About

Welcome to Indie Arcade. Casual and Indie games for the hardcore gamer. 

If you’ve heard about “casual” or “indie” games but then gone to any of the portals to see  what the fuss about only to find a bunch of crappy shoot’em ups, match-3 puzzle games and card games that are all basically bad clones of each other and wondered what people are going on about, this site is for you.

There *ARE* good games out there but they are buried under a lot of two bit shovelware created to make a quick buck off of traditional non-gamers i.e. bored housewives and office workers who don’t know any better.  This site was created to cut through most of that crap and spotlight the unique games that are worth the hardcore gamer’s time. You won’t find any reviews of every single indie or casual game that comes out here, there are plenty of sites where you can find those already. If a game is mentioned here at all it’s worth checking out full stop.

While I recognise that there are many entertaining and quite polished “time killer” games, I’m going to avoid mentioning them as usually hardcore gamers want a more involving experience. It’ll take something really special for me to mention any genre that’s regularly cloned because it’s easy i.e for a puzzle game it better be Tetris or Puzzle Fighter good. What you’ll mostly find here are games that a hardcore gamer would find interesting even if it wasn’t an indie game or if it was the concept was executed AAA style. Nowadays there are people that say the industry got its start from “casual games”. I don’t believe that, even if you compare a lot of the polished portal games to older 8 bit and 16 bit games, the older games are better because of the effort put into concept, design and gameplay without high end graphics technology to lean on. There was nothing casual about them despite similarities in 2D style graphics and gameplay. That is why many of them are still the superior games on places like XBL Arcade and remain popular to this day. The games you will find here are the rare few that match the quality of the classics of old in new ways

About Me and this Site

I’m a hobbyist game developer and went to school for game development although that’s currently not the industry I’m involved with. I’d been thinking of doing something like this for awhile as part as my regular blog but decided to make a site dedicated only to spotlighting the gems in the rough after playing Outpost Kaloki on XBL Arcade. However I decided to make it inclusive of all systems (Wii channel and PS3 store whenever I get them, or can find contributors to help) and more of a portal that hardcore gamers can look at that culls through a lot of the me-too clones and quick buck games out there. You can email me at fathamburger@gmail.com which is conincidentally my name on XBLA too.