Share the Wealth Wednesday #2
Okay, folks, it's wednesday! Time to share the wealth! What neat things have you discovered this week to share with the group?
This week, I discovered a site I genuinely resent not having known about years ago. I speak of a treasure trove of time-wasting whimsy called The Independent Gaming Source.
If I had known about this game years ago, I surely would have discovered gems like Cave Story and Spelunky long, long before I did. This website is basically a regularly-updated blog of small, independent groups of game designers and their output. It's really quite staggering to see just how much neat stuff is being produced all at once outside of the professional mainstream, and just how genuinely good some of it is. A lot of what they link to can be downloaded and/or played online for free, and most of the rest of it can be obtained really cheaply.
I have been particularly entranced by an incredibly silly little game called Runman: Race Around the World.
Click to viewDeliberately drawn in the style of childlike doodles, with a soundtrack of folk songs from the early 20th century, this game is just so unimaginably cute as to put a big, sloppy grin on my face every time I play it. The fact that the gameplay is fast, clever and well-designed certainly doesn't hurt either. The video above tells the tale rather nicely; if that doesn't make you want to give it a go, nothing I'm going to say is going to get that job done.
I've only gone back about 13 pages in the blog's archives and already downloaded five games, some of which I haven't even gotten around to trying yet. I'm sure I'll be able to fritter away many otherwise-productive hours with what else is to be found here, and so too, I'm sure, can you.
So! What have you got this week, folks?