Universal Star Drift (by Squarehead Studios) - Touch Arcade

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=255869

BIG and Heatherwick unveil "vibrant new neighbourhood" for Google's California HQ [feedly]

http://www.dezeen.com/2015/02/27/big-and-heatherwick-unveil-vibrant-new-neighbourhood-for-googles-california-hq/

GoPro: Nate Adams - A New Beginning

GoPro: Supercar Wakeboard

Terraria PS4, Xbox One Launch Trailer

Your Angel Messages for February 23 - March 1 from Doreen Virtue

ellentube: The place for hilarious and family-friendly web videos

ellentube: The place for hilarious and family-friendly web videos

Upload Studio Update for Xbox One - Feb 15, 2015 video - Youtube

Microsoft HoloLens - Windows Holographic - Official video - Youtube

Valve To Put Steam Behind VR Efforts With New Headset | Virtual Reality | TechNewsWorld

Valve To Put Steam Behind VR Efforts With New Headset | Virtual Reality | TechNewsWorld

Valve has shown in the past that it can jump the gun when it comes to new products. For example, Steam Controller -- its gaming controller -- and its Steam Machines entertainment PCs have been plagued by delays. "Valve getting into VR is precipitated by Microsoft getting into this next generation of graphics display," noted Eric Smith, an analyst with the digital consumer practice at Strategy Analytics.

By John P. Mello Jr.
02/25/15 10:04 AM PT

Valve on Monday announced that it's getting into the virtual reality hardware business.

In a terse tease posted to the Web, the company trumpeted its intentions to reveal its SteamVR hardware system next week at the 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Along with the SteamVR notice, Valve also announced that it is looking for developers and publishers to create content for its new VR hardware system.

Also to be demonstrated at next week's GDC will be a refined version of the Steam Controller and a number of living room devices, noted Valve, which operates Steam, an online games platform attracting 75 million active users per month.

Competing for Oxygen

With SteamVR, Valve is joining the ranks of Sony, Oculus -- and soon many others -- in the virtual reality headset market. "There's a lot of VR and [augmented reality] head mounted displays that are coming into market that have been announced, but there are very few available for purchase," said Gartner Research Director Brian Blau.

"That situation is going to change dramatically this year," he told TechNewsWorld.

Since Valve is in the game creation and distribution business, why should it want to get into the hardware? "It's about keeping their users engaged in their service," Blau said. "They're not only going to make great content, but they're going to deliver it to VR users through their own headgear."

In addition to keeping their users engaged, Valve may also be trying to gouge a place for itself in a space that's becoming dominated by large players. "Oculus and Sony are eating up the oxygen and Valve wants a piece of that," Eric Smith, an analyst with the digital consumer practice at Strategy Analytics, told TechNewsWorld.

What's more, Valve, which does most of its business in the Windows PC space, may see VR hardware as a hedge against being outflanked by Microsoft in the games market.

HoloLens Pressure

Microsoft has been dabbling in VR for its Xbox platform, but in the next version of its PC operating system, Windows 10, it's supporting an augmented reality technology named HoloLens. It allows holographic images to be projected on anything. Valve looked into AR in the past, but tossed in the towel on the technology.

Microsoft HoloLens - Windows Holographic - Official video - YouTube

"Valve getting into VR is precipitated by Microsoft getting into this next generation of graphics display," said Smith, of Strategy Analytics.

Although Valve will be demonstrating its VR hardware next week, it has shown in the past that it can jump the gun when it comes to new products. For example, Steam Controller -- its gaming controller -- has been plagued by delays, as have its Steam Machines entertainment PCs designed for the living room.

"You see Valve getting into VR, but I don't know if they're ready for it," Smith observed. "When they came out with their plans for Steam Machine, they weren't ready for it because it [was] still in the embryonic stages."

Weak Track Record

More immediate competition to SteamVR may be posed by the Oculus headset, noted Ross Rubin, the principal analyst at Reticle Research. "We'll have to see how much overlap there is between Oculus and the SteamVR platforms," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Certainly Steam has the ability to get the platform in front of a lot of game developers, and they have a more developed ecosystem," he added.

Valve may also have an edge over Oculus in the game market in another way. "They're laser focused on games," Rubin said, "whereas Facebook, Oculus's owner, has talked about a wide range of things they may want to do with the Oculus platform."

On the other hand, Valve has yet to prove its hardware chops. "Their efforts to develop their own hardware haven't transformed the industry," Rubin observed. "They've gotten off to a slow start."

Valve did not respond to our request for comment for this story.

Blogger cracks down on sexually explicit content after update to its policies - news.com.au

Blogger cracks down on sexually explicit content after update to its policies - news.com.au

IF you have an overly sexual blog, it might be time to change your platform. Source: News Limited

GOOGLE said Tuesday it would ban sexually explicit content or “graphic nudity” on its Blogger platform, asking users to remove the material by March 23.

In an update to its policies, Google said it would still allow nudity “if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.”

The update said users with sexually explicit content may remain on the platform as a “private” blog that can only be viewed by the administrator and persons with whom the link is shared.

Users will also be able to export the blog to another platform if they don’t want to remain on Google, the policy said.

Until now, Google’s policy had banned certain illegal activities including child pornography or paedophilia.

The update by Google comes a year after Twitter-owned Vine made a similar change to ban explicit video clips.

Google’s new policy elicited complaints over Twitter, with some calling it censorship.

Violet Blue, who pens the human sexuality blog tinynibbles.com, tweeted, “Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.”

Another blogger, Carin McLeoud, said, “google’s email about adult content on blogger treats adult content as though it harms people and nothing comes from it.” Twitter user Matt Adlard wrote, “Has #Google gone too far with its self styled #censorship on peoples Blogs?? Are we not adults to decide our own fate and what we watch??”

You would want to hope getting your exploits removed is easier than Sex Tape. Source: Supplied

The move marks a shift for the online venue, which has had a hands-off approach to privacy, largely allowing its 160 million users to police their own forums within certain guidelines such as no child pornography or spam.

The change comes about six months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to social media sites including Twitter and Reddit.

A posting on the site, signed by Reddit executives including CEO Ellen Pao, said the shift is an effort to “help grow reddit for the next 10 years and beyond.”

Effective March 10, any photograph, video or digital image of a person who is nude or engaged in a sexual act is prohibited if the subject hasn’t given permission for it to be used.

Anyone who wants an image of themselves removed from the site can email contact(at)reddit.com.

Reddit, owned by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital, did not return a request for comment.

Social media sites have varying policies on nudity. Facebook prohibits images containing nudity altogether.

Twitter doesn’t mediate legal content but recommends that content with nudity or violence be marked as sensitive.

It also lets users flag questionable content for review.

Gorgeous Arch-Viz in Unity 5 – Unity Blog

Gorgeous Arch-Viz in Unity 5 – Unity Blog

Is it possible to dial up the quality level in Unity 5 high enough to make high-end architectural visualizations?

In response Alex Lovett aka @heliosdoublesix built this gorgeous architectural visualization demo in Unity 5.

It makes good use of the real-time global illumination feature, physically based shading, reflection probes , HDR environment lighting, the linear lighting pipeline and a 

It makes good use of the real-time global illumination feature, physically based shading, reflection probes , HDR environment lighting, the linear lighting pipeline and a slew of post-effects all in order to achieve the necessary visual fidelity expected in an architectural visualization.

The aim was to push for quality, so very high resolution textures were used and the model has just over 1 million faces.

There is no baked lighting in this scene

The first part of the demo has a fast moving sun. The second part has more localized lighting; a spot light from a fellow maintenance robot lights up the environment in addition to the headlight of the robot the viewer is piloting. In both parts there is considerable environment lighting.

Due to how the scene is laid out, there is a lot of bounced lighting and also quite distinct penumbrae caused by indirect lighting. For example, the v-shaped columns cast a very sharply defined indirect shadow onto the ceiling, which is especially visible in the night time part of the video.

Using high resolution real-time lightmaps

When the lighting changes, these penumbrae and the overall lighting gradients have to change significantly. In order to do this with global illumination, the Enlighten powered real-time lightmaps feature was employed. Traditionally, Enlighten is used in-game at relatively low resolutions (1-2 pixels per meter). This works well because the bounced lighting is generally quite low-frequency.

In this demo, a much higher density is used to capture the fine details in the lighting. An overall density of 5 pixels per meter was used. There is about 1.5 million texels in the real-time lightmaps in total. In the resolution screenshot below you get a sense of the density in relation to the scene size.

At this resolution, the precompute time spent was about 2.5 hrs. The scene is automatically split into systems in order to make the precompute phase parallelizable. This particular level was split into 261 systems. The critical path through the precompute (i.e. the sum of the most expensive job in each stage along the pipeline) is about 6 minutes. So there are significant gains to be made by making the precompute distributed. And indeed going forward, one of the things we will address is distribution of the GI pipeline across multiple computers and in the cloud. We will look into this early in the 5.x cycle.

See geometry, GI systems and real-time lightmap UV charting screenshots from the Editor below:

Interactive lighting workflow

Once the precompute is done, the lighting can be tweaked interactively. Lights can freely be animated, added, removed and so on. The same goes for emissive properties and HDR environment lighting. This demo had two lighting rigs; one for the day time and one for the night time. They were driven from the same precompute data.

“I’m able to move the sun / time of day and change material colors without having to rebake anything. I can play with it in real-time and try combinations out. For a designer like me, working iteratively is not only easier and faster, but also more fun,” says Alex Lovett.

Lighting 1.5 million texels with Enlighten from scratch takes less than a second. And the lighting frame rate is decoupled from the rendering loop, so it will not affect the actual rendering frame rate. This was a huge workflow benefit for this project. Interactive tweaking of the lighting across the animation without interruption drove up the final quality.

To make this a real-time demo, some rudimentary scheduling of updating the individual charts would have to be added, such that visible charts are updated at real-time, while occluded charts and charts in the distance are updated less aggressively. We will look into this early in the 5.x cycle.

Acknowledgements

A big thanks to Alex Lovett owner of shadowood.uk. He has been tirelessly stress testing the GI workflow from when it was in alpha. Also thanks to the Geomerics folks, especially Roland Kuck.

The following Asset Store items were used. SE Natural Bloom & Dirty Lens by Sonic Ether, Amplify Motion andAmplify Color by Amplify Creations.

ID@Xbox - Independant Games on XBox One - News

ID@Xbox - XBox One Independent Developers - News

How to become invisible (to Google) | Stuff

http://www.stuff.tv/features/how-become-invisible-google



Your voice commands, location and even shopping history are all saved online. Here's how to go off the Google Grid

Just think about this for a moment: somewhere out there, a bunch of 1s and 0s are floating around in a server - specks of plankton in an unimaginably infinite ocean of data - and this is what they sing when they come together:

"OK Google, remind me to buy some nappies and milk after work"

[ SEE WEBSITE FOR GIF IMAGE]

It's no secret that Google Now uses the ethereal power of the cloud to process your voice commands, but you probably didn't realise that all those commands, uttered in your voice, are stored online. And you have the power to access them all.

Before you grab the pitchforks and the 'PRIVACY BREACHED' picket signs, it's worth noting that you have to be logged into your own Google account to access the Audio History list, so you're (reasonably) safe from the prying eyes of the KGB, MI6 and NSA - none of whom are likely to take an interest in your 2am voice searches for industrial-sized bottles of Sriracha sauce.

Google states that "Voice & Audio Activity helps recognize your voice and improve speech recognition", which is why every seemingly insignificant phrase you've whispered into your phone's ear is nestled in the cloud.

You can of course choose to delete your entire voice history and stop voice data collection if you want to. Just hit the settings icon on the top right, and select 'pause' on the next screen. You'll be hit with a warning saying that voice recognition accuracy may suffer, but you can always enable it again whenever you fancy.

[ See website for gif image]

While we're here, it's worth noting that you can view and/or delete your Location Historytoo, which is also stored in Google's ginormous data boxes. Head on over here to see a map of all your movements (assuming you've had location services switched on), and select 'delete all history' on the left hand side.

Hit the settings button on the top right and, as before, you can opt to pause location history. It's worth bearing in mind however that Google Now services - like local weather and travel information - may suffer.

[ SEE WEBSITE FOR GIF IMAGE]

Before you go, you might also be interested in Google History. It's a portal which blends together all of your internet habits,  baring your inner soul on one handy page.

You can see what images you've searched for, what items you've been shopping for, things you've hunted for in Google and even what flights you've taken - quite a lot of powerul information, all told.

You can of course wipe everything clear if the paranoia starts seeping in, and you should know the drill by now if you want the Big G to leave you and your habits alone: settings, pause, done.

USEFUL LINKS

If you ever want to go back and tweak, delete or re-enable any of these settings, then you'll want to bookmark your Google Dashbaord and Account History pages. Enjoy donning your virtual invisibility cloak.

Out Now: 'Overkill 3', 'Age of Sparta', 'Heavenstrike Rivals', 'Prison Life RPG', 'Striker Arena', 'Flop Rocket', 'Roid Rampage', 'Echo Dawn' and More

http://toucharcade.com/2015/02/25/new-iphone-games-february-26th/

Ori and the Blind Forest is almost out of the woods | GamesRadar

http://www.gamesradar.com/ori-and-blind-forest-almost-out-woods/

"Even now, after four years of development, I find myself playing Ori almost every day and still enjoy it so much.” Show-off. The rest of us have had to put up with a lengthy delay to Moon Studios’ console-exclusive debut. But, as director Thomas Mahler explains, Ori’s entire existence can be put down to, almost literally, the waiting game.

“When I worked at Blizzard,” he explains, “we had a mantra that the game will be released when the developers spend more of their time playing it than they do developing it. To me, that’s the sign of a great game. For Ori, we spent years just polishing everything and ensuring that people just can’t put away the controller.”

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That lengthy development, undertaken totally in secret, has allowed the team to craft exactly what it wants – an adventure platformer that at first glance seems totally unfamiliar but, at first touch of a controller, becomes strikingly reminiscent of classic Nintendo and Castlevania titles.

The hour or so we’ve played so far bears that out. Eponymous forest spirit Ori is a joy to pilot, all loping strides and long, lazy jumps, designed specifically for those last-minute ‘I’m going to miss that ledge!’ adjustments. Coupled with the astonishing-looking anime world of Nibel, and a tantalising Metroid-like structure packed with exploration, it’s a game designed to keep prodding you towards the next objective, until you realise it’s 4am, you’re still halfway through your morning Shreddies and you’ve almost certainly missed your uncle’s funeral.

We’ve seen how Ori can spend Spirit Energy currency to drop Soul Link checkpoints (think portable Dark Souls bonfires), and how finding Ancestral Trees offers him the powers he needs to get around. We’ve poked around in the Ability Tree, a set of upgrades - separate to story-specific moves – for Ori and his guide/fairy fireball cannon, Sein. We’ve already suffered at the hands of how ruthlessly difficult the game’s obstacle challenges can be. What we want to know is just how much more there can be in there. 

As it turns out, there’s an entire mechanical twist we’d been completely unaware of before now. “While Ori gains a lot of abilities throughout the game, the environments also allow him to use abilities he didn’t have before,” reveals Mahler. “Halfway through the game, Ori enters the Forlorn Ruins, where he’ll be able to just walk up walls and run over ceilings. I think the gravity mechanics are so well-made that we could have crafted an entire game around just that…”

Bear in mind that this takes place in a single area, one of many across the sizeable map. “We tried to ensure that every environment features something cool like that, something that always keeps the gameplay fresh and engaging,” says Mahler.

That interaction with the world itself seems crucial. Ori’s role as a forest spirit means you’re not just working out arcane ways of removing walls in an old fort to get around – you’re learning how this living world works and, on occasion, stopping it from dying. “At the start of the game, all the waters of Nibel are poisonous and hurt Ori,” Mahler explains, “but later in the game Ori will clear the waters, which allows him to swim to areas that couldn’t be accessed before.” Most games of this ilk are happy to hand you a new fire spell that can be used to melt some ice you saw a few hours before - here, you’re fundamentally altering the nature of the entire map.

The feeling seems to be that Ori shouldn’t just be a simple, albeit wonderfully reskinned, homage to the classic games Mahler and co are fans of; rather taking their core ideas and trying to push them to new heights. And that extends to the more oblique elements of these sprawling adventures, too. Challenge runs and speed runs are a huge part of platformer culture, and Moon wants in on the action.

“It’s absolutely possible to complete the game without ever acquiring a single skill on the Ability Tree,” he says. “None of them are essential to really finishing the game - but they sure make your life a whole lot easier. Also, while Ori does feature quite a bit of story, we ensured that speed-runners could skip most of it and just zip through the game as fast as they possibly can if they were so inclined. Even within our team, we’ve always had competitions about who could solve which area the fastest. We also recently had the first people speed-run the game without taking damage. I can’t wait to watch YouTube videos of people trying to compete with us!”

Ultimately, however, the only way to better what’s come before is to work from basic principles – Mahler is convinced that his game feels better to play than anything else around. “I truly think that our platforming controls are second to none,” he says. “Pixel-precision has been extremely important to us and we wanted to craft something that goes even beyond what other developers have done within this genre! To me, it’s very important that people will still be able to play Ori and the Blind Forest ten years down the road and enjoy it just as much as they did on day one. I still play classics like Super Mario Bros. 3 from time to time - I truly think that Ori will become one of those games.” If he’s promising that much, he can have all the time he needs. It’ll be worth the wait.

The city is the star in Tom Clancy's The Division | GamesRadar

http://www.gamesradar.com/tom-clancys-division-preview/

Thanks to Watch Dogs not being quite as ‘next-genny’ as previously suggested, a lot of hope now rests on the shoulders of Ubisoft’s The Division, with its tantalising mix of MMORPG concepts, third-person shooting, and, of course, realistic car-door-closing action. 

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Most of Ubi’s chatter has been about its fancy Snowdrop engine, which has enabled tiny details such as snow that will rest on characters’ shoulders, then melt when they enter a building. More noticeable weather effects include wind and piling snow, while the advanced lighting engine promises a more authentic day-night cycle in The Division’s apocalyptic take on New York City.

You’ve likely seen the effect that weather (or no weather) will have on the game, in screenshots and videos from recent demonstrations. The chilly clime of a lawless, Christmassy New York probably won’t impact the shooting too much, but it will cause car bonnets to glisten, send particles of snow careening into the frosty air around you and harden puddles up a real treat. It’s hard to relay this point without coming across as sarcastic, but puddles are going to look brilliant this gen. 

Of more note is the promise of high levels of destructibility, with big chunks of items and the environment (including car windows and tyres) absolutely ripe for smashing and puncturing thanks to Snowdrop’s ‘procedural’ destruction. If there’s a tactical advantage to deflating each individual tyre on a stationary car we’re not aware of it, but it’s the little things like this that stick with you.

What’s been missing over the last few months is some concrete details on how The Division will actually play. We might spend the first couple of hours opening and closing every car door we see, examining every snowy surface and scrutinising every available light source, but what will we be doing in the game once we’ve tired of that? We haven’t yet seen much footage, aside from a couple of carefully choreographed missions controlled by Ubisoft’s super-slick demo team.

Here’s what we know. The Division is essentially an MMORPG, only with guns and Tom Clancyisms in place of elves in chainmail bikinis. It’s a squad-based shooter, with other players acting as your teammates, but with loot drops and optional PvP encounters, and an open-world NYC to tramp around in. (It’s Seinfeld: Beyond Thunderdome, essentially.) If Destiny’s ‘shared world’ shooting wasn’t quite as grand as many had anticipated, then The Division is the next big hope to create an MMO that feels truly at home on consoles.

Will Ubisoft pull it off? We’re really rooting for this ambitious look at the future, but answers would be nice.

The best Indie games on Xbox | GamesRadar

http://www.gamesradar.com/best-xbox-indie-games-XBLIG/

Xbox Live Indie Games, or XBLIG as it’s known, is one of the Xbox 360’s hidden gems. Tucked away inside the game tab of the store is a seemingly endless supply of dirt-cheap, small-scale games. Granted, most of them are rubbish Minecraft clones, but there are some classics hiding among all the crap. But now the service has been abandoned in favour of ID@Xbox for Xbox One, you may not have much time left to hunt out these ten essential games and experience all that XBLIG can offer. So get to it.

Mount Your Friends

Price: £0.69 /Developer: Stegersaurus games

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In its short time on this planet, Stegersaurus’ uproarious Mount Your Friends has become the quintessential Xbox Live Indie Game. In a sea of rip-offs, it took something as original, hilarious and gloriously homoerotic as this to stand out. Basically, it’s a two-player game about building a tower. It just happens to be a tower of muscle-bound 2D men, whose central appendages swing wildly in the wind.

You control these ‘Friends’ one limb at a time, with each face button on the pad manipulating a hand or a foot. Skilled players can use the unusual physics to fling men to the top of the tower, where it then becomes a game of tactics, as you try to make it as awkward as possible for your opponent to scale the tower and place a man on top. 

A bit like: The Royal Rumble

Bleed

Price: £1.99 / Developer: Bootdisk Revolution

The boxart does Bleed a disservice. It shows a cartoon girl with pink hair and a gun – the type of retro-tinged genericism that fades into the background on XBLIG. But ignore Bleed at your peril – this is one of the finest action games you’ll find on the Xbox 360.

The framework is that of a 2D action game, the type you might have enjoyed back on the Mega Drive or Super Nintendo back in the ‘90s. Yet there’s so much more here. Bleed combines a brilliant slow-motion mechanic with a lightning-quick dodge to move through bullets like a neon-pink Neo, and an endless supply of ammo makes for a 2D platform shooter that is almost peerless in its action. It only takes around an hour to plough through, but the real beauty is in replaying on higher difficulty.

A Bit Like: Viewtiful Joe

One Finger Death Punch

Price: £1.99 / Developer: Silver Dollar Games

If you Google Silver Dollar Games, you’re going to see a hell of an output. And most of it is nonsense of the kind that has blighted XBLIG since its inception. Yet among a sea of dross floats one shining beacon.

If you’ve ever seen that classic gif of the stickman beating up waves of enemies, this is essentially the game of that. A stickman encounters enemies on either side of the screen, and you press one of two buttons to take them out. It’s simple, but the complexity soon ramps up as combos come into play and the game’s ceaseless pace cranks up to near-unmanageable levels. It feels like the lovechild of a Harmonix rhythm action game and a classic fighter. 

A Bit Like: Being Jet Li as drawn by afour-year-old

Hidden in Plain Sight

Price: £1.99 / Developer: Adam Spragg

One of XBLIG’s earlier cult hits, Adam Spragg’s party game is actually an ingenious precursor to Assassin’s Creed’s multiplayer. It works as a kind of social stealth game, where you have to hide, then kill or simply aggravate opponents by pretending to be nothing more than a simple AI nobody.

The presentation is fairly sparse – crudely drawn sprites walk about a screen randomly and, depending on the game mode, you have to mimic them. Hidden in Plain Sight is a proposition completely unique to videogames – its dynamics only exist because of the innate history of this medium. A perfect curio for the videogame-savvy, and a cracking party game. 

A Bit Like: Assassin’s Creed multiplayer

Amazing Princess Sarah

Price: £3.49 / Developer: Haruneko

The bar for platform games on Xbox 360 is high, but dig into the annals of Xbox Live Indie Games and you can find this gem. Ignore the bosom-heavy boxart and tepid name, and you’ll uncover a tricky, clever and remarkably consistent platformer.

Amazing Princess Sarah feels like a relic, a forgotten gem lifted from a bygone 8-bit era. Sarah has to use the scenery to eliminate enemies, or even use the corpses of those enemies to defeat others, all while mastering a level of pixel-perfect platform action. 

If there’s one downside, it’s that it gets extraordinarily, unpleasantly difficult towards the end. If you’re up for the challenge, though, this will push you to your platforming limits. 

A Bit Like: A million 8-bit games that never existed

Quiet, Please!

Price: £0.69 / Developer: Nostatic Software

When most games do their utmost to scream at you with all their might, what a pleasant change of pace Quiet, Please! is. You play as a little girl who just wants a bit of peace and tranquillity in her family home, and will go to great lengths to achieve it. 

Visually, it’s extremely basic, but drawn in a bold and engaging style. Characters look like tiny human versions of the Pac-Man ghosts, and the primary-colour palette stands out beautifully on an HD screen. This sets up a series of clever puzzles where you bounce between the various members of your family, looking for quiet. It’s short, sweet and different. 

A Bit Like: One Foot in the Grave

The Useful Dead

Price: £0.69 / Developer: Bootdisk Revolution

With a name like The Useful Dead, you might be expecting yet another zombie game, but this is a far more literal title than that. You have to use the corpses of the cutesy animals laying about the levels to solve an increasingly taxing series of logic and physics puzzles. It’s joyously sadistic but, more importantly, extremely clever and consistently surprising. There’s never a repeated idea, just concepts that are expanded, pushed in new directions, then thrown out for something better. It’s over before you know it, but doesn’t put a foot wrong along the way. It’s never too tricky, either – the solutions always make sense, and you get a feel for how the game’s internal logic is going to react to your every move. 

A Bit Like: Portal

DLC Quest

Price: £0.69 / Developer: Going Loud Studios

If you’re fed up with the piecemeal way modern games are being delivered these days, then DLC Quest might just be the antidote you’re after. An action platformer with pixel-art visuals is nothing new, but this one leans heavily on parody. The world is full of coins. Lots and lots of coins. 

What can you buy with said coins? DLC of course. New areas, levels, voice packs, weapons, costumes… everything that should be in a game in the first place. It’s hardly the most sophisticated gag, but its wry cynicism is backed up by a genuinely entertaining and well-constructed action platformer. 

A Bit Like: Reddit

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

Price: £0.69 / Developer: sparsevector

You could never get anything this daft in a mainstream game. Despite looking like an edutainment BBC Micro effort from the ‘80s, Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is a hilarious hybrid of roguelike and scrolling shooter.

You take the eponymous wagon on a trip across America, Lewis-and-Clark style, but what happens along the way is mind-blowing. You might simply be zipping through the Midwest, shooting bad guys on horses, you could end up in space, or you may be poisoned by hallucinogenic mushrooms and have to battle your way out of a bad trip. Every playthrough is an adventure, a comedic blast of utter nonsense backed up by a reasonably tight and entertaining shooter.  

A Bit Like: If Louis CK made a videogame

Dead Pixels

Price: £0.69 / Developer: CSR Studios

Okay, it couldn’t be a list of ten XBLIG games without any zombies at all. On the surface, this looks like a stupidly simple shooter. Pixel-art man uses a shotgun to blast pixel-art zombies. Eat, sleep, zombie, repeat. 

Except, it’s not actually that simple. It’s no match for DayZ, but it is a proper survival game, where the ammo is short and the difficulty is high. Yes, you do have to shoot zombies, but you also have to carefully manage resources. Loot a shop and find a bog roll? Well you can probably sell that for enough cash to buy another box of shotgun shells. Or do you keep hold of it in case you need food? It’s survivalism distilled, and a steal at 69p.

A Bit Like: DayZ. At a stretch 

What’s next for XBLIG?

The main development tool for XBLIG, XNA, has been discontinued by Microsoft, and the service no longer exists on Xbox One. Most wannabe devs now use Unity, which Microsoft cheerfully supports for its new console. XNA-proficient creators are still able to use the MonoGame engine to build XBLIG games, though: it has XNA equivalency, and games can be pushed to both Xbox Live Indie Games and Windows 8. The Wild West days of Xbox Indie Gaming might be over, but the quality level is going to be far higher from here on out.