Main website: IGG Marathon
Some folks have been playing indie video games all weekend, raising money for the charity "Child's Play", who use video games to help treat sick children in hospitals. Donators nominate which games they want to see played.
The event also has some interviews and there are some game codes being raffled to donators, and plushies being auctioned.
I've been watching it, it's been cool. Particularly the interviews; Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur (who localised Recettear) was very good and knowledgeable about doujin games. There was also the creative force behind Bastion, the composer for Flower, Kyle Pulver who did Offspring Fling, and all sorts of things. Michael "Kayin Nasaki" O'Reilly who did "I Wanna Be The Guy" was also hanging round in chat, so that was fun. He gets an interview later, but I think it might be in the middle of the night for me.
The main message they have to people trying to get into indie game development seems to be "just do it". And, to a lesser extent, "release things sooner rather than later".
What I think have been games that were new to me and stand out:
I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden is one of those games that kills you off at every step. It was very funny to watch them play, it's got that nice balance of repeatedly killing off the player in a cruel way that's hilarious, and is usually a reference to some other game like Super Mario or Bionic Commando or whatever. Kayin made it hard-mode only for this weekend, for this event. There was also someone who is #1 in some of the leaderboards for the game in chat, giving them tips.
Hatoful Boyfriend is described as a dating sim with pigeons. It's a visual novel, which I only came into seeing them play from part way through. They were reading out the parts, and it seemed like a school drama... then someone got killed and there was a disaster which caused them to be shut off from the rest of the world, and it turned into a pretty dark game. I decided to buy myself a copy of the game just to see what happens. It's only 420 yen for the download.
Chef Boyardee's Barkley, Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden - I didn't actually see this one being played, but the description made it sound worth a look. wiki entry
Red Rogue is something like an old ascii roguelike (e.g. Nethack) imagined as a 2D platformer. Seemed cool!
McPixel is really funny; it's like if warioware was a point-and click adventure. Each level is a 20 second attempt to diffuse a bomb, and clicking various things does different actions, and clicking them in a different order has even more effects. Whether you succeed or fail, it's usually funny.
Artemis is a game that I wouldn't want to actually play but seemed interesting. It's a labour of love from a really old uber-geek who they interviewed. When he was 18, he had the idea that he'd love to make a game that was like Star Trek, where a group of friends would make up the bridge of the Enterprise. That was back in the C64 days and the idea didn't go anywhere. So he went and worked in the games industry through the 1990s through to 2003 for high-profile games companies on mainly canned projects, eventually coming back to this idea. It was just good to see that kind of lifelong dedication. It's played with 7 people; 6 people playing on different PCs doing different jobs (e.g. engineer, weapons, scanners etc) and one person without a computer who sits in the middle, listening to what the others say and giving orders. I think it'd be good for people who like to play pen-and-paper RPGs and that sort of thing.
Lastly, they mentioned a game I don't want to see but want to just say "wow, this exists". It's a visual novel called "Gakuen Handsome", where people have incredibly pointy chins. They are so pointy that one person actually gets stabbed to death by another one's chin. O_O
video archive
SignT's list of freeware games / demos featured
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(but I don't have one of those). It'll be Japanese voices and English subs, according to the sales blurb.