This year’s indie crop is much stronger than last year’s (which was much stronger than the year before).  There are some fantastic games out there.  How do you find the best?

Go to GameTunnel.com, who are doing their game of the year awards!  The best indie gaming site on the web has the best game awards on the web: great (screenshot-filled) writeups on a bunch of really good games you’ve probably never heard of.  (Because really, do you need someone to tell you whether or not Gears of War is better than Zelda?)

So stop reading this!  Click!  Most of the games have free demos, which you can probably even play on some family member’s computer while you visit them for the holidays.

Dead: 750 GB Seagate, chirping, scratching, and thunking. Data recovery tech: “Yeah, we’re getting a lot of those in right now.”

Wiped: 500 GB Maxtor, verified “just fine” by multiple diagnostics.

Not Dead Yet: 250 GB Western Digital, making occasional worrisome noises.

Revived: TeraStation, via necromancy (reflashing the firmware).

Surviving Unscathed:

• All of Ruth’s drives, on the other end of the room.
• A pair of 400 GB Hitachi SATAs (disconnected for the past month).

So, my computer stopped booting yesterday. Or rather, it’d boot, then BSOD and shut down. The 500GB Maxtor that the data was on has diagnosed as totally fine using several different programs.

The backup images for the Maxtor were on a 750GB Seagate Barracuda. I say “were”, because two days ago it started making chirping noises. I can use the computer it’s in for about five minutes before it fails and the computer hangs. Five minutes is, unfortunately, not long enough to restore the image.

The TeraStation is no longer accepting connections, after a reboot following its mysterious “going stealth”.

The two computers with failed drives are hooked up to the same APC BackUPS, and all three go to the same outlet. I’m thinking the outlet is the common thread: I don’t know when the electrical was redone in this house, but it doesn’t look like it was too long after it was built in 1884.

The electrician will be redoing our outlets some time this month. In the mean time, I may switch to working from the laptop full time, from a different outlet. And perhaps I’ll leave my precious desktops turned off.

I really love me some Firefly.  And I think it’s well-suited for a game: Privateering is a good time.

News of the Firefly MMO might have me dancing in front of my computer, if they didn’t follow up the announcement by saying it’s due in 2008– even though they haven’t found a developer for it yet.  That sounds perfectly reasonable, as long the game is going to be a text MUD.

No, Tile Quest is not a spinoff of Adventure Quest.

Raph Koster has a great write-up on computerized movie and song analysis tools. The tools predict commercial success of a given movie spoiler (script summary) or song, respectively.   He also discusses one for songs.  I would love to have one of these for games.  And how cool would that tool be to develop?

Can anyone think of any games with a good “you’re looking for X” mechanic?

Games like Metroid have good exploration. There are cool things hidden about, and enemies that are fun to shoot, so you perform an exhaustive search through the world. Similarly with Diablo: you traverse the area boundaries until you find the gate to the next area, and move on.

What about games in which you need to find a specific thing, which feature something other than exhaustive or random search? How do you nudge the player in the right direction, without making it overly obvious or overly obscure? How do you include a skill element? This can be through an environment, or in a big stack of items, or whatever. Any examples?