boring news… today! There’s a ton to look forward to – Fez and a deluxe version of Spelunky for XBLA, Night Sky and the much-hyped-and-might-arrive-soon Cave Story for Wii, and who knows what else there might be for PC gamers!

In any case, we can kick the year off the way we want it to continue with Terry Cavanagh‘s VVVVVV very soon – he’s announced that it’ll be released in just over a week on the 10th of January. It will be available from thelettervsixtim.es and will cost a mere $15 / £9.30ish. Or you can still preorder the game for just $10 (by donating with the Paypal link on the Distractionware blog) until January the 3rd. Great stuff!