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Best Of The Indies - 19th October 2010

Features

Our pick of the best and worst new games on the indie XBox Arcade community.

Posted 19th October 2010, 8:30am in Games / By Michael J Fax
Here at DIY, it'd be a crime if we didn't look into independent developers and so we're committed to trawling through the good and the bad on Xbox Live Arcade's Indie Community so you don't have to.

Here's our pick of the latest bunch of indie software you can download now!

Bluebones' Curse - 80 Points




This is an amiable little platformer in which you play a skeleton trying to find treasure on Halloween in order to return him to his human form. Filled with joyous puzzles and creepy bugs with human skulls, the best moments come from the curses your skeleton spouts when he dies. Our favourite, a piratey 'Blimey!'.

Blazin' Balls Xtreme Edition - 80 Points




Roll a ball up a track. That's pretty much the premise. But it does it in such an thundering Mega-Drive style way that you're right in there, avoiding pitfalls and direction-changing tiles on the way, pumping the air to the blistering soundtrack. The real thrill is the two-player mode, where you can beat your friends' balls. Something that, outside of Xbox, will have you taken off the Christmas card list.

Avatar Massage Online - 80 Points




This is the future... We'll all be plugged into our Xboxes, getting virtually massaged by avatars. There are a lot of massage games on Xbox, frighteningly, but this one allows you to have your avatar massaged, with the vibration occurring through the controller as usual, from a partner online. In years to come, this'll be a form of tele-dildonics and the controllers will be attached to our genitalia. Just a thought. Anyway, sales from this game go towards funding a new JForce game, so it's not all filthy debauchery.

INDIE GAME TOP PICK - Cutouts! - 80 Points




A little delectable work of genius here. It's a cute platformer that looks as if it's made entirely from fuzzy felts in which you collect buttons and avoid enemies, protected by a renewable flat cap. Jumping on opponents will kill them, but it's possible to collect rabbit eggs and throw them at your spiky enemy thingies. There's a sentence for you. For only 80 Points, you're hard pressed to find anything as charming as this at the moment.

WTF WAS THAT AWARD - Lab Rabbit - 80 Points




A Limbo-esque shadowy puzzle game, possibly or possibly not made by someone with a sheer distaste for long-eared mammals. You guide your rabbit through spiky levels to the safety of the carrot at the end, but there's a worrying delight in skewering it beforehand. Mostly because the blood remains on the spikes when you begin the level again. The physics of the game are awkward, but watching the rabbit crumble and die when it lands on the edge of a platform is curiously appealing. Truly strange.

AVOID LIKE RABIES - Virtual Fireplace - 80 Points




Seems like a mean choice, really – there are dozens of virtual fireplaces to choose from. What's so wrong with this one? Well, the video of the fireplace isn't even de-interlaced, that's what! So on PAL TVs, we're watching what looks like SHIT VHS, and the sole purpose of this game is to provide a realistic fireplace for us to fool ourselves into thinking that HDTV we spent all our cash on has some real heart and isn't just some status symbol we sit vainly at one end of the living room like a golden calf. It's not even HD! There is the ability to have your avatar add a log to the roaring fire, however there's no opportunity to burn him to death and that's where it's missed a trick.

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