Humour and ingenious gameplay are giving small independent game developers a fighting chance against the big-budget efforts of the major video game publishers.
At least that was the impression left by Nintendo’s Wiiware demonstration for the gaming press in San Francisco today.
Wiiware is a new downloadable game service for the Wii, similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service. It was launched last month in Japan and arrives in the US on May 12. There is no date yet for Europe.
Gamers can buy the games with Wii points and small developers benefit from not having the prohibitive costs of packaging, marketing and distribution to retail stores.
Nintendo said today that start-ups like San Francisco’s 2D Boy were the quintessential indie developers that Wiiware was designed for.
Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel left Electronic Arts to start the company and still work out of local coffee shops.
They have come up with a physics puzzle/construction game called World of Goo, where Goo balls can be linked together to create towers and bridges and complete tasks.
The Goo balls have zippy, optimistic, endlessly striving personalities and are unaware of the unhappy destination they are heading for at the World of Goo Corporation.
“The game is a metaphor for the horrible interactions we have had with publishers so far,” Kyle told us.
A second presentation was made by Telltale Games, a four-year-old company started by two LucasArts veterans in its old base of San Rafael in the Bay Area.
Its Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is the first episodic content for Wiiware. The game is based on the very funny Strong Bad character and others created by online animators Matt and Mike Chapman at Homestarrunner.com.
Five monthly episodes will be released containing dialogue-based puzzles and lots of retro mini-games such as Snake Boxer 5, where a low-polygon-count boxer punches a snake.
Wiiware seems to encourage a level playing field for developers. Looking around the demo room later, the indie games’ simple graphics matched up well with some surprisingly rudimentary ones from bigger publishers, in particular, Boom Blox, the first game to come out of Electronic Arts’ collaboration with the movie director Steven Spielberg.
It’s all “in the game” play, to paraphrase EA’s catchphrase.
