The Armless Octopus Guide to Finding Indies on the New Xbox Dashboard

That new Metro Dashboard may be totally Binged out, but it sure hasn’t made finding Xbox Live Indie Games any easier. Thankfully, this handy guide from our very own Taylor Bliss should help you navigate the New, New, New Xbox Experience and track down those indies. Oh, and how is everyone liking the Dashboard? It’s pretty cool and all, but we’re still holding out hope for a blade revival.

Update: You can also go to “Game Type” from the same screen and choose indie games. This is somewhat more straightforward, but actually requires more button presses.

Update 2: The video has been updated to include selecting XBLIG from the “Game Type” menu.

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Posted on December 8, 2011 by Mike Wall in Features, xblig

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.

  • Anonymous

    I believe there is a “slightly easier” way to access the indie channel, however I can’t double check as I’m away from my XBox at this moment. Anyway, as far as I remember you go to the main Games tab, click on Game Marketplace, then to the Games tab, then click on Game Type, and finally Indies.
    I think that’s how it went… still rubbish though.

  • http://twitter.com/AlanWithTea Alan Charlesworth

    Yeah, that’s how I do it. I didn’t even know it was possible to scroll through the centre adverts until I watched this.

    The worst part isn’t how hidden indies are. It’s the fact that we can no longer group them by genre, or even by letter. I used to check the RPG section. I was working my way through it. Now all I can do is go through the entire 2000+ list of indie games and look out for the ones with RPG-like titles.

    Lack of initial letter grouping is even worse. I wanted to download the trial of a particular game beginning with T, so I had to scroll through some 1800 or so games to find it. It’s a horrible system.

    On the bright side, the bit that shows you a list of related games is quite nice. Sometimes the suggestions are way off, but a lot of the time they’re fair.

  • http://www.armlessoctopus.com Mike Wall

    You’re exactly right. I actually assumed that Taylor was going to show that in the video and I didn’t realize about the center slider thing. Either way….Still not great, and the sorting is horrible. 

  • http://www.armlessoctopus.com Mike Wall

    I was shocked by the elimination of categories. Also, it’s impossible to even see what the latest XBLA release is. I went to new releases and it lists Sonic CD, and other unreleased games. As far as the letters go, just use the Bing search. It seems surprisingly quick. Also, the list of games on my hard drive loads SO much faster. It used to hang for about a minute to show my games.  

  • http://twitter.com/AlanWithTea Alan Charlesworth

    Yeah, the speed is a definite improvement. My library used to take 2-3 minutes to load, now it’s about 5 seconds or so.