Category Archives: Indie

More Indie Hardcore Tablet Action

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XBLA, PSN, and Indie developers, that ship has sailed. Your work was voraciously consumed and heroically touted by a handful of fanatics who truly, deeply appreciated your artistic and emotional contribution. It looked promising with some early successes trending up. But then it flattened. it never got big. It stayed niche. And then it dipped. Part of the issue is that the console that does everything never even admitted on television that it had an App Store. Oops. But also, even if everyone who connected their consoles downloaded your games, the business model in operation would rarely get you a Tesla. Well, maybe one of you. But in general, people’s attention went to the other big console that nobody calls a console. But don’t hate, just think different. Behold your silver bullet, your red pill, your blue ocean – the magical iPad. Or Android tablet device.

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No Taxation Without User Selection

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Ah, taxes. They suck. They were even unconstitutional, until Congress cooked up a Constitutional amendment explicitly permitting the government to tax income. But for the purposes of what I want to talk about today, I’m going to let that go for now. We all have to file taxes or we get Willie Nelsoned. To be fair, the experience has improved. I downloaded TurboTax from Amazon, instead of buying the CD-ROM, although I noticed it was also available on Google Play for Android. I’m not sure I want to do my taxes on a tablet, but hey, choice is good. TurboTax ia also available through the browser, but I’m not sure I want to trust my tax preparation to the cloud. They already know everything about me already, but I’d like to have them jump through at least one hoop to get it. Doing taxes today is easy, but it still isn’t nice. The delivery and automation is 21st Century, but the user relationship is still very 19th Century. That’s what’s in the reticule today.

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The Indie Files: Shank 2

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Shank 2 is the bigger, badder sequel to a running-gunning-chainsawing sidescroller with a Tarantino vibe. That was the one-liner description I used to green light the original game and third party digital publishing at EA. I also signed and managed this follow-up, until I left EA last October. Shank 2 was released today by EA Partners on XBLA, and went live yesterday on PSN, Steam, and Origin, for $9.99. If this were a review, Shank 2 would get a 98/100. If this were a tell-all gossip piece, you’d be reading this on some back alley forum with vaguely pornographic handles and typos. But since you’re reading this on a geek pride blog, you’ll see why Shank 2 is so important to the art of games.

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