9th Annual Independent Games Festival Finalists

[Lazybones]

http://igf.com/index.html

We're delighted to announce Main Competition finalists for the 2007 Independent Games Festival, from an amazing field of 141 entries this year. Nominations are led by Bit Blot's dreamlike, innovatively controlled 2D underwater adventure title Aquaria, which garnered 4 nominations, including one for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Other Grand Prize nominees included Queasy Games' cleverly designed abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter, which grabbed 3 nominations in total - nominees for the top prize were rounded out by Peter Stock's intelligently complex physics puzzle game Armadillo Run, Three Rings' Wild West indie strategy MMO Bang! Howdy, and Naked Sky's Xbox Live Arcade/PC action-puzzler RoboBlitz.

Other notable IGF finalists grabbing nominations for design-related innovation include DigiPen-constructed first-person shooter set in a world of blocks (which act as both terrain and weapons!), Toblo, as well as NABI Software's extremely original turn-based ragdoll fighting game Toribash. Elsewhere, Best Web Browser Game finalists include Amanita Design's beautifully drawn adventure title Samorost 2, Visual Art finalists also have a plethora of highlights, including The Behemoth's Xbox Live Arcade title Castle Crashers.

Finally, the Excellence In Audio category includes Skinflake's Racing Pitch, in which the player uses a microphone to imitate a car engine in order to power his on-screen vehicle, and Technical Excellence also has a multitude of stand-outs, including Cryptic Sea's physics puzzler Blast Miner and EvStream's multiplayer space title Armada Online.

Might be some neat little games to check out.

[Shayne]

With the release of the XBL developer suite I think we will see more of these Indy games as now most of us code dabblers can get in on the fun with a very low entry point ($99/year)

I was already going to download Roboblitz but I need more arcade points

[Thorin]

Hmm...  Kudos to Microsoft for creating an XBL developer suite and pricing it low.  I hope it's not as crippled as C# Express, though   I'm busy trying to figure out how I can make reports in C# Express, and so far it looks like the only free solution is to use XML and transform it with XSL into a web page that you open in a new copy of Internet Explorer (since that's still installed on all Windows PCs).

Sorry, went off-topic there.

[Shayne]

To be fair, the Express version is well...Free.