The "Slack Motherfucker" of games

Apparently, there's this two-dimension game called Alien Hominid that's supposed to be pretty cool. It's a trendsetter in many ways for independent game developers, sort of the "Slack Motherfucker" of that niche industry. It's now a Playstation game, but it got its start as a "flash game" here (you can test drive it if you can weed through the pop-up ads). Pitchfork ran a column today on the upstart indie gaming community, finiding significant similarities and differences between the indie music and film communities and their gaming brethren.

I'm not really concerned at all about the gaming industry, although I can imagine how indie developers are having a difficult time competing with the three major gaming consules and the big-time developers that work with multi-million dollar budgets. However, I am interested in the prospect of one day having a bit more to choose from when I head to the video game store. Variety is never a bad thing. Right now we have shoot'em up first-person games and racing games and the usual sports games, but we don't really have much else.

One thing is for certain: I'm probably still going to be playing video games a few years from now. If they've stuck with me this long into adulthood, chances are I'll be playing MLB 2012 when I'm 36. Hopefully by then I'll have progressed on to some fascinating first-person crime detective game in which I hunt down a cold-blooded killer not with a machine gun, but with some brain power. What a novel concept: video games for adults whose learning skills were not stunted at the age of 17 when the first James Bond video game came out.