It is sometimes said that the little things are where we find the most enjoyment. So on Saturday afternoon at Eurogamer Expo 2009 I joined forces with the lovely Xander from The Independent Gaming Source to check out the Indie Gaming Arcade that was conveniently set up across the hall from the press lounge. 14 of the super-powered orange PCs that were a common sight in the exhibition hall were set up to run some of the most unusual, pretentious and entertaining indie games currently available or in development. The games I want to talk about today were possibly the 3 most interesting of the games available, Joe Danger, Darwinia+ and VVVVV. You can also hear us talking about Eufloria on the Eurogamer NGCast.

Firstly the least graphically impressive of the 3, VVVVV. This is a game based around zero-gravity platforming and graphically reminds me most of the Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy games on the Spectrum. The story of the game is that you’re the captain of a ship which runs into trouble resulting in your crew being teleported all over the place. The game then follows your journey through several single screen challenges that link to form a Metroidvania-like world in order to find them.

The zero gravity aspect basically means that instead of jumping over obstacles you have to flip the ship’s artificial gravity to avoid spikes, enemies and pits. In gameplay terms it’s about as simple as it could get, yet the level design is perfectly configured to that gimmick. One particular standout of the build I played required me to traverse a sequence of moving platforms on the ceiling in order to avoid the enemies in the pits below. Not being able to flip gravity again until landing on solid ground meant pixel perfect landings were often required yet when I died (and I died a lot) it never felt like the game was being unfair. I saw my mistake and always respawning at the start of the section meant that another attempt started immediately.

The Eurogamer build was an alpha build so there’s a lot of time for the game to be revised and refined, but the core gameplay is extremely difficult and a lot of fun. I hope the game can maintain that when it goes into beta, for more info (and a photo of Terry Cavanagh’s awesome beard) have a look at Distractionware’s blog.

Next up is an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game from a crew who used to refer to themselves as ‘The Last of the Bedroom Programmers’, the indie heroes Introversion. At a developer session on Friday afternoon game designers and company directors Chris Delay and Mark Morris talked a packed room through some of the hurdles they’d overcome to get the game to XBLA and to make a real-time strategy game to work on a console.

Playing it in the arcade I can say Darwinia+ controls very differently from the Darwinia I played on the PC and unlike any other console RTS. The most notable quirk is that you control your attack units directly with the left stick and control their fire with the right stick. Engineer units control automatically and go about their business without your influence thus freeing you up to deal with attacking enemies and protecting the helpless Darwinians themselves. I personally enjoyed this control system more than the mouse controls in the original game and only being able to have 4 units on the map at any time should help keep the game simple enough to be a console friendly RTS while maintaining the balance and fun that made Darwinia so enjoyable.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to try the Multiwinia side of the game, however the single player should be more than enough to justify the game’s price when it hits XBLA.

Finally there’s Joe Danger, the first game from Hello Games. This is a crew of former members of developers like Sumo, Kuju and Criterion who’ve decided to go independent. This is their first game and currently has no publisher, no platform and very little hype surrounding it. This I find extremely weird since the game is probably the most marketable indie game I’ve ever seen with a clear mascot character and colourful graphics. It plays like a cross between classic Excitebike and the evil Trials games. The aim being to get to the level goal as fast as possible by jumping over, through and scrambling under the various obstacles set up along your route in order for you to show off your skills as a stuntman. Extra goals are also all over each level, the most enjoyable in my play time being the targets which set off fireworks and send the watching crowd into a frenzy. Hitting these is an exercise in pure precision, though I found that each one could be set off by simply driving onto one and bunny-hopping. Hopefully this’ll be rectified before the game comes out, as falling from a great height to make a perfect bullseye landing on a target is immensely rewarding.

Multiplayer races are also in the game and in the arcade these almost hit Bomberman levels of competitiveness, each jump requiring perfect timing in order to maintain maximum speed. I was also shown the level creator which is probably the best I’ve ever seen. Suitably for a game based around precision jumping the level editor allows for these jumps to be created without endless trial and error. A ramp is placed at the start of the level, then the game is unpaused to launch Joe off the jump. As Joe approaches the ground the game is then paused again and a landing ramp positioned, the game is unpaused and Joe hits the landing ramp perfectly on the first try. Hopefully Joe Danger will be picked up by a publisher soon because whoever from XBLA or PSN gets there first is almost certainly going to have a major indie hit on their hands.

So there we go, VVVVV, Joe Danger and Darwinia+. 3 very different games yet all from a developer type that’s gradually becoming more and more influential. Indie games are becoming more successful and polished thanks to the new opportunities offered by the likes of Steam, XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. There will be turds that come from this hive of pretension but most of the devs have only one goal in mind for their game. They just want it to be fun, and in an industry where the big hitters are inching closer to complete brown realism we really need these games more than ever. So pay attention to indie developers, it was an indie dev who brought us Torchlight after all.