O Indie Night, Your Light is Brightly Shining

It's Christmas, everybody, and I am SO happy right now in my snuggly new pajamas- Holy smokes! Its finally Christmas and that means everybody is giving people gifts of some form, and I figure that since I now have a blog, then my gift to the world should be a post for Christmas.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everybody.

Christmas is a time of happiness and joy for all the little girls and boys. And when I mean little girls and boys, I mean that figuratively to represent the indie game developers and their little games and gamettes. Remember what we had a decade ago? When it came to Christmas planet Earth had two games on ALL of our computers - Snowcraft and Elf Bowling: two comedic, cute, short, spirited and difficult little games. Elf Bowling became known for its sassy gnomes and cartoon violence where Snowcraft was a well made Snowball fighting game that had many levels and became more and more difficult. It's hilarious sound effects also added to the experience. And Bejeweled was no where in sight.

It's crazy how far we've come in a decade, but did you know that you can spend money RIGHT NOW and buy an app for your Wii that helps you plan Christmas parties. Serious. You can create and send party e-vites to other people's Wii's for the price of 500 points. But really, you can do that with any of your favorite social networking devices and some bubble gum if your determined! But someone out there in the world of internet will PAY REAL CASH MONEY for a program that does what other things would love to do for free.









<-- This is my favorite tree decorating sim.




And then, with the brand new cellular market that the iPhone punched open, there are even more games there! Now you have your choice of iPhone holiday festivus, spirited flash games on the internet, or you can even download your favorite holiday directly to your favorite console! (Although Linux thinks that holidays are a waste of processing time and will just tell you to get back to work.) Basically, we've come a long way with this decade. Where we once had only two games to celebrate winter we now have our pick from many many games from many genres (Tower Defense anyone?) on many platforms. It's a beautiful thing.

So, Happy Holidays everybody. Remember the year, and reflect on the decade. Its been a roller coaster of emotions in the game industry with plenty of ups and downs, and I expect that a lot of reaction is negative over 2009 for reasons you all know quite well. We may not be going into the new decade strong, but we are going in together and with how much ground we've gained over the last 10 years, I definitely think that we will all have another joyous decade of gaming, and I can't wait to see you all there.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, love Solon S.

PS: Here's your present loving visitor, have some fun with Snowcraft

PPS: Frances, Merry Christmas, I love you.