We here at WingDamage consider ourselves pretty serious gamers. We play and discuss games on a regular basis; in reviews, opinion pieces, and the occasional anecdote. Everyone here has their own tastes, opinions, and feelings on what makes a quality game.

I believe everyone has a game that they have a special connection with. A game that you can point to, and confidently call it your favorite.

For me, that game is Cave Story. When Cave Story was first released, indie games were essentially quirky mini games you found on the internet. Cave Story’s independent status had no right to be as fun, thoughtful, and intelligent as it’s commercial cousins, Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of The Night.

Yet, Cave Story got it all right: great pacing coupled with tactile shooting and tight platforming. It seemed to come from a completely different universe as other independent games of the time. It is a game blessed with a unique hindsight that its contemporaries don’t seem to share, mixing and matching small elements of various classics games like Gunstar Heroes and the afore mentioned Metroid series.

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Games can grip you for many reasons; good stories and characters, interesting gameplay, or a fun setting to name just a few. With their independent title, Machinarium, Amanita Design has combined a point and click adventure game with traditional puzzles and an entertaining story of lost love and robots.

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Small Worlds is a browser based casual platformer that was created for the Jay is Games “Casual Gameplay Design Competition #6″. While it can be finished in just a few minutes, it is one that has stuck with me for days.

You are alone on what appears to be some sort of science fiction base. The base appears to have sustained heavy damage and it’s up to you to restore power to one escape pod. You do so by traveling into different worlds where missing pieces of the station have been lost.

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Wii gets a lot of smack talk against it for being a kiddie baby system for little baby kids. Attempts at making Mature titles have been met with mixed results.

Bloober Team hopes to change all that with Last Flight, an episodic WiiWare title that mixes fast paced action-adventure combat, old-school beat-em-up flavor, horror, and a dark sense of humor.

Click below the break for more info and screens. Warning: The screenshots do feature blood, though they are of the cell-shaded, over-the-top, cartoon-ish variety.

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“Blueberry Garden” was developed by Erik Svedang with music by Daduk. The game was the winner of the Independent Games Festival 2009 Seumas McNally Grand Prize. This places it in such lofty company as “Crayon Physics Deluxe,” “Aquaria,” and “Darwinia.” So what is Blueberry Garden and what makes it so unique and fun?

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“Today I Die” is one of those games that could not exist anywhere but the Internet. To describe it as simply a “game” is to do it a disservice. I think it would be more accurate to call it an interactive poem. It is short form gaming at it’s best. Something you can pick up and play with little to no instructions, that tells a powerful story in a very brief time frame.

You start with your character bound, underwater, drowning. While you don’t have a time restraint that she needs to be saved within, it’s still a bad spot to leave her.

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"Not Shy About Their Love"

“2 Player Reviews” is a series of articles in which two members of the Wing Damage staff separately review a game, so as to give our readers multiple perspectives on the subject matter.

Player 1 – Jonah “spambot” Gregory

One of the bigger disappointments in gaming over the last several years, for me, has been the lack of new and creative adventure games. They are finally starting to get a small comeback through the efforts of companies like Telltale Games, but for some of us, they never really went anywhere.

The independent gaming scene has seen adventure games flourish. Many fan projects have been started, and many have died, never to be finished. I find it even more exciting when an original IP comes along that can give you not only an entertaining game, but a big dose of nostalgia to boot. Enter Zombie-Cow Studios, home of “Ben There, Dan That“.

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