The sights and sounds of the Indie gaming community
I have been to Indiecade in the past at the Electronics and Entertainment Expo and every year you never know what you’re going to see. I planned to see three games this year and those games were Desert Child, Disco Bear and Frog Fractions 2. Indie games are the heart and soul of creators and are special so it’s always fun to play these games.
First up was Desert Child, a quirky RPG racer where you play the main character in the rundown desert town. The hub town is small but has everything you need to survive. You can buy/sell ammo that you get/use in races to make money. You can eat at the ramen shop, which you will have to do from time to time. You will have to fix your ride as well as often as you mess it up during the races. The last option is you race! You can get gold during the race so you won’t have to sell ammo but there’s a lot going on during the race so you have to be on your toes. The action is frantic during the desert race and it isn’t just desert, you can also race on water in certain levels. You can shoot the other racer to slow him down but you have a limited amount of ammo and if you don’t win the race, you might have to sell that remaining ammo so it never ends.
If racing in the desert doesn’t do it for you, how about a dancing bear, more specifically a Disco Bear. Disco Bear is a fun game that tells the tale of a bear who loves to dance that gives up the thing he loves when tragedy strikes suddenly. You’ll following Disco Bear on the emotional roller coaster for all of ten minutes (length of the game) for all the highs and lows with all the dancing in-between. Controls are simple with you just pressing the arrow keys while Disco Bear dances and you read the dialogue onscreen. I love the dancing animations; especially the bear skin run and when the run has roller skates on. The music is really good as well but why wouldn’t Disco Bear have good Disco music? It reminds me a lot of the old flash games that use to be on the Internet because it’s short, fun, and simple and those are three things that add up to a winner in my book.
Last up on the Indiecade roundup is a two-for-one special, Frog Fractions 2, which is hidden away in the game Glittermitten Grove. Let’s start with Glittermitten Grove and work from there. This is a city builder where you have a city of fairies and you need to create a city for them. From the looks of things it plays a lot like some of the newer simulation games around now where you need to harvest materials and use that material to build things like houses for the fairies. You will kill the fairies the first go through so you can learn the controls but after that you should get a feel for them. Time to move on to the hidden other game, Frog Fractions 2. That game is built around an old-school looking Dos adventure. There are mini games strewn about in the game as well and I was able to playa few of those. In one of them, you play a type of battle chess where it feels like the board it out to get you. The other mini game I played has you take the role of the “villain” and your trying to get your roommate to move out. The way you do that is be extremely annoying but the annoyance is up to you in game. It was interesting to see and to think about how I have a bad roommate like this and thought about doing a few of these things to annoy him.
Indiecade is different every year and like I said you never know what you’re going to see. This year I saw racing in the desert, dancing bears, and fairies and frogs. This is what makes E3 great!