further reading leads to independent games festival, where you find a lot of more cool game ideas here. one of the games fez even has some of the same ideas of riddle; a little game i was developing the last month (and as usual i ran out of times, as studies startet again), but it is impressing, how you can start with having a cool idea and limitizing yourself on stuff which just makes fun. too bad that the conference (as it takes part of game developer conference) is in the u.s. stupid european game convention had (at least the times when i was there) just the stupid kill-sex-graphics-porn there, which makes fun maybe for short time, but doesn’t really feed the surge for intelligent occupation.
but there is a shine of hope: as the biggest players on the market decided to move their expo (and their senseless games) as “gamescon” to cologne instead of leipzig; maybe the rest (indie!) will refresh the games convention to something which deserves their struggle for several games being named an art.

directly after the last one i found the next cool independent 2d game. from some ea guys who didn’t wanted to do their usual boring stuff anymore; they released world of goo. it’s about putting silly creatures called goos into a big wired network to get them back into their pipeline system. it’s quite difficult to explain; but it makes a lot of fun. the network is braking down when you come into chainsaws, it can fell down, their are different goos, some balloons helping you and a lot of more stuff. interestingly, it’s powered by the ode physics engine; also being used in the powerball game. and even more interestingly, it runs in linux/mac/win/wii. checkout demo, we just had two hours of fun.. ah, also it’s drm free and just 20$.

do not always have to look ugly, at least when there is enough light:

(both shot in dresden)

usually i’m not so in computer games anymore, but this looks interesting. from the zürich school of modern art: feist