Hooray For The Indie Games Arcade Winner!
Indie Game Of The EG Expo 2011
If you were (or are, as it's still going on) lucky enough to be among the gaming hordes at the Eurogamer Expo you might have noticed a booth with "PC Gaming Since 1873" emblazoned upon it. Inside are twelve games. Some of them are even PC games! We saw them. We judged them.
Find out which one was the winner of our yearly super-indie award accolade, below!
These are the games of the show:
At a Distance - Terry Cavanagh
Blocks That Matter - Swing Swing Submarine
Fotonica - Santa Ragione
Molecat Twist - iwait4 Developers
Pineapple Smash Crew - RichMakeGame
Really Big Sky - Boss Baddie
Rimelands: Hammer of Thor - Dicework Games
Smuggle Truck - Owlchemy Labs
Stellar Impact - Tindalos Interactive
These Robotic Hearts of Mine - Alan Hazeldean
Waves - Squid In A Box
Xenonauts - Chris England
A special thanks has to go to Smuggle Truck, for being hilarious and nightmarish. We should also thank Terry Cavanagh for putting up with Alec and myself failing and jumping in his incredible ultra-lo-fi FPS co-op spatial puzzler, At A Distance. The game is a remarkable feat of cleverness, with the two players never meeting, but nevertheless being forced to work together. I almost don't want to talk about it, actually, because it's one of those games you'll need and want to play without knowing too much about it. Amazing stuff.
Xenonauts is looking fantastic, too - fully faithful to the ways of X-Com, and superbly constructed. We just know it's going to make a certain sector of PC gamers quite happy indeed. I also had a fun time with Stellar Impact, the spaceship duelling game that puts positioning and tactics over twitchiness. It was an genuinely interesting title, and we'll take a closer look at it on RPS soon.
Anyway, the winner of 2011's Indie Games Arcade is.... *DRUMROLL*
...
!!!
Pineapple Smash Crew, by RichMakeGame!
Pineapple Smash Crew is a single-player top-down shooter when you control a squad of tiny cuboid space-marine type dudes who race around splatting aliens with lasers and an array of pleasing turrets/bombs/grenades/missles/super-lasers. The game is what Alien Breed would have been like if it had been made by the Sensible Software team. That is to say that it's like Cannon Fodder in space, with a superb pace and a stylish sense for lo-fi visuals. It's also a game with a grin on its face, and easy to get to grips with (and possibly quite hard to master). We can't wait to get a swing at the full thing, and it's amazing that this the one-man team's first game.
It was a unanimous decision between the judges that Pineapple Smash Crew be game of the show.
So congratulations to Rich Edwards on being so good at making games. And here's a video of the winning title in action:
Thanks to David Hayward for once again tirelessly organising all this stuff.
SEGA, who sponsored the Indie Arcade this year, are offering an extra special prize to the winner, too. So thanks to them! Well done all, it was a brilliant selection of games, again.