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
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.
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