Man, who says no one gets anything done Thanksgiving week? We’ve got a metric ton of show for you, including our hands-on impressions of Super Meat Boy, the announcement of the contenders for Free Indie of the Year 2009, and your picks for the most underrated games ever.
Radar: Super Meat Boy Hands-On/Free Indie of the Year Candidates
We had the chance to play an early build of Super Meat Boy. How is it? Fucking delicious. We’ve got all the juicy details, lightly seasoned and pan-seared. Meat analogies.
Windows/Wii, Platformer, Team Meat (Ed McMillen/Tommy Refenes/Danny Baranowsky), Relase date: Q1 2010 – LINK
Free Indie of the Year 2009
It’s time for Free Indie of the Year 2009! Place your votes on the site for one of these awesome free indies we’ve covered in the last year:
Auditorium
Closure
Icycle
Jumpman
Runman: Race Around the World
Small Worlds
Spelunky!
Squid Yes! Not So Octopus!
Star Guard
Walkie Tonky
Free Indie Countdown
#3 – Fetus: Windows, platformer, Ted Lauterbach, suggested by Ph4wX – LINK
#2 – Clockwords: Flash, puzzle, Gabob, suggested by Erin Robinson – LINK
#1 – madnessMADNESSmadness: Windows, Platformer, Andrew McCluskey – LINK
Feedback: Most Underrated Games Ever
Man, some games just don’t get their props. We asked you to give a shout-out to the game you think deserves some love and never got it.
Next week’s question: Which game do you think deserved to be in the running for Free Indie of the Year and didn’t make it? Weigh in with a video or audio comment on www.Bytejacker.com or leave a message on our hotline: (530) 675-GAME
Free Indie Rapid Fire
Captain Forever – Flash, Action, Farbs – LINK
Dungeon – Windows, Platformer, Cactus/Mr. Podunkian – LINK
Focus – Windows, Platformer, Jesse Venbrux – LINK
This week’s music:
arcadecoma.
“what? nothing”
The Game Boy Tree Adventures
LINK
goto80
“wallpaper jam”
bortabra
LINK
iqtu
“marshmallow magic”
embarrassing triangle
LINK
Vote on this week’s contenders and leave a video or audio comment on our site! You can also leave us a message at (530) 675-GAME.
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bytejacker
Become a fan on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bytejacker
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I really enjoyed madnessMADNESSmadness even though it was not by Joep Aben for once *cough cough nudge nudge* (Might wanna check that).
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Sorry to Andrew McCluskey and Farbs for the mix up this week.
missing game: Glum Buster
oh boy, the new meat boy looks quite freaking stunning. but from that video it also seems that controlling it is harder somehow, as if the character has more inertia? is that true? coz that will be causing 200% more frustration for me when i play the game. what saved my sanity while playing the first part was the fact that even the game was tediously hard, the controls were nice and crisp and didn’t add to the headache. also, do the new graphic make it need much more cpu? and finally here’s some recommended dubstep for you guys to help getting rid of the meat boy inhibited sweet frustration – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-0WUryESzI or even better, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5WxZNIpszs
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Control was definitely tight, and the games runs incredibly smoothly, even at this early stage. Two things to note:
1) I am bad at Meat boy
2) Recording video of a game sometimes makes my controls lag a tiny bit.
I ran the game on my Mac (Core 2 Duo w/integrated graphics) under Boot Camp in XP and it was great. We also ran it on a system with a dedicated, 1GB video card and it was totally mindblowing. Tommy’s told me that there are a lot more optimizations in the works, too — I can’t speak to the Wii version, but the PC one is gonna be great.
haha, being bad at meat boy… that can’t be true, such an easy game!
anyway, the cpu info is great news and i’m seriously looking forward to smb2 now. hopefully it will run fine on a netbook.
and you guys should seriously add more games to the free indie of the year vote. if not, you’re so getting another ‘rescue the beagles should have been the free indie of the year’-ish song!
BRING IT!
ok… stay tuned! ;]
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my feedback answer i got your back joe!
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Thanks for the coverage of madnessMADNESSmadness, it’s great to see it won the Free Indie Countdown!
To add to Rolf Soldaat’s comment, I also seem to have been accidentally credited for Captain Forever.
Sorry about that, man! We’ve got you in the right place on the show notes, and I’ll definitely make an on-air correction next week. That’s totally our bad.
missing Game: Canabalt
So sorry for the mistake this week.
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ASCII POrtal should have been an option for free indie of the year. I deserves to be.
Doing PORTAL in ASCII is so retro and awesome!
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THIS
IS
PANDALAND!!!
Missing game(s): Canabalt, AsciiPortal, Au sable, Picma, Tower of Heaven, Elements, Waker, Time fcuk, and many more.
My roster for free indie of the year:
1. Auditorium
2. Runman
3. Small worlds
4. Jumpman
5. Squid Yes! Not so octopus!
6. Star Guard
7. Icycle
8. Closure
9. Spelunkie
10. Walkie Tonky
i vote tower of heaven.
Auditorium, Small Worlds, and Spelunky? How can I possibly choose!
Seriously, why did you NOT include Glum Buster?
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Sorry, that previous video didn’t work. Trying again.
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ok joe, fair enough you are with your family, for thanksgiving, with a screaming mini homosapien in your immediate presence, also acknowledging fans of a game that you made. But I’m still dissapointed in you. For thus far, you have failed to cram star control into any response. ;)
The results definitely surprised Nick and I when we went through them — that’s why I thought the Feedback question this week was definitely appropriate.
There are indeed fewer candidates this year. Last year, the viewer-decided FIOTW was a new development, as was the whole show, so we only had around 20 to choose from. Because that was a semi-manageable number, I figured “Fuck it – let ‘em all have a chance.” This year, with 52 FIOTW winners, we had to decide how to handle it. At one point I had thought about a bracket tournament… but we honestly don’t have the time or resources to organize something like that this year. I finally decided that it would be the top 10, no matter what the results.
That doesn’t mean that the games that were left out won’t get a chance at something – I’ll have details next week.
So out of curiosity, where did ASCIIpOrtal/Time Fcuk fall in the rankings (realizing that since we tied in vote we tied in ranking theoretically)
You know what you guys aught to do going forward is have 4 indies of the week, 3 new ones and the returning challenger. See if any game can keep first place for the longest streak. If that were so I’m guessing we’d still be looking at spelunky.
That could be fun, in a sort of Jeopardy ‘returning champion’ way.
So, Time FCUK and ASCIIpOrtal fell at 13th place. I have a feeling it’s because I ran you two against one another.
Also: I know you like mathemagic, so here’s how we did it. First, Nick compiled two lists: one that was every FIOTW by highest number of votes, and one that was by total percentage of the vote for that week. Looking at the two, they were pretty similar, but ultimately we felt neither was 100% fair. So here’s what we did:
[(total number of votes/10) + (total percentage of the weekly vote garnered)]/2 = score
I did that in Excel, all by myself. I felt very grown-up.
Anyway, there’s really no ultimately completely scientific way to pull it off (at least, not one that my tiny actor brain could figure out). Some weeks we had much lower numbers, some weeks the contenders were more evenly matched than others, some weeks we were mentioned on major websites that sent a different kind of viewer our way… we did our best to make it work as fairly and by the numbers as possible.
And that’s the story of the nominees.
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Anthony’s going to take up programming, you just watch.
@Lawrence: You’re right, I should have added that I was thankful for Star Control 1.
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Yep, you guessed it. This is an imitation of GlaDOS.
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Sorry about the bad quality sound. New Microphone.
To be honest I’m kinda disappointed with the free indie of the year lineup, it pretty much came down to star guard and spelunky for me.
Commander Video! WOOT!!!!
I can’t wait to play SMB and play as him. I love the Bit.trip series. I always wondered this, but why have you guys never reviewed any of them?
It’s definitely not due to any lack of love for the games themselves – sometimes it’s all an issue of timing. I think with both games it’s more been an issue of what else we were doing and what else was released on the same week.
We’re definitely going to get them on the next go-round.
I feel like I may be the only one, but I just had to vote for Small Worlds. There was just something about it that I absolutely loved. But I get the nagging feeling that a more action oriented game will probably win.
Also, do you know where we could find past Free Indie Games of the Year?
There’s only been one so far – Daniel Remar’s Iji.
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Bleh, made lots of errors in my speaking today.
-600 Spelunky rounds.
-Au Sable was “fun” in that I was very very very entertained, although it was really creepy. Like watching a good horror movie.
-Haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving *this week*. We had it back in October.
I think I may have cried a litle bit dude.
Thanks for sticking with us!
ıɥ
Isnt’s Anthony Dead? He killed himself last time. He must Be a ZOMBIE!!!!!
Dungeon is a jerk game. It was fine for me when I played it but if you’re having a hard time playing Dungeon it’s not because you suck, it’s because the game is stacked against you. It samples your system to determine which game you get to play, but doesn’t tell you it’s doing that so that Cactus and Podunkian can hit the message boards and watch people discuss it and laugh.
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POKEMON PINBALL!!!!!!!!!!
…no. You Can’t Possibly Expect Me To Do That. ( http://bit.ly/3WYfHg )
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Hi there! Free Indie of the Year? “Spelunky!”, hands down!! For me, there’s no real competition there (though I really like “Star Guard”). I think it may be, along with “La Mulana”, my favourite indie game. Too bad “La Mulana” is being stripped of its MSX roots for the Wii version; it may make sense from a business perspective, to make it accessible to a larger, broader audience, but forsaking its heritage like that feels wrong…
Captain Forever was simply amazing. I sat down and played it for two hours, not even knowing the time had passed. This game is very addictive and I recommend it to anyone who wants a challenge because it is stupid hard.
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Captain Forever for it’s resemblance to Star Control.
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Seeing Closure on that list is… mildly frustrating. Brings back painful memories I’d been so successful at burying.
But! That said, my vote for indie game of the year had to be Spelunky. Such a joy to play, I’ve spent more time on that game than any other indy in recent memory, if not in history. If it does not win… the world is crazy.
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