If you thought Summer of Arcade was hot, with its five weeks of excellent XBLA releases, then you’re gonna love the Indie Games Winter Uprising (official site). A couple of high-profile indie developers have rounded up some of the top upcoming indie titles and are releasing them all during the first week of December to demonstrate the best the indie service has to offer. The event promises new awesome games every day of the first frost-filled week of December, so pour some hot chocolate, light the fire and start stockpiling Microsoft Points. (Although you won’t need too many; many are just $1.)
The promotion was designed by Robert Boyd (Breath of Death VII) and Ian Stocker (Soulcaster), who initially planned on a cross-promotion for their upcoming releases Cthuhlu Saves the World and Soulcaster 2. They decided to expand the scope, examined submissions from developers and settled on 14 games. The final tally includes new releases by Ska Studios (I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 1NIT!!!1), Radiangames Crossfire 2 and Aphelion: Episode 2.
The duo wanted to do something positive for the community in light of the dashboard debacle and sinking sales. “With so much negative feelings going around – XBLIG is dead! Let’s all bail and develop for other platforms! – I thought something positive that developers could rally behind would be a good idea…We’re hoping that staging a big successful event will help to invigorate sales for the platform overall, as well as being quite the morale boost to the XBLIG development community” said Boyd.
