There are- or, rather, were- over 3000 games on Xbox Live Indie Games.
Here are
(And, well, a whole bunch more that snuck onto other platforms but that's less dramatic-sounding).
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Astroman |
Astroman comes to us from Starquail Games, whose better-known work is Tiny Barbarian DX, and this is a very peaceful, chilled-out Metroid-esque adventure, with Astroman himself stranded in deep space and looking for parts of his destroyed ship to get back on his way in one piece. There's no aiming up or down, and your gun actually has limited ammo, but you can pick up additional hit points along the way via hidden capsules, and there's plenty of ammo lying around. It's a little slow-paced, but it feels very relaxing in a strange way- the music is very subtle and understated, checkpoints are frequent and you can retry a section from them as many times as you like, and each area is actually its own separate stage so you won't get lost, although the end of a stage is not necessarily where you'll find a ship part. Ship parts let you explore more of the wold map, slowly expanding you level selection. A nice game to relax with, to take your time playing and take it easy.
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Chieri no Doki ★ Doki |
One of the failings of the XBLIG marketplace is that finding Japanese games takes a bit more effort, as they're almost always at the very end of the list. Some list their names in English, but Chier no Doki Doki Yubemuri Burai Tabi did not. That's why the JP text is there for you if want to grab it! Tasked with saving your dad from a hot springs filled with nefarious ducks, you're armed with a hook that can latch onto grapple points, and a rapid-fire weapon used by latching onto a point and aiming with the thumbstick. So, in a way, a cross between a shoot-em-up (except reversed- enemies appear from the bottom!) and Umihara Kawase (especially as you have momentum and need to avoid falling into the water at the bottom). Throw in a points system, with enemies and bullets deflected with your china dropping fruits you can grab by letting go of the grapple point and leading to extra lives at certain thresholds, and you have a standout title for XBLIG- a very neat and inventive shoot-em-up.
For another look at this game from a friend, please pop over to Lunatic Obscurity!
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Cosmic Caverns |
A little shuttle-em-up, reminiscent of games like Lunar Lander and the Net Yaroze title Gravitation, as Stuntman Dan you have to make it through treacherous space caverns, with infinite fuel but a limited amount of hits you can take before exploding. As you unlock more levels, with a map that usually opens two branches every time you clear a stage, more traps get introduced, including lock-on laser beams, black holes and rival spaceships. A bit like Astroman, it's subtle and quiet, with some odd touches like Stuntman Dan being visible at all times and offering sage words of advice at the start of each level, and the orchestra-esque music throughout. There's not that many levels, but it's definitely worth a look if, like me, you have an odd soft spot for games where you fly a tiny spaceship and have inertia and momentum to deal with.
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Dreams of Witch Town |
As this is Gaming Hell, it would be remiss of us not to include at least one poisoned apple in the bushell, one radioactive clown in the circus, and we've done it here and there on this list. To start with some old-fashioned art tracing, though, Dreams of Witchtown is a very basic platformer with exceptionally light RPG elements that would otherwise be completely unremarkable and unworthy of discussion but for two things. One, your character uses a football as a means of attack for what appears to be no reason, and the two bits of decent character art in the game are traced from the Touhou fighter Immaterial and Missing Power, explained on our Miscellaneous Tat page. We would not be shocked in the least to hear more games nicking/tracing art assets on the service, but this the only one we have proof for. Don't do that, otherwise your bad platformer will get bad-mouthed on a tiny website no-one's ever visited, on a page that's about to go out of date! A fate most foul, indeed.
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Earth Shaker |
Alroght, this is the one cheat on our list, as while the others are all homegrown XBLIG games unavailable elsewhere, this is a bit different- it's actually a port of a ZX Spectrum game- a Your Sinclair covertape game- of all things! There were a few other odd ports like this- Timeslip from PS1's Net Yaroze programme made it to XBLIG, as did ZX Spectrum stablemates Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy- and we decided to shine a light on this one because of its relative obscurity and the fact our American readers may not be too familiar with the ZX Spectrum style. As for the game itself, it's pretty much a Boulder Dash clone, so standard fare for a covertape game, but it includes a few extra things like forcefields and new hazards like fires, and also comes with a level editor to make your own levels. Plenty of Boulder Dash clones out there, even on XBLIG, but there's something charming about the ZX Spectrum presentation preserved in this release.
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Irekae Maho-chan |
Another game on XBLIG hidden right at the back because of its Japanese title, this is an updated version of a game called EXCHANGE POSITION, nominated at the XNA Game Studio Japan 2008 Spring Contest, and it's a cute single-screen puzzler. You have to get to the exit door on each stage, but Maho-chan can't attack- she can only launch a star horizontally or diagonally up/down, and when that star hits an enemy, she'll swap positions with them. It's not super-difficult, but if you are stuck it'll let you skip a stage, and some stages will require a bit of dexterity and understanding of what you can do with your limited mechanics. You can also select any cleared stage, and it actually has achievements- not official ones, but Records available on a separate screen. Perhaps not the best puzzle-platformer on our list- the difficulty does weirdly fluctuate rather than get steadily harder, and the extra lives seem a bit superfluous when you can restart from cleared stages- but a neat idea, executed relatively well.
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Jewelry Master Twinkle |
Aha, this one's easy! A very engaging and challenging puzzler with many similarities to a pet favourite, Cleopatra Fortune, this is probably our favourite game available exclusively on Xbox Live Indie Games. We like it so much, in fact, we already wrote a big thing on it that goes into the game's origins and why we like it so much. So, not much to say here, go and look over there instead!
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Koron de JUMP |
Oh, I really wanted this one to be a favourite! It's an auto-scrolling platformer where you control an adorable girl with a leaf she can use as a parachute to slow her descent. The stages are relatively short and the presentation is very cute, but it's kinda done in by the collision detection, which is more than a little off. In particular, platforms that lower and raise will not automatically move your character up or down, and small moving obstacles like birds are much more likely to hit you than you might think. It's a shame because it's otherwise inoffensive- it looks cute, it's not an original concept but it does what it does fairly well, it's just a lot more unforgiving than it ideally should be, and the death noises are a lot louder than everything else. Oh well! If you have a bit of patience, maybe it's worth a try.
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Lolita of Labyrinth |
Somehow, this game is even stranger than the title would lead you to believe. A bored princess starts exploring the worlds inside a giant painting, taking the form of a slow-paced and awkward platformer. You've got a double-jump, a dash to get under low ceilings, special magic such as thunder to attack foes and a magic umbrella to float, and... A stamp attack, where you stomp on top of fallen enemies (including pigs with dinner carts and pollen-spewing plants) for extra points. The presentation is probably the most striking thing about this one, with a rendered CG sprite style which makes it look like a very late 16-bit game (not a complaint, necessarily) but the animation is very awkward, and the game has ill-fitting jangly guitars for its soundtrack. It doesn't help that the controls are also very floaty and strange with weird hit detection, making the game quite frustrating to actually play with you constantly missing platforms and bumping into enemies you didn't intend to. At least it looks distinct enough from the 1000-or-so other platformers on XBLIG, and that's something, isn't it?
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MagicalCube |
Oof, this one's a bit rough, which is a shame as it could've been a neat puzzler. As a witch-in-training, you have to defeat monsters by playing Bejewelled (or Puzzle Quest, or technically Yoshi's Cookie) by sliding rows and columns along to match 3-5 colours in a row to cast attack spells, avoiding matching icons that have items that help the enemy out, getting the requested matches to earn items to help out, and eventually earning coins to buy new accessories that offer stat bonuses. It's a form that's been seen before and this could've been a cute example but visually the game is far too busy- so much is constantly happening, with the attack spells going across the playfield and enemy effects having their own animations, that it's actually confusing and hard to keep track of exactly what's happening. The slightly tilted perspective doesn't help either, and neither do the controls (you can't use the D-Pad, and it often seems unresponsive even when a Lock item isn't in play restricting your movement). An example of a sound idea just getting a bit botched in execution.
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Mama & Son - Clean House |
A surprisingly clever little single-screen platformer that, unless you're more dextrous than I am, really needs to be played in co-op. Really Shooter and his mama run a cleaning service that shifts into alien-blasting when UFOs invade, and so they must work together and rely on the other pulling their weight to survive. Really Shooter will revive every time after dying and has a machine-gun to blast aliens, but his ammo is limited and he's defenceless without it. Poor Mama (that's her name) can jump, but can't attack and can only be hit so many times before she dies and the game is over. The bullet casings left in Really Shooter's wake, however, can be brushed along by Mama into bins to make new ammo for him, and she can also clean the walls for bonus points. So, Really has to protect Mama, and Mama has to keep Really armed. You can play by yourself with twin-sticks, but really this needs a second player- if you have one though, this is a very neat co-op game, one of the more pleasant surprises on our list.
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My Chabudai |
I'm not entirely certain you can call My Chabudai a good game, necessarily, but it's certainly novel and not something you'd easily find elsewhere. It's a hybrid of a top-down RPG and a... shoot-em-up? You control a flying tea table and, much like Scramble, shoot down enemies with either straight shots or angled bombs and... That's it, really. You can take a few hits before dying, but the real quirk with this one- such as it is- is that you can grab money from destroyed enemies and, critically, keep it if you die. You'll need to do that, because then you can go to the nearby shop and buy upgrades to your
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Ninja Chop!! |
I don't actually remember downloading this. I had trouble finding out the game's developer, or the year it was released, because none of this is listed on the title and the game itself has already been delisted from Xbox Live Indie Games. This game doesn't exist anymore. But here we are, I guess? This is a very simple game where you just press the button at the right time on a meter to chop the milk bottles (or, if you want, human heads) in one hit, a bit like the beer bottle challenge in Art of Fighting, except you get splattered afterwards. At certain levels you also unlock bonus challenges such as knocking a set of dominos over in one blow, but it's just a QTE game, and a weird one at that. This feels like the kind of game you'd play at the very back of a dodgy arcade with the windows blacked-out, but I felt obliged to throw it in here simply because it does not exist anymore. The developers, it would seem, went ahead and remade it substantially for Android as Ninja Chop Z Sakura, so go look that up if you really want.
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Noyd |
A reccommendation from a friend (ta, Kittens), Noyd is by a wide margin one of the most interesting and unique games on XBLIG. Presented in very simple ASCII graphics and with a text-to-speech program giving your nemesis a voice, the titular Noyd is a smiley-face A.I. that challenges you to a selection of gradually-unlocked minigames, including things like Pong and Hangman, and later Asteroids and a tower defense game (. Each game is self-explanatory and simple, but as you progress, Noyd bends and twists the rules of each, forcing you to out-think the overconfident little mite at his own games. I won't spoil the twists here, as figuring them out yourself feels very satisfying, but my favourites were the changes made to Hangman to tax the brain. With its unique presentation, slightly charming if confrontational antagonist, and clever premise, Noyd is an easy recommendation if you want to engage in a battle of wits with a smart-aleck A.I. for your own amusement... Well, more like Noyd's amusement, really. You will lose, and Noyd will win.
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Nyan-Tech |
Now this is a gem, another recommendation by site friend Kittens. A single-screen platformer, it starts off exceedingly simple- get the key, open the door, don't run out of time- but quickly introduces the main game mechanic of using every button on your 360 controller. Platforms and blocks are controlled by holding or tapping the buttons shown on-scren- green blocks are controlled with A, blue with X, and so on. This quickly escalates, leading you to have to hol your controller in strange and unusual ways to keep all the buttons pressed, and this gets even more complicated when you remember you need to use A to jump- plan your approach so the blocks are active/inactive as necessary so you can make it to the exit! My favourite element is the fact that the time only ever advances when you are moving- you have time to think about how to make it to the end (and some stages require you to move only when necessary to get to the end). One of our favourite hidden treasures on the service. We also recommend looking at the developer's other game on XBLIG, Ninja-Bros., with similar controller-bending ideas.
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Protect Me Knight |
If there's only one game on this list you're already aware of, it's probably Protect Me Knight. Developed by Yuzo Koshiro's company Ancient, we call Protect Me Knight a tower defense game but it's a bit different from the norm. Taking on the appearance of an 8-bit game (with a skippable intro that even has you doing a bit of cassette fufu to get the game to run), you pick one of four character classes with different special attacks and set out to defend your princess from monster attacks (as she's not a tower, she walks around and you can even push her out of danger if necessary). Bashing monsters earns you Love Points you can use to upgrade your stats between stages or build new barricades and upgrade existing ones into little towers or even catapults, and, well, that's it really. Don't let your princess die, basically! There's a lot to like here, and there's a reason it's fairly well-known on the service- the presentation is top-notch, the action is constant and at times overwhelming but never totally forlorn, and more than anything the game supports local co-op for up to four players, which is, needless to say, a lot of fun. If you have friends for this, it's a very easy recommendation. Luckily, even when XBLIG goes down, Protect Me Knight will live on in the form of its sequel, Gotta Protectors, on the 3DS eShop.
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Rushing Punch |
Alright, you got me, here's the poison chalice, the game that's just plain ol' bad. There are more than enough terrible games on XBLIG to fill this list a hundred times over, so we had to have a representative, no? A 3D homage to belt-scrollers, Rushing Punch is not very good. The mechanics are very simple, enemies are completely single-minded and will head to you immediately, leading them to gang up on you in giant gaggles and making it much more likely you'll be lamped before you can attack, and the stages are just straight roads hemmed in by walls. At the very least, it's unintentionally amusing, mostly due to the fact that after you defeat all the normal punks on a stage, you have to fight skeletons. Sometimes the skeletons are red, sometimes they are green. It doesn't matter. You will fight these skeletons. That's not the sentiment I expected to end this on, but there we are.
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SHOOTING CHICKEN BrutalSuckers |
This is a very strange one, as in theory it could be a pretty solid run-and-gun, but it feels very scattershot and, well, a little all over the place. A heavily-upgraded rerelease of SHOOTING CHICKEN Revenge (yes, you'd think that was the upgrade, but no), Kohei Gallery's poultry-themed run-and-gun sees you fending off bizarre-looking chickens with a shotgun, grenades, and any extra weapons you can get your hands on. There's a surprising amount of things going on, with a combo meter and a Yakitori Bonus for killing chickens a certain way, but even on the easiest setting, the game is so chaotic and haphazard that it's hard to get a bead on exactly what's happening. The sceen is almost constantly covered with chickens and getting a Yakitori Bonus requires such a specific set-up that it's hard to concentrate on it when chaos is all around. It doesn't help that the special weapons cause the game to drop frames- it doesn't slow down, just skips frames all over the place, making it even more difficult to parse. There's a decent game hiding in here, probably, and perhaps it'll appeal to you if you can deal with the calamity on-screen, but it feels more like a headless chicken than anything else (Arf! Arf!).
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The Tempura of the Dead |
A game that uses a sorta-6-bit look to tell the story of President Thompson (armed with guns) and Sugimoto (armed with a sword) saving America from a zombie infestation, it's hard not to be charmed by this one. Especially if you have a soft spot for KAZe and Meldac's bizarre NES shoot-em-up Zombie Nation, as while the two games play completely differently, visual style-wise the games are very close. Switching between Thompson and Sugimoto at will to use their different abilities, Tempura is almost like an expanded single-screen platformer as you have to hunt down certain Germ enemies with fairly basic movement/combat mechanics, the main wrinkle being that juggling zombie heads turns them into tempura which gives you extra lives you can exchange in the shops for health boosts and new abilities. Thing is, I remember this being fantastic when I first played it, but my second time around was a bit less fun. Mainly, while the game introduces more enemy types as the game goes on, it doesn't feel like it gets more complex, just that you take so much more damage as you progress that you'll be stalled (especially on Stages 17 and 24) unless you buy upgrades. It's hard to articulate but it doesn't feel like a game you really get better at, exactly, your numbers (be it number of abilities or hit points) just go up, which feels weird for a game trying to evoke the spirit of 8-bit action. The jumping controls being a bit fussy don't help (I've walked off platforms to my death when I swear I pressed Jump in time). Not a terrible game, and the setting and story sequences are a superb homage to 8-bit nonsense make it very likeable and charming. I really wanted to talk this one up too, but I guess my memory failed me, alas!
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Vorpal |
You may have noticed a distinct lack of shoot-em-ups on this page, which is strange because the service was rife with them. That's partly because we try not to write about shoot-em-ups unless we can help it (we're bad at it) and partly because many of the more notable ones found homes elsewhere (usually Steam or itch.io), thus precluding them from this listing. While not a sterling recommendation, we decided to pick an oddball one to represent the genre here, in the form of Vorpal, which cuts out the foreplay and goes straight to the bosses, almost like a versus game. The presentation in particular separates it from the others- the only colours used as white, black, grey and red, which should logically mean everything is very clear and easy to see... Except for the power-ups dropped by enemy drones that almost blend into the background, they're that faint. You need them as well, as without them it'll take longer to build your power, and some paterns aren't beatable before time expires like this, denying you points bonuses. Aside from that, a generous life system and a bomb system tied to a meter built up by items and shooting the enemy, this is a fairly standard bullet hell-style game, probably skewing closest to Touhou's style (it even has the same boss location indicator) although the bullet patterns aren't nearly as exciting. Mostly visal appeal here, then, but we wanted to highlight one you may not have tried before.
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Yukkuri no Meikyū |
I can think of no weirder note to end on than whatever the hell Yukkuri no Meikyū is, a game so strange I had to make a US account for it as it's nowhere to be seen on the UK store. Oh, and surprise! It's a Touhou game! Well, a fangame, based on the Yukkuri shiteitte ne! meme from 2ch, with Touhou characters represented as giant disembodied heads with strange expressions. You must wander the maze and punch Yukkuris in the face while they shout "TAKE IT EASY!" in Japanese at you, with different-coloured Yukkuris raising different stats such as attack, defense and 'sight' (which adds a minimap), and fina the exit before time's up. Your performance is then graded and you'll slowly reveal a poorly-modeled Touhou character, and you get a little gallery of them if you fully reveal the model. The main quirk of the game is the treasures chests can contain... People from your friends list! The more Gamerpoints that friend has, the bigger time bonus you get, so better hope you don't get one of your alt accounts. There's really not much more to it than that, but it's oddly compelling, much like Yukkuris themselves.
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