SunBurn 2.0 Game Engine

Xbox Indie Games News and Reviews

Bug Zapper and Hop Til You Drop

Here are two games that seem like good ideas, but the execution is just a bit off, resulting in the losing streak the Leaderboard has been on continuing.  First off is Bug Zapper, which comes from the developer of previous Leaderboard title Zomp 3 (#84 as of this writing).  This time, instead of a Lolo-esq […]

Day 925: Epiphany in Spaaace!

I have no idea how I missed this one. No idea at all. Way back in 1989, before “Breath of Death VII”, “Cthulhu Saves the World”, “Penny Arcade’s Rain-slick 3″, Robert W. Boyd created “Epiphany in Spaaace!”. He did so without his Zeboyd Games collaborator, Bill Stiernberg. From what I understand, Robert writes the story […]

REVIEW: Happy Pong

Much like I know that, pulling up next to a car full of otherwise normal teenage boys doing a pitch-perfect rendition of Katy Perry’s California Gurls, they have to be […]

Day 924: Field Archer

Today’s game is like Pong, except… Just kidding. Yes, you’ll be happy to know I didn’t do a Pong-related game for a third day in a row. Far from it. “Field Archer” is an impressive attempt at an archery simulation. This is not a run-and-gun experience by any means, a lot of thought has been […]

FortressCraft and CastleMinerZ

There were two reasons I’ve avoided the whole Minecraft craze and most of the clones that have followed in its wake.  I figured I would either not get into them, or I would get too into them.  I decided temperance was the best solution.  Then again, I wasn’t expecting hundreds of requests for these reviews.  […]

Day 923: Kube Ball

I spoke too soon. I spoke WAY too soon. Just yesterday I said that I couldn’t imagine what else could be added to Pong, that “A Game of Tennis” didn’t offer. Well, now I do. “Kube Ball” adds a tonne of personality, and some innovative features, that it make it a very different game. For […]

Indie Spotlight: The Novelist, Teslagrad and Among the Sleep!!!

Welcome to the Indie Spotlight, bringing the latest in news, trailers and new releases in the Indie Video Game area. OUYA showing open public E3 event – http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/18/ouya-booth-to-be-open-to-the-public-in-a-parking-lot-outside-of/ Among the Sleep funded – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krillbite/among-the-sleep Kyle plays “Among the Sleep” alpha – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJX8i2qeA4E Cognition – http://www.postudios.com/cognition/episodes.php Reus – http://reusgame.com/buy Filed under: News Tagged: among the sleep, […]

Day 922: A Game of Tennis

Do we have any Gundam fans in the audience? If you’re familiar with the original Gundam continuity (Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam 0080, Gundam 0083, Zeta Gundam, Double Zeta Gundam, etc.) then you’ll know that, in addition to new mobile suits, they like to throw in some ridiculously upgraded renditions of nearly antiquated mobile suits as […]

Day 921: Fish Bait

Genre mash-ups are all the rage these days, and some of them are brilliant. It’s interesting to speculate what might have been created had they been popular in the ’80s. We had Pac Man Jr. (video game/pinball hybrid), but we never got that “Double Dragon” “Tetris” mash-up that the world was (probably not) waiting for. […]

REVIEW: Dinora

A million years ago, in a land very unlike the one I currently reside in, I had a wife. Children. A modest house, a valued trade. I was making a […]

Day 920: Picbox

If you’re like me and have struggled at times to get into a Picross-style game, then “Picbox” may be for you. It has the puzzling gameplay you’re looking for, but with a solid tutorial that makes it easy to get into. If you’re into this style of game (or thought you might want to be, […]

Dinora

Dinora bears a strong resemblance to Terraria, the sleeper-hit that’s climbing up the charts on XBLA, and of which I reviewed the PSN version.  As a reminder of what I felt of Terraria, I was annoyed by its numerous game-killing glitches, then went on to lose 50+ hours to a borderline-addiction to it.  So, I […]

Day 919: Jetpack Rapture

This idea is too crazy to be made up! Well, I guess someone did make it up… but you know what I mean. As for who is doing the “making this up”, it’s Stegersaurus Games Death Closet, “Lots of Guns”, “Tank Strike”, “Mega Monster Mania”, “This is Hard”, “Baby Maker Extreme 2″, “Blow Me Up”, […]

REVIEW: Zombie Outback

One thing that fiction has proved (ignore the silliness of that phrase), beyond a doubt, is that nowhere is safe from the march of walking death. This includes land, sea, space(!), […]

Day 918: Cherry Poke Prison

From the creators of the “Trailer Park King” comes. “Cherry Poke Prison”. It’s actually a side story to that series (with the King actually making a cameo at the beginning). The game is full of the same gratuitous content. Unless you think it’s satire, which I suppose it may be, but that would make it […]

Day 917: Burning Fist of Rage

Looking a bit like “Dynamite Cop on the Dreamcast, and playing a bit like how Irem’s “Vigilante” might have played had it evolved over time to include a combo system similar to modern day arena fighters, “Burning Fist of Rage” is a good looking and unique take on a side-scrolling beat-’em-up. The number of on-screen […]

Day 916: Action Arcade Wrestling

A sojourn back to a 2010 indie game today. Looking a bit like a long lost Atari Jaguar or 3DO wrestling game, and playing a bit like one too (somewhere between the classic Fire Pro Wrestlings for the SNES, and the golden age of N64 wrestling titles), is “Action Arcade Wrestling”. I was never a […]

REVIEW: The Blitz

If considered as a historical project or artistic piece, The Blitz (80 MSP) would fail to engage; its setting is twenty years too early to reference the wholesale bombing of […]

Day 915: 10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2

The makers of “10 Amazingly Awful Games” and “Block Vengeance Alpha” are back with more allegedly amazingly awful games in “10 Amazingly Awful Games Vol 2″. And, again, they’re not (all) amazingly awful. This time the games I recommend looking at include: - Grid Warrior, an implementation of “Space Invaders” that innovates by having enemies […]

White Noise Online

Whoa, Déjà vu.  I’m pretty sure I played something like White Noise Online two days ago, only much more inferior.  White Noise Online itself is a direct clone of a popular iPhone game called “Slender” just like The Monastery was.  I haven’t played Slender myself, nor do I plan on it.  I use my phone […]

Day 914: 21 Ball Snooker Champion

Whether it’s “Avatar Monster Truck”, “8 Ball Champion LIVE”, “9 Ball Champion LIVE”, <a href="“27 Ball Funky Pool”“>”27 Ball Funky Pool”, “Red Tie Miner” (or it’s sequels “Red Tie Miner Zombie 2″ and “Red Tie Miner Zombie 3″), “Dirt Track Racer”, “Missile Escape”, or “Cosmic Caverns”, there are a lot of Maximinus games worth owning. […]

REVIEW: The Monastery

Slender really opened the floodgates for imitators with its release; it was a brilliant scare that capitalized on the one thing that most of us cannot bear in any quantity— […]

Day 913: Pajamorama

This has got to suck, right? Wrong, apparently. “Pajamorama”, by the creator of “Opposites”, is a surprisingly slick 2D fighting game that actually moves pretty fluidly, has decent balance between the powers of all the characters, has suitably imaginative backdrops, and actually supports local, system link, and online multiplayer for up to four people simultaneously. […]

The Monastery

Yea, I know.  The game is called “the monastery” in one of those strange cases where capitalization is denied.  There’s irony in that, because the developers didn’t capitalize on solid 3D graphics to create something worth playing.  The Monastery is just plain boring.  Now if the guys at Rendercode Games were aiming to create an […]

Puts the ‘tron’ in ‘Positron’

Whatever side of the fence you sit on regarding the sequel, arguably some of the best moments in the contemporary Tron film were the visually-impressive light bike scenes early on. While this was […]