When the Paul Morley of games journalism is banging on about indie games on some Channel 4 countdown show in 25 years time, he'll probably briefly mention XBLIG. XBLIG stands for Xbox Live Indie Games, an uncharacteristically lovely initiative that let indie developers release games on the Xbox 360, without having to court and badger Microsoft first. Microsoft then characteristically buried the service on their ad-ridden Xbox Live Marketplace, and now they're planning to shut it down.
Mommy's Best Games was one of the best developers releasing games on XBLIG, and I'm not saying that just because 95% of everything on there was guff. Rather than going down with the ship, Mommy's Best has instead ported four of its games to PC, collecting them as Mommy's Best Action Pack.
The pack contains Weapon of Choice, a sidescrolling, Contra-ish shooter; Explosionade, a game about stomping alien guts; Shoot 1UP, a vertical shmup featuring a giant woman with guns for norks; and Game Type, a satirical shooter about the state of the Xbox Live Marketplace. You can buy them all individually for chump change, while the pack will set you back £5.59.
If the name sounds familiar, that's probably because Mommy's Best Games made Serious Sam Double D XXL.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.