Xbox 360 Indy Games Erik Would Have Liked When He Was Thirteen

The independent game scene in the Xbox 360 marketplace is always interesting to browse through.  You have genuinely original ideas surrounded by rip-offs.  You have the budding promise of designers who desperately want to be able to get into the larger market buried under people looking to make a game as cheap and fast as they can to make a dollar.  You have creative designs using limited resources, and you have blatant eye candy and covers that outright lie about what the game contains within.

Today, we're going to focus on one of the latter.  Some of the independent games are quite honestly some of the most "mature" games when it comes to sexual content I've seen, passing any "graphic" scene from Mass Effect.  Others are so blatantly going for the "horny young man" demographic that I almost have to respect the fact that they're so honest.  I mean, who do you think the target market is for a game with this as the cover:

Let's dig deeper.

Caution: there's horribly rendered CG breasts barely covered by horribly rendered CG ribbons further on.  You have been warned.

Review: Deadlight

As part of their effort to hold on to people starting to realize that they might be getting more content per their dollar with Sony, Microsoft started the "Games With Gold" program, allowing a game to go free for two weeks (fifteen days-ish) that anybody with a Gold account can have for free.

The only problem is that while Sony's system tends to bring in games that are still relevant, Microsoft seems just willing to skim games that are several years old or Xbox Arcade games that they must feel not enough people cared about.

That isn't to say none of their games in this are good.  I've just found myself more often than not downloading the games just so the system shows "paid" and I can get it in the future if the mood strikes me.

The newest game to become free to download is "Deadlight," a remnant from an old Summer of Arcade event featuring zombies that don't go under the name "zombie" because some worlds apparently don't have the word in their vocabulary and have to make up new ones.