World of Goo: Indie games win

There are a ton of free indie games you can just download from the net. Most of them are worth the time of playing them. Some are not. A lot of them are well worth the time. Spending 15 minutes trying a game out isn't a big cost for me. It is for some people. 15 bucks on the other hand is a huge deal for a lot of people. So when you get into indie games you pay for you're in a whole other world from the free stuff. When you're playing something for free you're usually playing the cheapest possible production that it would take to try out a game design idea. But when you get into an indie production with cash, now you're talking about a case where that guy with that good idea can realize it with some cash -- he can hire an artist or a programmer and license some software. He'll still keep creative control. He's just using the money to realize his idea.

That's how you get something like World of Goo. The $15 WiiWare game was made by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel -- a couple of ex-EA employees who's office is, as they describe on their website, is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day.

World of Goo is one of the most engaging single player games I've played all year. The playthisthing.com guys describe it well when they say the style is all about spunk. World of Goo makes Braid look horribly pretentious.

The story is ambiguous at first. You know your goal is to build a tower of goo toward a pipe to deliver goo to it though you're not sure why. Maybe it's for an ill purpose. But that's not really important. The gameplay revolves around building physical structures in the warped physical game world. The gameplay is completely fresh. As soon as I started groking what was thrown at me Kyle and Ron further build on and variate the gameplay. It engaged me into a perfect state of flow through the whole game which took me several nights to get through.

This game is one of the best games on the Wii. And it's only 15 bucks. It's a little pricier than going out to see a movie. If you own a Wii you should play this. If not just for the reason of stopping Space Horror Shooter X or Shallow Fun For All from consuming the industry. Why not try something new?