Some truly massive demos this week. Unfortunately, Section 8 is still busy coming down, so you'll have to wait a little for a writeup of that one. In the meantime, enjoy Earthworm Jim HD, Flower and Madden NFL 11.

Hello, and welcome to my indie videogame series. This week’s Indie Corner is about a videogame called Canabalt. Canabalt is a videogame on the internet and you can play it. It is also on them iPhones if you have one of those … which I don’t because Verizon is confusing and does not make any sense. Anyways, you should read on to find out why it is good.

This video is more of a montage of the convention, so you can get a feel for it.  It does feature some quick shots of the games I got to play. I apologize, we did not capture a lot of footage because we were only there for a limited time.

So while it wasn’t completely videogame related, there were some cool new games to try and videogame announcements made at Comic Con 2010. No More Game Blogs was there to cover the event. I will have a full preview of DC Universe up soon – it’s the only game I got to spend a lot of time with. I didn’t get enough time with each of these games to do a full preview, so instead I will just comment a little on some of the games I got to see and play.

Anyway, here's the roundup of the last few weeks' demos, including Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, DeathSpank, Blur and Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Enjoy!

Bit.Trip RUNNER is a 2D platformer created wherein the player takes control of Commander Video. Created by indie developer Gaijin Games, RUNNER is an autorun platformer, meaning the player does not control forward movement and progression is determined by the player’s ability to avoid obstacles. Jumping over, sliding under, breaking through and shielding from numerous obstacles is what separates Commander Video from the finish lines of RUNNER’s 36 levels.

Let me take you back to yester-year, when a chunky, strange, and confusing device arrived: the Virtual Boy. How novel, back then, 3D seemed and how fantastic that you, yes YOU the consumer, could hand Nintendo a wad of cash, and we would give you a huge pair of stationary red goggles and tell you that you had arrived in the future. What? 

Last week, I started off Indie Corner with last year’s winner of the TIGSource Adult/Educational competition. Edmund, while disturbing, manages to raise important questions regarding the use of sex and violence in videogames.

This week I bring you something rather different. Every Day the Same Dream is the latest title from Molleindustria, an Italian indie team, headed by Paolo Pedernici, which is interested in using videogames as a tool to incite socio-political discussion. Every Day the Same Dream is about the monotony of the working person’s life, and the story of one man’s attempt to escape it.

This week in Five-By-Five: The Fear of the Unknown.

When I was a little kid, there was a computer game called Bugdom. I can remember rushing through it with my brother for entertainment (my parent are both professors and for some reason this game was on every university computer). So, for vast stretches of time we would roll about as the pillbug main character until one day when we discovered the cheats. The one that would instantly beat the level or the game, the one that made the pools of lava and bug poison harmless, and others that dubious memory has lost. Regardless we still played the game to death, though one incident put a stake through the heart of the game for me.

The point of playing video games is to have fun, surely? We play them for various reasons, but mainly, they form part of a recreational pasttime. In other words, to relax and enjoy ourselves, or to put it another way, to play casually.