The Indie games scene is booming.  Contributors include the poor economy aiding the demand for free and inexpensive games, excellent development tools available at low cost to talented, but not well to do, programmers and artists, as well as simple tools, available to the less skilled, albeit occasionally brilliant, game designer.  Hundreds of these games are available online, many free, almost all available for fewer than twenty clams.  It’s a win-win all over.  With so many games and so many developers, real gems are popping up and some of these babies are getting picked up by huge companies and published for actual platforms:  Alien Hominid, Flow, Chalk, N and Geometry Wars just to name a few.  With the dream of actually making it big finally becoming nascent, more people are willing to give it a go, which means more free games for us, the gamers.  Yee haw, buckaroo.  With so many of these games to choose from, it can be tough to pick the gems out of the massive pile of reeking feces.  However, several publications and a few internet sites are devoted to helping you do this.  Using these I have found my way to quite a few, really incredible games.  One of these is Trackmania Nations Forever.

     The fact that this game is free to download belies the huge amount of high quality content it holds under its very beautiful exterior.  Running at high resolutions and fully 3D, Trackmania is a racing game, with a massive online community of over a million people racing, painting their own cars, and creating murderously difficult tracks for you to race other players on, whether it be hordes of online opponents from all over the world, some buddies on a LAN connection, or just the computer AI offline.

     Yes, for those of you who hate online gaming, Trackmania is fully enjoyable played solo.  The game comes set with a hundred tracks and you can always add to this by downloading more, or better yet, making your own with the game’s easy to use track editor.  There are actually two modes for this editor, Simple and Advanced.  Advanced is for those who want to make incredibly elaborate tracks with all sorts of terrain and obstacles, while Simple is for somebody who wants to bust out a bare bones track and play it in a few minutes.  Also editable are vehicle’s paint schemes.  The paint tool is easy to use, like the other editors in the game, and it’s a lot of fun to customize your vehicle’s look, though the game comes with a wide variety of preset patterns.  Another editor is the replay editor which allows you to edit the replay videos the game can save of your races.

     As I have wrote, there is a lot to be had here for no money at all.  The game is as deep as you want it to be in terms of track design, and it does looks great.  Sure the control’s and physics are simple, but what makes this game a challenge are the zany and complex tracks.

-jr

SCORE: 6.5 Okay and a half