Xbox 360 Indie games

[toythatkills]

I just said Little Racers STREET!

It's like Forza 4 meets Micro Machines. Utterly tremendous. Has 12-player online multiplayer too, it's the best thing on the service for ages, it's been pretty slow aside from that for the last few weeks. Picbox is brilliant if you like Picross, though.

[charlesr]

lol, cool. You should have bolded that bit.

Added to queue.

[charlesr]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-18-xbox-360-dash-update-gives-xblig-more-visibility

OMG. MS dash in "change to actually be more useful instead of less" shocker.

[charlesr]

All this time I've thought that the Quick Play feature was broken, but it's not. It just doesn't show any XBLIG at all. It shows all the rest of the stuff (lovefilm, netflix, XBLA games), but misses out XBLIG completely. WTF MS??!!??

[toythatkills]

It never has, even on the old dash. It should show the one you most recently downloaded at least

[charlesr]

Strikes me as massively broken functionality - it's there to give you quick access to the stuff you most frequently use yeah? But if it misses out parts of the unit's content then it's useless if you favour that area. Bah. Surely it would take a 5kb update to fix? Unless XBLIG doesn't even count as content or something daft. Like they've hard coded something somewhere.....

[toythatkills]

I don't think they're seen as separate games. If you look in the storage, where each XBLA game has its own folder, there's just one huge XBLIG folder with everything dumped in it. It's as if each game isn't really treated as a game by the console, but a piece of DLC for a game called "Indie Games". I'm pretty sure it's this that stops it being technically possible to allow achievements, too. They'll probably have to rebuild the service entirely if they choose to allow them.

[charlesr]

Ah that makes sense. It probably part of what prevents them from being played without being online too.
Must have seemed like a good idea to someone

[Charlie]

Anyone have any recommendations for good indie shoot 'em ups released in the last 6 months?

Maybe I've overlooked the cream, but I can't remember the last time I played a good indie game of any type.

[toythatkills]

Not much in the way of shoot 'em ups, really. There's Game Type, I guess, but it's not brilliant. Actually, Orbitron. Get that.

Elsewhere in the last six months, Little Racers STREET, Magic Racing GP 2 and Flowrider are all ace racing games. Wizorb, Escape Goat and Evil Quest are cool. Dark Reign Redux is, just, well, it's a PC RTS on Xbox, and works.

It's not been a great six months, but there are bits here and there. I, Zombie is a neat puzzle game, too. Last few months have been all about LRS really, it's utterly fantastic

[Charlie]

Cheers for those. I'll check 'em all out.

[qupe]

Charlie if you don't own Revolver that was reduced to 80pts, that's a decent shooter.

There have been a couple of shooters released in the last week but I haven't got around to trying them yet.

[Charlie]

Excellent. Was tempted to buy it when it was 240 points, at 80 points it's a no-brainer.

[charlesr]

Redshift and Birth Order are worth checking out. Just out recently. The former is fairly traditional but allows you to slow down time for a while. The latter needs you to switch buttons which should be ****, but it's quite addictive.

Shoot1UP and Leave Home are still my fave shooters on XBLIG

[Sketcz]

So I got a 360 and went online and found the indie section.

How in the hell are you supposed to search for Japanese games, with Japanese names, when it only has A-Z and numbers? I was only able to find ちえりのドキ★ドキ湯煙ぶらり旅 by going to Vorpal (a vertical shooter), and clicking the similar button, and then scrolling through until I found it. There it was, the name in Japanese, and yet checking under "C" for chieri (ちえり) yielded NOTHING.

I want to search through it alphabetically. I can read Japanese well enough to read the names of Japanese games. This kind of oversight on Microsoft's part is un-****ing-believable.

How am I supposed to find games I've never heard of if I can't browse?!

It seems it's absolutely impossible to find Japanese games unless they start with an English alpha-numeric in the A-Z-0-9 range. In effect, an indeterminate number of games is obscured from view. I went through the A-Z and the only Japanese games are those that start with English letters - the Japanese only ones are entirely missing!

Bloody hell!