***CURSE YOU, GAMESPOT, AND YOUR LIMIT OF 20,000 CHARACTERS!***

DYAD

DYAD, I'll tell you right now, is easily the most indie game you will ever hear about, and not just from the super-abstract visuals. The designer dropped out of high school, bought some textbooks, and began to construct- yes, construct- his game. DYAD, which is Greek for two, is kind of like Audiosurf meets Burnout meets Tempest on crack. You play as a thing shaped kind of like a dot. You speed through a tunnel and there are different colored "enemies" which are represented as dots and x's and you gain speed by "attacking" them in pairs. For example, in the level I played, the enemies came in two colors, blue and purple. I attacked the first dot, a blue one, and then I attacked a second blue one and was rewarded with a speed boost. However, if I it one of the enemies or I mismatched the colors, I slowed down.

What was cool about this game is that the guy who made it build a machine that spun you in real time as you spun your character. He said it cost him approximately $1800 to build and he put the designs up on his website. What's even more impressive is that he built it improvisationally, building by ear (or, more accurately, by eye), using metal framework, a racing bucket seat, a 5-way racing harness, an electric winch, and a garage door opening battery. It was really cool and added a new layer of depth to the playing of the game.

Raskulls

Raskulls is already out but the developers showed it off, nonetheless. Raskulls, and the mode I played in, had you selecting one of several skeletons to run through a maze to finish before your friends by blasting blocks, boosting through some sort of jello that made you go faster, and using Mario Kart-**** items to trick your opponents. Lot of fun to be had but I'm not sure that it has enough content to warrant a full purchase unless you're like me and "indie" means "buy this now".

F3AR

Not gonna lie, I was really disappointed in this one. I even told the developer I was not happy with the changes they made; what made up for it a little is the fact that he agreed with me that the changes were bad and were ruining the game.

For starters, no more health packs. If you know me at all, this is pretty much a deal breaker (with very few exceptions). The fact that games have the audacity to go from designed for hardcore players who might actually want a challenge in a game to what the developer called "designed for casual gamers who aren't familiar with the genre" is just plain friggin' wrong.

Shotgun is still annoyingly overpowered, enemy AI is worse than the previous game. I'm fairly certain the original Mario Goombas had better AI. Ammo is even more plentiful that the previous game, for which you had the entire supply of the US military. There were no scares to speak of, an impressive amount of attention was diverted from single-player to multi-player modes.

For all this **** I was impressed that the developer was very direct when I asked if this was the finale to the series. He responded, "yes, this is the end of the FEAR series". I was shocked. A developer who was more interested in producing quality than making monEAy (see what I did there?) these days is unheard of. Really, all my complaints were things thatIprefer, and what used to set the FEAR series apart from the mainstream of FPS titles like friggin' CoD.

Shoot Many Robots

EASILY the game that I spent the most time playing. It's just stupidly entertaining to the point where it's unfair. Such a simple concept as shooting lots and lots and lots of robots has so much depth to it. You earn both experience for leveling and unlocking gear and outfits with various degrees of usefulness and "nuts" from your fallen foes which are used for unlocking and purchasing gear and outfits with various degrees of usefulness.

As with the link which I hope you read, it is very, very difficult. My buddy John and I were the only ones who were able to complete the brutally-difficult Survival mode. It got to the point where we were discussing strategy even on the way home from the convention.

Really, there's not a whole lot I can say about this one other that it's just plain fun to play. Track it, buy it, support an indie developer's first 100% independent title, enjoy it. I think it was my personal favorite of all of the indie games shown at the expo and a close contender for my favorite game there period.

Brink

It's hard for me to comment on the game because I was so shocked with how awesome everyone was at the booth. I picked up the controller and our match began. I went Light body type and Medic **** which apparently shocked the development team there. What also impressed them was the fact that I kept all the default settings for the character and weapons. I didn't customize the visual appearance of the character at all and I kept the light medic's default (and awful) SMG and pistol.

Match started and immediately I noticed that I didn't notice the highly-talked about SMART running system. Don't get me wrong, it's there, but it's so well integrated with the gameplay that you don't even realize that it's happening. It just "does". It feels so natural that your character would vault over a railing that was in the way instead of walking all the way around it.

After the match ended, one of the staff came up to me and shook my hand. "What's going on?" I asked.

"You did awesome! I've never seenanyoneplay like that before!" he exclaimed.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Dude, you were incredible! You were the only one on your team doing any work! You were top scoring in the team, top scoring in the match, best medic, most kills, most assists, fewest deaths!"

"Woah..."

"And on top of that, you placed 3rd on the high score board!" (See photo, I kept that high score all weekend). "Your team also lost so you'd have been in first place if you had won and gotten the winning bonus!"

"Woah, sweet"

Then a European man came up to me in a suit. He introduced himself as the CEO of Splash Damage. 0_0

He told me how impressive my playing ****was and asked how I did so well as a medic.

I told him, "never, ever, EVER underestimate the point-whoring ability of the medic ****". He and I also discussed different things about how the game worked, the integration of the SMART system and how it just felt natural to the game, and he asked for any criticism I had on the game. I told him a few things I noticed but I don't want to tell you them because if they show up in the final version I can claim it was me who came up with the idea :D

Overall, highly impressed with how Brink turned out.

Continued in following posts