Indie Game Night 6-24

• Posted on Amanda Wallace
• in Indie Game Nights
• on June 27, 2013
• No Comments.

Monday nights, 6PM, at Awesome Inc., we meet up to expose ourselves to indie games. C’mon out and look at how small game designers are pushing the medium, or bring something we can play!

This week turned out to be more “Let’s Play with Tim’s New Ouya,” so we ended up just playing with that new console, as well as playing the two games Cananbalt and Towerfall. 

More details after the jump.

Ouya

The Ouya is a small, Android based console originally funded by Kickstarter. (In fact, that is how Tim got his.) The console is easily moddable about has a library of 174 games as of launch. Oh, and it can fit in your hand.

The Ouya comes with two controllers, and all the games in the library are “free-to-try” with some of them being “free-to-play.” A few are Android ports, but there are some Ouya exclusives– like the game Towerfall.

Towerfall 

Towerfall is a multi-player couch co-op archery arena shooter. The play style is very similar to games like Super Smash Brothers and Spelunky death match, with a variety of different multi-player modes like death match, headhunters, team death match and team headhunters. Since there were only three controllers, we were unable to experiment with the team death match and headhunter variations, but the vanilla versions were a great deal of fun and once the Ouya was set up most of the time was spent there.

A couple of stand out features are the simple controls, excellent polish, and variety of power ups.

Canabalt

Canabalt  is an endless running game originally constructed in Flash for the PC, then ported over to a variety of different platforms, from IOS to Android to the Commodore 64. The game features a black suited protoganist who runs through an endlessly generated backdrop. The man will run forward no matter what, endlessly accelerating. If you hit an obstacle (crate or chair) his speed will slow and if you miss a jump you die and start over again.

It’s a one button control – you simply press a button to jump.

If you liked what you saw, feel free to come out to Indie Game Night – every Monday at 6pm at Awesome Inc.