Kidzworld's Official Blog

This week’s gaming news post covered Cave Story for the Wii, an independent game that’s recently hit it big. A lot of indie games are awesome like Cave Story, and even free to download or play online! Here are a few free indie games that are just as good as a lot of regular games.

• Spelunky – Maybe the best free game ever made. You explore randomly generated caves for treasure and adventure, and the game just never gets old. I could play this until the end of time.
• Knytt – Explore a new world with sweet platformer gameplay. Give it some time to grow on you.
• RunMan: Race Around the World – It’s been described as “what an even better Sonic game would be like.” That’s some high praise, there.
• Dino Run – Escape the apocalypse! Also, dinosaurs!

Another week of only three games coming out, but still some neat stuff. Pixeljunk Shooter is getting some insanely good reviews. The first thing I think when I see the game, though, is that it’s not exactly a “shooter” at all. It involves shooting, but that’s totally not the point.

It turns out there was a contest to decide the name of the game, back when it was a prototype and was only being called “Pixeljunk 1-4.” People got a look at this video, and got to decide what they thought it should be called. The leading name by votes on their website was “Pixeljunk Elements,” by a long long way. But the developers were afraid that the name wasn’t action-y enough, and that people might think the game was about the weather. Other leading contender names were “Pixeljunk Caves,” “Pixeljunk Depths,” “Pixeljunk Atlantis,” “Pixeljunk S.O.S.!,” and “Pixeljunk Blaster.”

The developers were planning on calling it “Pixeljunk Depths,” but they said that the name was too hard to say. So anyway, they picked “Pixeljunk Shooter,” which received only 8 votes, and said that that name won the contest, which ticked a lot of folks off, and me too a little bit. It’s not that much of a shooter, it’s more about the water/lava puzzles.

Regardless, great game, definitely worth trying for $10 on the Playstation Network.