The Boing Boing 20, pt. 2: the best indie and iPhone games of 2009
“It may seem arbitrary lumping the indies and the iPhone together for the second half of this feature on the best games of 2009 (which previously ran down the best retail console and handheld games of 2009), but this year more than ever the lines between the two blurred, as the App Store continued to evolve into a marketplace second only to the web where a one-person team has as equal a chance for success as the biggest publishers in the business.
Granted, that chance still continues to be “slim”, and most recently the tides have been turning slightly to top-seller lists reading more like those you’d find on the DS and PSP, but nearly all the iPhone games on this list earned critical praise and top slots in the charts with marketing staff and budgets approaching zero.
Still, I wish this list could be longer. Even moreso than the first half of this feature, where the best games left off the list were the ones that were called out as the year’s finest nearly everywhere else, the selections that didn’t make the cut here were still at the top of their game.
Releases like the Bit.Trip games, LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, Bonsai Barber, Words With Friends and reams of other iPhone games (as I’ve been continuing to cover weekly), and especially Spelunky (which technically is a late 2008 release, though it didn’t progress to truly sublime until a few months later) all deserve their high praise.
So then below, the best web, PC, Mac, and iPhone games — freeware, commercial, and uniquely otherwise — that sprang from the best of the indie community this year.”
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