Ever play Every Day Shooter? What about Roboblitz? Aquaria? No, huh? Well, all three won awards, with Aquaria taking the $20,000 grand prize, at last week’s Independent Games Festival. Oh, never heard of that either? Sigh.

While indie culture has become firmly ensconced in film and music, it’s still stuck on level two in the gaming industry--though the scene appears set to beat that next boss battle any day now. Gaming began all indie back in the ‘70s with basement-bound dudes like Atari's Nolan Bushnell programming primitive games like Pong. But since it went big business, the indie scene’s been at a veritable standstill. Yet times are a-changing.

Ironically, since indie games are necessarily low-budget, this is largely thanks to the arrival of next-gen consoles. The 360, PS3 and Wii all have hard drives and their makers are eager to make money by filling them up. Retro titles comprise the bulk of the current downloadable offerings, but more and more indie games are making their presence felt.

An early indie crossover was The Behemoth’s Alien Hominid, a way cool hand-drawn side-scroller that hit consoles in 2004. But to be honest, the old-school gameplay, even beefed up from its wildly popular IGF award-winning Flash origins, felt a little light for the boxed price tag. But she’s perfect as a high-def Live Arcade download offering plenty of twitchy action for minimal expense thanks to the elimination of manufacturing and distribution costs. In fact, the 360's leadtime has enable Microsoft to set the standard for indie game support, with the likes of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and Ninjabee’s Cloning Clyde, Outpost Kaloki and upcoming Band of Bugs as well as The Behemoth’s own highly-anticipated Castle Crashers.

So far the Wii’s Virtual Console shop exists to push Nintendo’s back catalogue, but they've left their indie options open. Meanwhile, PlayStation Store’s first indie title flOw is an acclaimed underwater game based on creator Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis, with a trippy audio-visual aesthetic and clever self-regulating difficulty. The broadband subscription network Gametap, which sponsored an indie award at IGF, has also added three winning titles to its upcoming indie channel.

For the time being, these indie efforts provide innovation but can't exactly compete with Gears of War. But low cost equals big risks and soon enough we’ll get the equivalent to an Arcade Fire album and, well, the whole game could change.