The finalists for the 2008 Sense of Wonder Night were announced on September 16th. Never heard of Sense of Wonder Night? Earlier this year, Nintendo announced a new event that will take place during their annual Tokyo Game Show called Sense of Wonder Night, the Japanese equivalent of a cross between Independent Gaming Festival and Experimental Gameplay Workshop (the organizers said SoWN was inspired by the latter).

Just how awesome is SoWN? One of their criteria for entries states that the entry has to be "A 'terrific!' game, even though the reasons are not immediately clear: A game that at any rate gives a strong impression that 'this is terrific' as soon as you see it." How cool is that?

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So, apparently a lot of things can happen in just a few weeks, which, not surprisingly, makes this place look old and out-dated...but that's besides the point.

So, Where to start? First and foremost, the biggest news this week: Cave Story, the Holy Grail of the Indie Games Movement and apparently the most ripped-off game in indie history, is coming to the Nintendo Wii. So either indie fans will see this move as a betrayal on Cave Story's part of moving towards commercialism, or simply a way to bring in more fans, I hope for the latter, though. More info on the Wii version here.

While on the subject, a new preview for The Underside, former Cave Story ripoff and now almost-a-game-of-its-own, can be spotted in the wild.

What's this? A release date for World of Goo!?!? Something must be wrong! (Those who pre-ordered will get the game a week earlier, muahahaha!)

And that's about it!

TIGSource's latest competition, the Bootleg Demakes Compo, has finally come to an end.

There's a record number of submission this time around, whether it's because this kind of event is getting more popular or because it takes less effort to make a low-res crappy game is beyond me.

With that said, this time the theme is to take a game or series or whatever, turn it into an "old-school" style game. The concept is great, but don't expect anything with out-of-this-world graphics or gameplay this time around.

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IndieGames Blog reports that the PC version of Queasy Games' award-winning abstract shooter Everyday Shooter has been released on Direct2Drive.

What does this mean? It means you can finally "own" the game without having to buy a PS3! They should have done this a long time ago! While this game was originally released for the PlayStation 3, surely there were people who wanted to play this but didn't want to buy an overpriced and at-the-time sucky PS3.

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More Ciellus news! Actually, it was really just a new screenshot, but it's worth talking about anyway!

Since a one-sentence post isn't really fun to read, here's more info about the game...remember how Ciellus was originally made for TIGSource's procedurally generated game contest? This means some elements in the game will be procedurally generated, and in this case, it looks like the terrain/dungeons are it.

Looking at the screenshot, the terrain won't be all blocky a la most adventure games, instead there will be slopes and curves!

And that's all! Until next time.

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A little game called Braid by Jonathan Blow was released on Xbox Live Arcade this Wednesday. The game, a simple flatformer that integrates the concept of time to create wonderful gameplay experiences, received ridiculously high scores from a slew of websites that you'd think this is the next Final Fantasy. Of course, although a PC version is said to follow sometime this year, the fact that it's a XBLA-only game at the moment means I'm not going to be playing it any time soon.

As a result, instead of rambling away with next-to-none first-hand experience of the game, I'm just going to quote some of the other review sites, which will likely produce a review just as interesting.

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Once upon a time, a little project called Ciellus entered TIGSource's PGC Competition. The game was made by the tag team of Annabelle Kennedy (art and music) and Terry Cavanagh (programming).

In the beginning, only artworks were shown. However, they were not simply artworks, they were AMAZING artworks, so amazing, the game's thread, with only concept arts, garnered more replies than all other game threads that came with demos, plans and whatnot. Later, when it was revealed that Ciellus would be a pixel art game, and a subsequent screenshot was shown, the crowd went wild, and expectations probably shot through the roof.

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Hopefully you've all heard of Cortex Command by now (and if you haven't, check it out, you won't be disappointed), the first game to win IndieGames' Game of the Month feature (which for now seems to have stopped after its first installment). Anyway, recently two interviews with Data Realm, maker of Cortex Command, have surfaced on the internet.

The first interview is with Play magazine, a scan of which can be found here. The second interview is with IndieGames, which can be found here. With these interviews, a lot of interesting information on Cortex Command were made available to public, let's see some of them...

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Konjak has finally released Noitu Love 2 - Devolution, and the side-scrolling game comes in a little package of ownage for only $20.00.

The game was a finalist of the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Although the grand prize was snatched by Crayon Physics Delux, that doesn't take anything away from Noitu Love 2. In fact, it would have totally been expected had it won the grand prize.

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TIGSource, one of the premier blogs on independent gaming, has just announced the launch of TIGdb (in case you're curious, it stands for "The Indie Game Database"), a database for indie games that not only provides basic info and download link to indie games, but also lets users rate the games:

One thing that's pretty cool is that we have a rating system. Anyone can sign up for an account and start rating games (out of five stars). Eventually, these accounts will let you do more, like keep track of your favorite games or submit games to the database. The task of populating the database is a monumental one, so it'd be great to crowd-source this... but until we have some controls in place, me and Terry (and perhaps a few other people) will be adding the games. I will, however, take submissions/suggestions very seriously! See this thread for details.

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