Indie Games Summer Uprising hotter than the sun

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games service has been much maligned since its inception, with good reason. It’s the equivalent of a dingy, shoddy restaurant with mediocre food and a waiter that seems like he’ll try to stab you and take your money the first chance he gets, and games from that service have made more money in one week on PC than they made during their entire lifespan on Microsoft’s fun toy.

Back in the winter, a group of enterprising developers decided to try to change this. Thus the Indie Games Winter Uprising was born. Okay, most of those games were mediocre, but there were some gems in the bunch (Epic Dungeon and Cthulhu Saves the World chief among them), and it obviously worked out well enough that said developers would try to do it again.

The imaginatively named Indie Games Summer Uprising launches on August 22nd, and will feature ten games, eight of whose identities are known and two of whose identities you can vote on on their facebook page. Watch the video below, then come on back for my thoughts.

Pretty decent collection of quality looking games here. We have a swell looking fighter in Battle High: San Bruno that seems reminiscent of Capcom fighters of yore, satirical RPG Doom and Destiny, a 3-D canabalt alike that looks awful pretty in T.E.C. 3001, and a neat looking little side scroller in Raventhorne. Plus some platforming goodness in Speedrunner (to be confused with the flash game of the same name) and Cute Things Dying Violently. Plus two other, weirder titles: class based 2-D shooter Take Arms and Train Frontier Express, because we always need games about trains.

What am I voting for for the last two games, you ask? Well hilariously premised Author Adventure gets my vote for having Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen as protagonists. After that, I’m torn between inventive looking City Tuesday, zelda-alike Blossom Tales, and novel Be Stiff, which adds fog of war to an infiltration platformer. There’s others, though. So many others. And markedly few of them suck, which is a welcome change from the usual line up of terrors on Xbox Live Indie Games.

So go check it out!