Video Games

I'm very interested in gaming and what with working at an online games company and running my own shareware games store I like to keep up to date with gaming news. Being a blogger I thought I would spread the joy and list a few of the gaming blogs I visit daily.

Insert 25

I don't like the name of the site, it doesn't make sense if you're outside the US (well... unless you put some thought into it), but Insert 25 is a very nice video game news blog. It's run by the incredibly prolific Scrivs who has created a vast number of blogs on various subjects. The blog itself features all things gaming including commercial, indie and online games.

Recently Scrivs has announced a number of competitions, one of which gave me the idea for this post (not that I'm posting this purely to try and get free stuff... ).

Independant Gaming Source

This site has a lot more games that I am likely to play. I tend to download a lot of Independant games both for work and play.

For those who don't know independant games are video games that are produced independantly of publishers. This means the person making the game has to do everything from writing the game, to doing the art, to actually advertising and selling the game. In the last year or so indie developers have started outsourcing some of this work (eg hiring artists) but they still control the process themselves.

The fact they control the everything means the games have the potential to be a lot more creative/ do things in a different way than traditional commercial games. This isn't always the case and there are a lot of me too games (eg colour matching games - which I'm guilty of selling), but the ratio of innovation to 'me too copy cat' games is a lot higher in the indie than commercial games.

Jay Is

Updated multiple times every day Jay Is is a big online games fan.

Online games are generally developed in Flash or Director (Shockwave) and can be played in a web browser. This makes the games very easy to get into and gives them a massive audience.