It would be easy to miss since it was only on the New Releases for a day or two due to a sudden rush of new games, but Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess just came out on XBox Live Indie Games for 240 MS points ($2 cheaper than the PSP version). It’s simple (not much more complicated than jumping up and not missing platforms), but it’s fun and has rather nice production for an indie game.

You can download it here.

Some new screenshots & a new song to go with one of them.

And here’s a song – Zombie City.

Here are some screenshots of various parts of the world map in Cthulhu Saves the World for your viewing pleasure.

I didn’t have high sales expectations for PlayDead’s first XBLA title, Limbo. Between the higher price tag ($15), black and white graphics, and short running time (most reviews have pegged it at around 3-6 hours), it had “artsy sales flop” written all over it. And yet, 8 days after release, the game has over 200,000 different entries on its leaderboard. If say, 75% of those entries purchased the game (with the other 25% being alternate gamertags) and Microsoft took a third of the revenue, the developers of Limbo are looking at around $1.5 million dollars. Now admittedly, Limbo had a bigger development team than most indie games and it’s been in development for a while, but even still, $1.5 million would be fantastic lifetime revenue for most indie titles, to say nothing about a mere 8 days of sales.

The question then becomes why? Why has this game sold so extraordinarily well? I haven’t actually played the full version (they were out of review codes when I asked and our money’s too tight for me to purchase new games these days, although I hope royalties from Cthulhu will rectify that) so I can’t analyze the entire game, but just from the demo and the Internet, I’ve come up with a few possible explanations.

1 – Summer of XBox Live promotion. Any game that’s featured in Microsoft’s yearly Summer of Arcade promotion gets a huge boost in visibility. Yet this alone can not explain Limbo’s huge success – for comparison, last year’s Splosion Man (another high quality Summer of Arcade game) had 70,000 leaderboard entries after a week – a solid showing, but nowhere near as good as Limbo (and Limbo is $5 more expensive!).

2 – Media Coverage. Coverage by the media is huge for boosting sales, as my own experience has born out (Breath of Death’s sales usually spike whenever a website covers it). Limbo currently has 48 reviews on Gamerankings with an average of over 90%. Both the coverage and the high scores certainly can’t hurt.

3 – Accessibility. Limbo’s controls are very simple – move, jump, and interact. Although I’m sure the puzzles get more difficult as the game goes on, at least in the demo, there was nothing particularly mindbending (pull an object, push an object, jump). Certainly this isn’t Braid with its numerous complicated time manipulation mechanics.

Not only are the controls simple, but the game wastes no time in letting the player play it. No lengthy cutscenes, no big tutorial, just press Start and begin playing.

4 – Cliffhanger demo. The demo for Limbo isn’t long – it took me about 10-12 minutes amd that’s with getting a couple of hidden achievements -  but it ends with a bang and that counts for a lot. I daresay a lot of people who were on the edge ended up buying it just to see what happens next.

5 – Ignored niche. Horror games have become a scarce commodity of late. Resident Evil has abandoned its horror focus in favor of action, Alone in the Dark & Silent Hill haven’t had a great game in years (although Shattered Memories was a step in the right direction), Fatal Frame is Japanese only these days, and we haven’t seen anything new from the Siren team (my personal favorite horror series). Sure, we’ve gotten a couple of new series like Dead Space & Alan Wake, but for the most part, I daresay there is more demand for horror games than there is supply.

Limbo fills in this much desired void in the current gaming market, but not only that, it has some noticeable advantages over the limited competition. One, it’s rated T so children and teenagers who are in search of scares but have parents that frown upon M rated games can purchase it (as well as adults who chose not to play M games for whatever reasons). Two, it’s a 2D platformer so players who lack the skill or inclination to play 3D shooters (i.e. the standard format of horror games these days) can play it with ease.

Any other reasons I’m missing?

A new version of Breath of Death VII was just released to the marketplace today. This version is just to fix a few small bugs that we discovered recently; no new features have been added (maybe next time).

Sorry about the lack of updates recently – I’ve been busy moving to a new place so game development and reviewing has taken a backseat. We finished moving today, however, so expect more reviews and more news about Cthulhu Saves the World soon.

RPGamer.com just posted an interview of yours truly talking about Cthulhu Saves the World. Click here to go read it.

Progress report, we’re up to 123 monsters for Cthulhu Saves the World and we’re not done yet. For comparison, Breath of Death VII had 100 monsters, about a third of which were palette swaps. Cthulhu Saves the World does include some monsters that are variants of other monsters, but the percentage is smaller, and in most cases, they aren’t just palette swaps, but have other variations as well. Not only are there going to be noticeably more monsters in Cthulhu Saves the World, but I really think Bill outdid himself with the quality as well.

To whet your appetite, here is a sampler of some of the monsters we have done yet.

Click on the image to see them at full size.

Remember FMV games? Remember how much fun they were? Yeah, I don’t either, because aside from the novelty factor of the early stuff like Dragon’s Lair, FMV games were about as fun as you would expect watching poorly done movies that keep rewinding on their own would be.

Bloody Death doesn’t buck the trend. Although I applaud the fact that they were able to make an FMV game at all given XBLIG’s size limitations, that’s about all I can applaud them for. The acting & directing are laughable, the plot is non existent, the pacing attrocious, the visual quality of the video is horrible (no doubt to fit under the 150MB limit), and if all that wasn’t bad enough, it’s very obvious that there was not one native English speaker to work on the game so not only are you watching a bad student horror flick, but you’re watching a bad student horror flick with hard to understand accents, out of place swearing, and poor grammar.

Come on developers! Start releasing more good games so I don’t have to review dreck like this. We had a wonderful stretch earlier in the year with great game after great game coming out on XBLIG. What happened?

Just a quick note to let everyone know that my first e-book game, Epiphany in Spaaace, is now available on Kindle for a mere $0.99. It’s the same as the version available on XBox Live Indie Games, except now it’s portable!

You can get it here.

If you enjoy Epiphany in Spaaace, please show your support by writing a positive review on Amazon.