It's worth noting that The Onion A.V. Club regularly reviews indie titles like PeaceMaker and The Shivah right next to the dire movie tie-in games.

What, haven't everyone bought this yet? Shame on you, go buy it now!

I didn't realise that Gamespot and IGN don't review this month. That's daft. From a commissioning and content flow point of view indie games provide me with a vast back-catalogue of interesting stuff we can fill our pages with on a slow reviews month. And it gives us and our readers a warm fuzzy feeling.

Go Robo!

"without the typical 'but look, the indie scene!'"

Puts to words some of my own thoughts. I guess I can see the appeal of a gaming club. I too am hopeful that indie games are getting more equitable attention. However it is two steps forward and one step back. Or maybe one step forward and two steps back.

Let me start by saying I think there is a reason why gaming clubs aren't a popular way to discuss games. In a message board discussion you have people who have played the game individually finding each other and discussing it. This is the internet's signature group aggregation: connecting people with a common interest, which in this case is interest in a game. With a book-like gaming club the common ground is an interest in being in a book-like gaming club, not an a priori interest in the game. The act of playing the game and the act of discussing is forced.

Think of why we don't form clubs to discuss blog articles. You don't know what sites I visit besides GameSetWatch... maybe I'm also an IT junkie and read things from Slashdot or maybe I read left wing political webcomics. Forming a club to discuss the blog articles we've all read would be kinda pointless. We don't know each other and we aren't going to have much intersection in the kinds of websites we like to read. The standard comment system I'm using right now brings together people who share a common interest in the article, that's why it works well.

I played the demo and the game is rather terrible I must say. I actually feel nothing but empathy for this developer group and their intentions, but I don't have the space or desire to go into why. I can explain why I disliked the game though. The game is very, very slow. It takes too long to put you into the game. Summarize the introduction ("Robots take care of human colonists in stasis.") and leave the finer details to be revealed in the game. Nothing interesting even happens once you start playing either. What little battling and puzzling does eventually happen during the demo is shallow and not something that would sell me on this game (I pushed a bunch of boxes and pressed 'fight' five or so times). There are a lot of control issues: robot movement is imprecise, you can't change the keyboard arrows to be orthogonal to the screen, the menus aren't intuitive using the keyboard. I also question how much they limited jumping. There is no music for me (is it just the demo version?), speech seems to have a low volume. The game never misses an opportunity to nag you about buying the game. (Cardinal sin!)

I *think* the style of the game is light puzzling+platforming ontop of an rpg system. (I don't really know because I barely experienced anything.) If so they should have taken their pencils and paid more attention Super Mario RPG. All of these mistakes should be obvious.

Okay.. I can tell this post is getting too long. I want to reiterate that I don't have any contempt for Moonpod (my heart goes out to them because I really do identify with what they seem to be about). Earlier today I downloaded another indie demo which does everything in all the right ways. It is polished, nag free and offers so much that I expect to be playing it for weeks (and this is the *demo* I'm talking about). After one play session it was a forgone conclusion that I'd buy the game when it comes out.

I don't why I'm ranting. If anyone reads this I care less that you agree with me and care more that you know I wrote this in good faith. When I see these glowing reviews in pc magazines of a (imho) terrible indie game with quotes like "a great example of what indie gaming is all about" and when I see the momentum of a Kotaku being put behind this game it feels like the attention isn't equitable at all, and that the reason basically boils down to "look, it's indie!".

dude wrote a novel

First Gameclub was great, but it fell apart when they introduced guest speakers. The MTV dude decided to try and make himself look 'cool' to the kids, by slagging off a game he had only played the demo portion of, and the second rambled on about something completely unrelated and ruined the entire chat session. They could also do with editing it a bit better (why leave in: 'XXXX has entered the room' ??)

To some extent I agree with dosbot - the Mr. Robot demo fails utterly because it has too much to do - the game has a steep learning curve. A shame though, you have missed out one of this year's great games, and wasted a lot of time writing a critique of a game you've only played the demo of...