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Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - My Life as a King (2008)
7.0/10on IGDB
Released
Square Enix used WiiWare to try a small kingdom-building game under the Final Fantasy name. You’re the young king who builds homes and sends adventurers on assignments. It’s an early example of a big role-playing series trying an idea on a different scale through a launch download.
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Star Soldier R (2008)
Released
Hudson made the whole WiiWare release about chasing a score on a two- or five-minute timer. Those tight limits make each run about leaving yourself a better line through the next wave. A shop selling individual downloads had room for a shooter built around the arcade score attack alone.
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LostWinds (2008)
7.1/10on IGDB
Released
Frontier financed and published its own WiiWare launch game. You use the Wii Remote to draw gusts that lift Toku across gaps and shape his route through the landscape. It’s a clear example of a studio bringing a focused new idea to a console under its own name.
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Strong Bad Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner (2008)
Released
Telltale launched its five-part Strong Bad adventure on WiiWare and PC, with Homestar Ruiner as the first separate purchase. Its story begins with a prank that leaves Strong Bad stuck with an unwanted houseguest. Think of it as a console adventure that arrived like a season of the web cartoon it came from.
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Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty (2008)
7.0/10on IGDB
Released
Insomniac made this short pirate adventure a separate download between larger Ratchet & Clank games. It picks up Ratchet’s search for Clank and uses the wrench for puzzles as well as combat. The original $14.99 download offered a chapter of an established console series at a different scale and price.
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CarneyVale Showtime (2010)
Released
A Singapore-MIT game lab team won Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play contest, then released this vertical circus platformer on Xbox Live Community Games. You launch a ragdoll acrobat from a cannon and try to meet the arena’s stunt objectives. The route from a training lab to the Xbox 360 store is as distinctive as the game.
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Flower (2009)
7.4/10on IGDB
Released
Sony’s PlayStation Network sold an unusual kind of game by thatgamecompany for $9.99 at launch. You tilt the PS3 controller to direct the wind, gather petals, and watch each place change as you pass. As a download it sat alongside conventional games even though movement and atmosphere were the draw.
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Mighty Flip Champs! (2009)
8.3/10on IGDB
Released
WayForward used DSiWare to publish its own puzzle game built around two handheld screens. Each screen shows a different page of a maze. Flipping changes the map Alta occupies, so the other screen tells you where the next move can land. It’s a compact new game tied to the hardware people already owned.
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Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition (2012)
8.1/10on IGDB
Released
Minecraft’s first console edition arrived on Xbox Live Arcade. The couch-friendly port kept building and surviving at its center, and Microsoft reported that it set the service’s opening-day sales record. It’s the other side of the download story: a game that could draw a huge console audience through the same sort of storefront used for smaller releases.
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Tokyo Jungle (2012)
7.3/10on IGDB
Released
Sony brought this Japanese PS3 game to North America as a download. Picking an animal and trying to survive in an empty Tokyo was an unusual pitch for a console game. The North American release shows how a game that had already come out in one market could get a different route to players overseas.
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The Unfinished Swan (2012)
7.7/10on IGDB
Released
Giant Sparrow’s first PlayStation release grew out of a student project and a deal to make it for PSN. It starts in whiteness; throwing paint gives invisible walls and objects an outline. That one striking interaction was enough to build a standalone console release around.
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Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale (2013)
6.7/10on IGDB
Released
Level-5 issued this Guild02 project through the 3DS eShop in Japan and later brought it overseas as its own download. Sohta looks into the giant monster that appears on Fridays and plays cards with local children. The format gave this small, intensely local story a release of its own outside Japan.
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Pocket Card Jockey (2013)
7.8/10on IGDB
Released
Game Freak turned an internal pitch into a 3DS eShop game that uses solitaire to help a horse race. The two halves make sense once you see how clearing cards affects the next stretch of track. The download gave the studio a place to sell an experiment apart from its much larger Pokémon releases.
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Shovel Knight (2014)
8.6/10on IGDB
Released
Yacht Club Games brought its Kickstarter-backed first project to the 3DS and Wii U eShops alongside the PC launch. The original campaign turns one shovel into a weapon, a way to dig up secrets, and a tool for bouncing off enemies. The boxed release followed, and the studio’s funded stretch goals included additional campaigns delivered as updates.
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