I opened one of my first Free and Worth Every Penny columns, about RunMan: Race Around the World, with the following:  "This may only work for those of you of a certain age and a certain background.  For those in the right group, however, I believe it will work quite well."  I can't think of a better way to describe this week's installment, so there it is again.  If you weren't in the right place at the right time, this might not do anything for you.  If you were, though, then this is my holiday gift to you, and I think you're going to love it.

Merry Christmas.


I kind of wish Digital: A Love Story was designed to be a Christmas gift, because it's a wonderful one, but the truth is that I simply missed it when it was released by Christine Love earlier this year.  Luckily, the fine folks over at Rock Paper Shotgun featured it in their series of Advent Gaming articles, so I doubled back and gave it a try.  I'm so very glad that I did so.  No other game has taken me back to my childhood so effectively this year.

The year is 1988.  You're a teenager, and your dad just bought you an "Amie Workbench", complete with a state-of-the-art 1200 baud modem.  You don't have permission to dial long-distance numbers with it, but anything local is fair game (and if you know the right tricks, there are ways around that long-distance thing).  There's a popular local Bulletin Board System with the number 698-5519 - I hear a bunch of folks hang out there.  The world's your oyster, kid.  Go have a ball.


I think I used to log into a BBS with this exact login screen image.

I need to be straightforward in telling you that I love this game because I've lived in its world.  Not in 1988 - I didn't get there until the early 90's - but I had a binder full of phone numbers for local and toll-free bulletin boards in my computer desk when I was in high school.  I would take notes about which ones were still operating, and whether they'd let you register for free.  People would gravitate to different boards to talk about various topics, and over time, you figured out which ones had the folks you wanted to spend time with.  You learned which places carried shareware game downloads, and which ones could get you the full games.  These weren't just networked computers, they were places you visited through your computer - clubs, bars, seedy back alleys - and thanks to the clunky technology involved, the journey to reach them felt far more tangible than typing in a web address could ever feel today.  Upgrading from a 1200 to a 2400 baud modem (or, finally, one glorious day, to 9600)...  it was like getting a new car.  It was a whole new type of freedom.


Yeah, we all knew about "The Matrix", whatever name it went by.

Digital takes place entirely in that space, and as the title explains, it tells a love story.  You're going to meet a girl.  Things will get complicated, miscommunications will occur, and difficult realities will be faced.  (All of these things happened on the BBS's of my youth as well, of course, though admittedly in far less dramatic fashion.)  It's an entirely linear adventure, with the only real puzzle being which action you need to take at a given time to advance the plot.  In a slightly odd design choice, you never actually input the messages or replies your character sends to anyone in the game, only seeing what the other characters are sending back to you.  It does remove some of the direct interaction you'd otherwise have, but I like how much imagination it invites you to inject into the story.

This is a gameplay-light experience, I'll warn you ahead of time.  Mostly, you'll be reading public and private messages on these Bulletin Board Systems to trace the story through its paces - you need to pay attention so that you know which board to dial next, and occasionally you'll need to intuit the solution to a problem and act on it, but "driven narrative" is very much the theme here.  With only two exceptions I can remember, there are no problems you can't solve by just clicking everything you can click.

I loved it anyhow.  The atmosphere is fantastic, with messages posted about William Gibson, or what the hell "PC Load Letter" means, or virus troubles and how to deal with them, or the history of BBS's (pre-Wikipedia, folks just posted really long articles to BBS systems and hoped someone would archive them)...  or, of course, Star Trek.


If you were this guy, or still are, I forgive you.

This is the way the Internet was before there was an Internet, and Digital: A Love Story understands it.  It wants to take you back there for an hour or two - or show you what it was like, if you were never there.  You can play this game in a window, but don't.  Leave the scanlines on in the graphics options, and play it full screen.  Don't turn off the modem sound effect, even though that noise is still one of the most grating things to ever come out of a computer.  Leave the music running.  Get lost in it.

Is it a good love story?  It's not bad.  I became more invested in the plot than I thought I would, and enjoyed pursuing it to its conclusion (though there was some cheesy heavy-handedness at the end I could've done without).  But I don't know that the title refers entirely to the romance that develops between the player and Emilia.  This isn't just a love story about a person, it's about a time and place with boundless possibilities;  seemingly limitless freedom;  constant, joyous discovery.  To be a kid on the still-forming information superhighway was to explore a new frontier with people you'd never met but who somehow understood you, and through doing so realize that virtual and "real" relationships weren't all that different, no matter what your parents said.  It's how I became the crazy Internet-loving nerd I am today, and I'm sure that's true for some of the rest of you, too.

So go on.  Go be a kid again.

Digital: A Love Story is...

  • maybe the most lovingly crafted retro computer experience since Uplink.
  • well-written, and hit a surprisingly wide range of emotional notes for me.
  • a great example of how games can tell stories in a way no other medium can.
  • a time capsule - a window to a world that is lost but should not be forgotten.

Digital is available for PC, Mac and Linux, so you have no excuse;  you should play this one.  It weighs in at just under 50MB;  download it here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.  If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

2010 seems to be a year of resurgence for the difficult platformer.  I suppose that's a fairly obvious claim to make for any year that opens with VVVVVV and closes with Super Meat Boy, but I've noticed it in this column, as well - from twitchy madness like Super Crate Box to more slow paced but no less diabolical challenges like L'Abbaye des Morts, everybody seems to want to make a classic throwback game that loves to kill you this year.

This installment of Free and Worth Every Penny highlights another game you can stack on that pile.  In some ways, it's one of the better ones I've seen lately, with a great concept and some moments as satisfying as the ones I loved in Hero Core and IJI.   In other ways, it's a frustrating mess that doesn't live up to its potential.  Still, I don't regret the time I spent with it, so if you think you're up for a challenge, let me invite you to...


So you're an angel.  Not a cute cherub "bow with love arrows" angel, either - one of the avenging kind.  ...Well, you were.  But without those wings, or that badass sword, it might be harder to convince anyone.  I won't tell you exactly how you ended up stuck down here, because the opening to Banov's Escape from the Underworld is one of the better introductory surprises I've seen this year, but stuck you surely are.  You'll need to figure out how to reclaim your lost power, with nothing and nobody to help you.


Everything seems so idyllic.  What could go wrong?

As in many of the best freeware side scrollers - the aforementioned IJI and Hero Core, as well as the exquisite Cave Story, come readily to mind - Metroid is the most obvious design influence for Escape From the Underworld.  Stripped of your abilities, you must make your way through a labyrinth of caverns, slowly acquiring the items that will let you open new areas and face increasingly difficult enemies.  It's a classic formula, and in many ways it works here.  Every power upgrade feels significant (honestly the last one feels almost game-breaking), and a helpful automap keeps track of where you haven't been yet, and what you found in the places you have explored.


This sucks. I want my wings back.

Sadly, I can't say that all of the design choices behind Escape are successful ones.  The opening sections of the game are brutally hard, giving you absolutely no directional clues to help you figure out what you should do first.  You constantly run up against areas that are blocked off to you or enemies you can't handle, until you manage to luck into the right path.  Worse, save points are few and far between, so it's easy to lose progress to a quick death if you're not meticulous about backtracking to save every time you find something useful.

Speaking of backtracking, you won't find the handy telepoters of VVVVVV here, or the ability to warp between save points, or anything like that.  You'll be traversing the same ground many times, and given the number of enemies and environmental traps that can quickly become tedious.  Barriers to pathways re-spawn even after you have the ability to remove them, so you're going to have to destroy that boulder / energy barrier / etc every time you want to get to the room on the other side.   It doesn't break the game, but it sure does break the pace.

None of that might matter - after all, Super Metroid had plenty of backtracking and no teleporters - but on top of it all, the controls feel far too clunky for a game that demands so much of the player.  Let me give you a recommendation:  get a gamepad, and map the Jump command (the Up Arrow key if you're playing on the keyboard) to one of the buttons, because having to actually press Up every time you want to jump in a game with this much jumping is torture.  After such gamepad mapping, I found it playable, but still never as precise as I wanted it to be.


This. Is. What. I'm. Talking. About.

So why put up with it?  Well, largely for the reason displayed in the screenshot above - you get to be an overpowered God by the end, and it really is pretty satisfying to tear through areas and enemies that once gave you so much trouble leaving naught but destruction in your wake.  When you get to the aforementioned near-game-breaking item, you won't complain, you'll say "F*** yes!" and have a blast using it.

The usual pleasure of exploring a map and finding items in a Metroid-style game remains, including the requisite hidden ones you'll want to locate if you're a completionist.  I should also mention that the music by "Prophecy" is great, hopping back and forth between catchy synth with a solid beat and Gregorian-sounding chants.  I didn't get tired of listening to it at all during two playthroughs.

That's the bottom line, I guess.  As often as I smacked my forehead at the way Banov did some things in his game, I played it from beginning to end twice.  I write up lots of games I can't say that about.

Escape From the Underworld is...

  • a really neat concept for a game and character that I've love to see fleshed out more.
  • inspired by some of the best games of all time, which never hurts.
  • sadly hindered by not learning all the right lessons from those games, and furthermore by finicky controls.
  • still an impressive effort, and one I'm glad I played.

The game is Windows-only, and comes in under 15MB.  You can pick it up here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there. If you're done with this one and want more, feel free to browse the archives.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

A very nice reader sent me an e-mail with the following Youtube video, consisting of - so it claims - 111 free games that you can go download and play, covered in 11 minutes (11:11 exactly, which is a neat touch).  I say it claims this because I have not heard of all these games and certainly have not downloaded them all myself, but I have no reason to doubt him.  I do see some games I've played in there, certainly, and others that I've heard of.  Some appear to be abandonware, some are completely original titles, and some are fan-made games that might be begging for a cease and desist, but presumably haven't received one yet (Sonic Robo Blast, I'm looking at you).

If you'd like to watch it, you can follow the link above or just watch it right here:

I notice that there are a lot of shooters in the beginning and middle of the video.  First-person shooters, third-person shooters, top-down shooters, side-scrolling shooters... it seems that folks who make free games are pretty drawn to making games about shooting stuff and making it blow up.

I suppose that could be a reflection of what's popular in the commercial industry, as well - certainly the Halo's and the Call of Dutiful Medals of Battlefield Honor continue to often enjoy a lion's share of attention from the gaming media, not to mention profit.  But I'm a little surprised to see so many frankly samey-looking shooters from people not being paid to make them.  I've written up some shooters here on the site, for sure, but I also try to feature different things, games that try to explore new gameplay types and ideas.

Still, some of the shooters in that list are pretty good, I understand, and there are other things in there... the last third of the video has more genre variety.  It gets bonus points for having Spelunky and Battle for Wesnoth, two of the all-time greats.  (No Cave Story, though!  I mean, what?)  If you want to download a few of them and try them yourself, as I'm sure I will, the video sends you to this page where all the games are listed out with links.  The page is in German, but none is necessary to find the games.

Enjoy, and thanks to "doink" for sending me the link!  Back later this weekend with another writeup, I hope.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie
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Or, if you've never been on World of Warcraft, they want you for the first time.  Enough to make it very cheap for you to get in.

As part of the lead-up to next month's release of the Cataclysm expansion, they've kicked off a sale on all of the existing game content.  The original World of Warcraft package is $5.00, the Burning Crusade expansion is $5.00, and the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is $10.  These are very deep discounts compared to their standard prices, which are $20, $30 and $40 respectively.

If you've never played at all, your purchase of the original game (and any expansions) would come with 30 days of gameplay.  If you're a former customer (like me), that won't be true, but you can get a 10 day trial of either expansion pack and then buy near the end of your trial - the deal appears to run until November 30th.

This is a very shrewd move on Blizzard's part, IMO.  I understand they've revamped the game quite a bit in anticipation of Cataclysm - and of course when that releases the entire game world gets "done over", so to speak - but luring back customers who skipped out on the expansion packs was going to be a tricky thing.  Nobody wants to buy $30 and $40 expansions just to have the privilege of buying another $50 one.  But now, for $15, I can have all the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King content and be ready to bite when Cataclysm comes out.  I'm not sure I will bite at Cataclysm, but I'm in for the other two at the sale price.

I have to wonder whether the success of free-to-play Lord of the Rings Online has impacted this move in any way.  It might not have, but this is definitely the closest Blizzard has come to giving away their WoW content that I've seen so far.  Well played, gentlemen.  Well played.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

You may recall that when I wrote up Sombreros a few weeks ago, I confessed (as though you didn't already know) to being a fan of art-house games.  If you're not one... well, you may want to skip this week's installment of Free and Worth Every Penny, because we're going all-the-way-pretentious this time.  If it's any consolation, I promise it's short (and this writeup will be, too) and it's easy.   Hopefully that'll be enough to get you to give it a spin even if you ordinarily wouldn't, because you might find yourself saying that you didn't think this sort of thing was worthwhile...


...Or maybe not.  I apologize for the abuse of the title card, there, and I should say up front that I know this game won't be for everybody.  Indeed, But That Was Yesterday won't even be considered a game by some of you, I'm sure;  it's as valid to call it a piece of interactive animation...  maybe even more valid.  You can't really lose - or rather, any moments of "failure" have no real consequence - and you are limited to moving along the pre-set path laid out for you by the designer.  Of course, I will refrain from pointing out how well that last sentence also describes many of the AAA single-player games I've played in the last couple years.  Wait, I guess I just did.  Well, nevermind.


In any event, it certainly isn't a game about challenge...  wait, that's not true.  It isn't a game about mechanical challenge.  It's very much about challenge - the challenge of loss, and pain, and acceptance, and perseverence.  I expect you'll find that at least one part of the narrative laid out here, if not the whole thing, resonates with the experiences you've had in your own life;  the themes tackled by Michael Molinari ("Bean") in But That Was Yesterday are fairly universal.  Like Jason Rohrer's Passage - another favorite of mine, though I know many dislike it - this feels like a very personal piece of art, but I think it means to speak to everyone about the joys and hardships the world holds for us and how to deal with them.


Unfortunately, I can't actually talk about how the game asks you to deal with them, or I'd give away the only secret it holds.  Allow me to dance around it by saying that the game makes the most of an extremely minimal input set in some pretty clever ways, and that while I did think the whole thing went on about 5 minutes longer than I needed it to, I still took genuine satisfaction from the way everything came together in the game's final section.

But That Was Yesterday is an entry in this year's "Casual Gameplay Design Competition", run by JayIsGames.com and sponsored by EA.   The theme this year is "Friends" - you can view all the entries here if you'd like to try more of them.  As I said before, there's an argument to be made that this game is so casual that it doesn't even qualify as a game, but personally I think it's a wonderful take on the theme, and I'll be very curious to see how it fares against the other entries.

You'll notice, I'm sure, that I've spent a large portion of this piece writing from a rather defensive stance, as if I'm hesitant to put this out there and stand behind it as a game I like.  That's because I am.  Not for any good reason, really;  I feel the same way I might feel taking a friend to a really quirky movie I love but that I know they might not like at all, or putting a painting on my wall without knowing exactly what people will think it reflects about me.  What if anything that says about the "are games art" question, I leave for you to decide.  If my words or the above screenshots have piqued your interest, evaluate it for yourself and let me know what you thought.


But That Was Yesterday is...

  • not going to appeal to everyone.  It's about a subject matter some people think games aren't suited to, and even then it arguably takes a position some may not like.
  • very pleasant aesthetically, with simple but bold color use and some well-chosen music in the background.
  • extremely straightforward from an interaction standpoint, but most of the time I appreciated the chance to think about what was going on.
  • the only game I've ever played to use sitting on swings with a beautiful long-haired girl as a "level."  As it happens, that's also a pretty awesome level in real life.

But That Was Yesterday is a flash game, so any supported browser will work fine.  Click here to try it out.  As a postscript:  there are multiple endings, but I wasn't able to figure out whether anything I did determined which one I got.  It may be random.

I hope you like it.  See you next time.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

I've been pretty light on the posting again recently, I realize - sorry about that.  It occured to me last weekend, as Witness for the Prosecution was about to close on Saturday, that I've been doing theatre almost nonstop for the last six months.  There hasn't been a week since June that hasn't involved either rehearsal or performance almost every night of the week.  That's absolutely not a complaint - I'm loving being back into it - but I have to admit I've felt a bit weary the last few weeks, so posting here has taken a backseat.  I hope to have something fun for you to look at and play this weekend.

Right now, though, there are two things I'd like to bring to your attention which I hope you'll be interested in.  The first has been dear to me for a long time, and that's the yearly Child's Play charity, which just kicked off for 2010.  Since you're reading this site there's a better-than-even chance you've heard of Child's Play already, but in case you haven't:  for the last seven years, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade - with the help of Kristin Lindsay and other lovely, talented folks - have run a charity to deliver games and toys to children's hospitals all over the country (indeed, all over the world).  It centers around the holiday season for the fundraising and gift-giving, but sick kids and their families use these gifts year round while they're stuck in the hospital.  In the span of its existence, Child's Play has raised over $5 million in contributions.

As someone who spent more than his fair share of time in hospitals as a child, let me tell you with absolute certainty that this charity is extremely important.  My truly good memories of hospitals are few and far between, but every single time I remember playing the vector-engine Star Wars game with my mother in the patient lounge at Texas Children's Hospital, it makes me smile.  Almost nothing could be more helpful to a frightened sick child than comfort.  Distraction.  Fun.  Hospitals are scary places for anybody, and can be doubly so for kids.  If you've never heard of Child's Play, or hadn't planned to donate to them this year, please do.  Feel awesome when you click that button, because you are awesome, and I know exactly how much your donation will mean to someone.  If you were already planning to donate, I was happy to learn that Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh is on their recipient list for the first time this year.  If you feel like donating to them specifically, odds are pretty good I know some of the kids you'll be helping personally, and I thank you ahead of time on their behalf.

The second item is considerably more frivolous, but hopefully still of interest to some of you.  Mathew Kumar, another games writer up in Canada whose work has appeared in Edge, Gamasutra, Eurogamer and (my favorite) Rock Paper Shotgun, has just released the most recent issue of exp., his personal short-form videogame magazine.  I purchased and really enjoyed the first two issues of exp. (one - two), and I'm looking forward to reading his latest, which covers (among other things) VVVVVV and Dragon Quest IX, two of my favorite games of the last year.  In a surprisingly generous move, he's made a PDF version of this issue of exp. called "minus infinity" available for free right here, and you can go read it now online if you like.  If you want a hard copy - as I will - they're $6 and can be had over here.  Congrats on churning out another issue, Mathew.  Can't wait to read it.

Alright, that's it for now.  Back with something free for you to play tomorrow or Sunday.  Promise.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

It's Halloween, kids, and you know that means I really have no choice but to pick something silly and shlocky to give you for your Free and Worth Every Penny installment.  Luckily, the game makers of the world are in the mood to provide just such fare, and Ryan Wiemeyer, Ben Perez and Micheal Block of The Men Who Wear Many Hats have come through in fine form with a playable beta of their humorous spin on a childhood classic.  Join me as we travel on the...


You'll forgive me if I make this a piece short on words and long on funny screenshots, because come on.  You know what The Oregon Trail is.  I don't need to describe that for you.  This is that, but with zombies.  As described on their product page...

Quote:
Organ Trail was an edutainment game developed in 1971.  Schools across America used this game as a teaching tool to prepare children for the impending zombie apocolypse and dysentery.

Re-live your childhood with this faithfully emulated version of Organ Trail for the Apple-II.

So what's changed from the game you actually remember playing back in the early 80's?  From a gameplay standpoint, almost nothing.  You'll still stock up at the beginning on the East coast, picking your difficulty level and your limited supplies - though now you'll need mufflers, batteries and spare tires for your station wagon (see what they did there?), rather than oxen and axles.  You'll still travel to the West, hitting cities and landmarks along the way.


The map looks a little different, though.

You'll still deal with running out of supplies along the road and needing to try to find people to trade with.  You'll encounter zombie hordes you need to cross that substitute for the rivers of the original, with suitably creative options for doing so.  You'll still go hunting, though it's called "scavenging" now and there's a lot less wildlife than there was before.


The worst part is, I'm only gonna be able to carry back half that shopping cart anyhow.

And of course, as a hallmark of the series, random events will still bless or curse you every so often along your journey.  Some of these have been predictably customized for the new setting...


...Sorry, hon. I didn't see him in the back seat there.

...and some of them are old friends.


Are you effing serious? I'm still dealing with dysentery in the zombie apocalypse? Sigh.

Why does the game carry a beta label?  Well, because it isn't finished.  It's playable through to the end, to be sure, but there are pieces notably missing - try to talk to people in town, for example, and you'll get no response - and parts of the game will occasionally bug out.  I had a trading screen get garbled on me early in the game and had to start over, costing me 10 minutes or so of progress.  The full list of features planned for the final game but not yet implemented includes:  saving your game, music, "lots more art", an updating map, extra minigames, a better ending, and conversation.

So you'd be forgiven for deciding to wait for all that stuff to make it in, before giving this a try.  But I'm glad they put it out now anyhow, and I'm glad I played it.  It's an idea that rests entirely on the seasonal appeal of its theme - if ever I was going to play a zombie themed Oregon Trail parody, Halloween weekend is when I was going to do it - and the idea really doesn't suffer much from not having all that extra stuff.  You still manage resources, rationing food and tweaking your pace as you go.  You still get sad when somebody dies.  You still hate that goddamned dysentery message.

So did I make it to Oregon?  I did, I'm pleased to say.  ...Well, mostly.  Ryan had a pretty serious fever, and he didn't make it.  But four of us did.  That's better than I used to do in elementary school.


Have fun beating my score. I might've overdone it with the bullets.

There you have it:  your free Halloween-themed time waster for the weekend.  If I may make a request of the Internet for next year, though:  something other than zombies, hm?  They're beginning to be seriously played out.

Organ Trail is...

  • a clever twist on a classic game.
  • clearly unfinished, but playable and enjoyable in its current state.
  • full of bits that made me smile, even if hunting is still a pain in the ass.
  • a good use of a half hour if you have fond memories of the previously zombie-free series.

No download necessary for this one, just a Flash-supporting web browser.  Get your zombie on by clicking right here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

I've offered this one up as a Free and Worth Every Penny entry for Mike to do - if he doesn't take it I surely will myself.  But I want to tell you right now to go download Super Crate Box.  Between this and Super Meat Boy (which is sadly not out yet on the PC but I've been playing on the 360) I have just about all the retro super-hard platforming I can handle, and I love it.  I started out this evening playing a leisurely round of Civ V, but then Super Crate Box came along and it was all jumping and shooting all the time.

What the heck is it?  Well, it looks like this:

...and the gameplay is exactly as insane as it appears.  You're on a single-screen layout, not dissimilar to the original (pre-Super) Mario Bros arcade game.  Enemies are spawning at the top and making their way to the bottom, also not unlike Mario Bros.  What is unlike Mario Bros is, of course, the obsession with crates.  They are your only scoring mechanism - the more you get, the better your score - but every crate forces a new random weapon on you, and it's frequently an unpleasant surprise which one you get.  You need to manage the constant weapon switching and avoid enemies while collecting crates until you die, which will happen A LOT.

And that's it.  But it's great and free.  A longer writeup will come from me or Mike later, but for now, just go get it.  You'll want a gamepad, I imagine.  I certainly wouldn't have wanted to play it with a keyboard.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

After last week's Free and Worth Every Penny installment, Space Funeral, I kind of feel like I need to give my brain a rest.  Not that there wasn't merit to the trippy, musically rich horror of last week's game...  but as I said in the comments, it made me feel like I'm getting old, because it just wasn't for me.  You know what is for me?  Gun.Smoke.  Anybody else remember that?  I played that game for days as a kid.  If you did too, then this week's title is right up your alley.

A little context may be required before jumping into the game proper.  There's a rather infamous NES cartridge that's received more than its fair share of attention on the 'net over the years titled "Action 52".  A compilation of universally awful mini-games, its reputation for being unbearable to play led to a TIGSource collaboration earlier this year where members were challenged to re-make the ideas of the Action 52 cart into something more respectable.  Sombreros (along with another 'net darling, Streemerz) was one of the more successful products of that venture.

The original Sombreros was a vertically scrolling shooter in which you shot guys, dodged cars, and collected sombreros.  (Apparently the hats were stolen, and as the sheriff you needed to get them back.)  I'm not going to embed it, but if you want to see it in action, it looked like this.  From that inauspicious seed, Dustin Gunn has grown a much richer experience, in which an offensively stereotyped corrupt politician is trying to take over an offensively stereotyped Mexico (Dustin describes the game as "inspired both by the vaguely racist original game and countless western movies and games").  You must shut the would-be dictator down.

This doesn't look good for our hero.

The basic mechanic is classic top-down shooting - arrow keys to move around, X to fire a pistol with infinite ammo in the direction you're facing.  You'll square off against an army of bandits, both on foot and in vehicles, as well as several boss characters.  All of which would make for an entertaining but standard experience, if not for the extra effort Sombreros puts in to set itself apart.  Most notably, the nameless sheriff has a recharging "dead eye" power - a label I use because it functions very similarly to the one in Red Dead Redemption.  At any time, holding down C will freeze the action and allow you to carefully place up to 6 shots that will be fired as soon as you release the key.  The power is recharged by collecting drops from fallen enemies - sombreros, of course.  In addition to being useful for crowd control, you'll need to master this ability if you hope to beat the much more challenging showdown fights and boss battles.  Also welcome (and similar to Gun.Smoke) is the ability to strafe - holding down X will keep you firing in that direction no matter where you move.

Beyond those mechanical improvements, Sombreros differentiates itself through variety.  While a relatively short game (a speedrun video of under 20 minutes exists, but I'd say that an hour or so is a more realistic runtime for most players), it packs in a lot of stuff to do.  You'll encounter enemies on rooftops you'll need to take out with carefully placed dynamite throws.  You'll do one-on-one quick draw showdowns against increasingly fast marksmen.  You'll make your way through a minefield of exploding hot peppers (...yes, really) as the game mixes bullet-hell dodging with its shooting action.  You'll cause donkey stampedes.  You'll beat a boss by literally tearing him in half...  and then beat him again when both halves come back to fight you later.  And at the end, if you're very lucky, you'll use the power of sombreros to save the town, and all of Mexico with it.

I can't believe I wrote that last sentence.  "The power of sombreros."  Sorry about that.


Now that's a hot peppe-- I'm sorry, I can't do it.  It is a fun level, though.

I'm not going to try to convince you that Sombreros is a life-altering experience, or even that it will give you anything to think about.  I love my art-house games, but this is not one of them.  And sometimes that's great;  this weekend, deep thought wasn't my goal.  I wanted something silly, quick and challenging, and this fit the bill nicely.  If you're in a similar mood, I recommend checking it out.  As long as you can get past the overt and not-really-all-that-funny stereotyping (oh look, you shoot a pinata as a checkpoint.  Yup.  I get it.), there's a lot of gameplay to like here.

Sombreros is...

  • fast, challenging and tightly controlled, like a good NES knockoff should be.
  • at least 100 times better than the Action 52 "game" that inspired it.
  • backed by pretty great visuals and a fun soundtrack, since I didn't mention that above.
  • a silly diversion that I'm grateful to have stumbled across.

If you'd like to give it a spin, it's under 10MB and can be picked up at Dustin's site, Sniper Diplomat.  Windows only.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

"An obsolete videogame for a dark passage of history."  That's how the creator of this week's Free and Worth Every Penny feature pitches his own game.  Kind of a strange angle to take, isn't it?  Sure, retro-style titles have been in fashion in the freeware community for awhile now, but to label your own work "obsolete" seems a bit harsh.  Then again, you could argue he's just setting the tone - I'm not going to lie to you, this game's kind of a downer.  But I think it's also something really special.  Welcome to...


If you've read other installments of this column over on Colony of Gamers, you may remember Locomalito as the author of the superlative side-scroller Hydorah.  While Hydorah was a throwback to the days of the 16-bit space shooter, L'Abbaye des Morts goes considerably further back for its inspiration, taking its visual and aural cues from the early 80's and the ZX Spectrum.

In terms of plot, though, it goes much further back than that, which I freely admit is the real reason I wanted to write about it.  From Locomalito's description of the game:

In the 13th century, the Cathars, who preach about good Christian beliefs, were being expelled by the Catholic Church out of the Languedoc region in France.  One of them, called Jean Raymond, found an old church in which to hide, not knowing that beneath its ruins lay buried an ancient evil.

...This little game has been created at nights during our vacation in southern France.  The whole style is spontaneous and sincere, straight out of our trips in the region during the day.  Be sure to visit the Languedoc if you feel somehow attracted by the game ;-)

We must assume, I think, that monk Jean Raymond is probably a fiction, and certainly his adventures as presented here are not drawn from history.  But the Cathars were quite real, as was their violent expulsion from France under Pope Innocent III in the 13th Century.  More on that in a bit.  What sort of a game am I asking you to play here?

For the most part, it's a straightforward action-adventure, though it's a completely nonviolent one on the part of the player.  You have no weapons, and indeed no actions available to you at all other than to run, jump and duck.  It's a game entirely about escaping death, and as you'd expect from the fellow who brought us Hydorah, that can be infuriatingly difficult at times.


You will come to loathe rooms like these.

You are given 9 chances to collect the twelve crosses scattered in the catacombs by your former monastic brothers before facing the evil that lies at the bottom and hopefully claiming your freedom.  Checkpoints abound, and extra lives are scattered about in limited supply, but make no mistake, this isn't a game like VVVVVV where you keep trying until you succeed.  Run out of lives, and it's back to the beginning for you - expect this to happen at least once while you get the hang of things.

Expect, also, to scratch your head more than once about how to proceed; many of the rooms are puzzles in one way or another, and the clues to those puzzles are not always presented clearly.  It's unfortunate that a game with such harsh penalty for failure requires so much experimentation to succeed, as those design choices would seem to be directly at odds with each other.  Luckily, this is mitigated somewhat by the brevity of the game as a whole - once you know what you're doing, getting to the end in 20 minutes is a reasonable proposition.


Let me give you a hint I wish I'd had - this room is really important.

Unfortunately, I can't fully talk about why I think this little game is so neat without delving into spoiler territory, but let me dance around it a bit by saying this:  what Locomalito has essentially done here is to use a video game to write a martyr tale... to craft a myth.  The title's hero may not have been a real person, but his religious order was real.  Their persecution was real.  The churches like the one under which you explore and fight for your life were and are real.  Pick any pseudohistorical figure whose story has become a jumble of fact and legend - King Arthur, Robin Hood, Homer - this is how they begin.  Real events occur, and somewhere along the retelling a sword is pulled from a stone, or perhaps from the waters of a lake.  The sad story of a criminal fleeing to live in the forest becomes the great legend of a rebel who overthrows an unjust king.

And here, the story of a monk who hid in the catacombs under a church to avoid persecution becomes the legend of a hero who braves death to stare down the Devil himself.  Is it great storytelling?  No, it's an antiquated ("obsolete"? perhaps so) and occasionally frustrating video game.  But you know what?  Twenty-four hours ago I didn't know much of anything about the Cathars.  And now, however briefly or immaterially, I've been one.  This is precisely the sort of thing that keeps me playing games.

L'Abbaye des Morts is...

  • a unique experience by an unquestionably talented developer.
  • not exactly a history lesson, but it might prompt you to go find one.
  • a little bit frustrating and depressing, but not in ways that deterred me from playing.
  • a strange little game that I'm very glad someone wanted to make.

It's a tiny game - under 3MB, though sadly Windows only - that can be had for the low price of clicking right here.  A poster, DVD cover, manual and soundtrack are also all available, because Locomalito is serious about his freeware.  Long may he continue to be so.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers.  This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Holiday weekends are for RPGs. Having three days off instead of the usual, far-too-short two is a perfect excuse to dive deep into level grinding, loot collecting, dungeon crawling bliss.

But what kind? Single-character or party-focused? Real-time or turn-based? Plot-driven or randomized? There are a lot of choices out there, and a lot of good free options whichever way you go. Let's keep things simple this time, and cut plot out of the equation - if you wanted to spend your weekend reading you'd go pick up a good book. Allow me to present you with two options I've become thoroughly hooked on over the last couple of weeks in a Labor Day Weekend...

The Enchanted Cave

First up, credit goes to Phil Kollar for pointing me to The Enchanted Cave in his recent free games feature for Game Informer (which you should also go read - he gets paid for this stuff. How do I get in on that?). Enchanted Cave is a turn-based RPG that bears more than a little similarity on first glace to the previously-featured Desktop Dungeons, though it develops in a very different way once you start playing.


You'll start out as an unimpressive weakling...

Most of the gameplay is straightforward turn-based hack & slashing. Static enemies litter the screen, and moving into them triggers a battle. Any spells that you find can be dragged onto your character during the fight to help turn the tide, and you'll gain some gold for your trouble every time you defeat an enemy. Where Enchanted Cave differentiates itself is in its progression mechanic - you don't gain experience or levels. Instead, you pick up permanent stat bonuses in the form of gems as you go deeper into the dungeon, and the occasional golden-colored artifact that is much more powerful than your standard items. When you are forced to flee via a pair of escape wings - and you will need to flee regularly in the early game - you get to keep those stat gems and artifacts, making your next trip down that much easier.

If you've played any of the Shiren the Wanderer games, it's a very similar design, though considerably easier here as you get going than in that series. If I have a complaint about Enchanted Cave, it's that the difficulty level drops off sharply in the latter half of the dungeon - there are 99 floors, and every 10 floors you find a shop to barter items with and a new checkpoint from which to start your next run. Eventually, you have enough gold and artifacts that the escape wings almost become an afterthought, because surviving to the next checkpoint is an almost certain event.


But with a little perseverance, nothing will stand in your way.

Still, it managed to be a fun ride for me the whole way through, and I'd say I spent 2 to 3 hours exploring Enchanted Cave before I definitively put it to bed. The stat system and loot drops are diverse enough to serve as a solid "one more turn, let me see what I get next" carrot, and Kongregate's achievement system is at play here as well, so there's a little bit of extra incentive to keep going even after floor 99 if you're into that sort of thing. (You can make repeat trips into the dungeon after winning, and I did.) It'll also save your game for you, so you don't have to finish it in one run. Go give it a spin and see if you can beat it into submission faster than I did.

Shoot First

If you find yourself disappointed that The Enchanted Cave quickly becomes a walk in the park, don't worry. I promise there will be no complaints about this game being too easy.

From the same team that brought us the exceptional Action Fist, Shoot First plays like the frenetic child of the roguelike genre and Robotron. Moving your tiny monochrome adventurer with the WASD keys and aiming with the mouse, you'll go as deep as you can through randomized levels, shooting everything that moves and running from the stuff you can't shoot. "As deep as you can", by the way, may be Level Two. Three if you're lucky.


Theoretically this screenshot shows Level 6. I cannot confirm that it exists.

Where Shoot First triumphs - aside from being an extremely challenging top-down shooter cast in an RPG mold - is in aesthetics and tightly focused design. Much like Action Fist, there's so much love for games of yesteryear in here that it hurts. The game "boots up" with a DOS command each time you run it, and (optional) scanlines evoke memories of grainy adventures on the tiny CRTs of my youth. A superb soundtrack and great sound effects round out the package, making this feel like a lost classic you might have stumbled across in somebody's shoebox of 5.25" floppies.

And yet, from a gameplay standpoint, it couldn't have been done back in the 80's; it's too much informed by the ideas and technology of the time since. Thrown back by the force of your shots, monsters blow apart into piles of coins (synonymous here with experience) when defeated. Cover is destructible, and crumbles under enemy fire or your own. A surprisingly large variety of weapons - of which you may only carry one - forces you to choose a combat style and master it, while item pickups - of which you can only hold three - help you even the odds a bit. An automap helps you keep track of where you've been and where you need to go.

If I have a complaint about Shoot First, it's the opposite of my problem with The Enchanted Cave... this game seriously, but seriously wants to kill you. Your character has precious little health to begin with, and there are so many ways to take it from you. Trap rooms lock you in with swarms of enemies. Boulders roll at you down innocent-looking hallways. Floor tiles fall away to reveal deadly spikes. Powerful bosses threaten to crush you in moments. It's malicious. It's like the most tense moments of Spelunky, all the time.

But it's also a hell of a lot of fun. Oh, and it has co-op! I didn't get to try that, but hopefully one of you will, and you'll let me know how it goes. Shoot First is Windows-only, and is available as a free download (under 10MB) here. You'll also find at the bottom of that page a "Donate With Incentive" button - if you like the game, any amount you want to give will get you a version with a new environment and two new weapons to play with. I ponied up some dough even though I'll probably never get to the Ice Level. It's worth it anyway.

That's it for this week, kids. Have fun, and we'll see you back here again soon.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

I'm not usually a Day One purchaser of a lot of games, but for high-profile Nintendo releases I'll sometimes make an exception, and I had a $15 gift card to Toys R' Us sitting around doing nothing from when I picked up Dragon Quest IX last month, so over the lunch hour today I ran out and got a copy of Metroid: Other M. It wouldn't be true to say I'm fanatical about the Metroid series - like most gamers who grew up in the 80's and early 90's I view Super Metroid as a truly awesome classic, but I didn't have a SNES as a kid so I didn't play it until years later. I never played Metroid II at all, never finished the original Metroid, and while I own the Metroid Prime Collection on the Wii (and it's really good), I haven't finished those games either. So I'm a casual fan of the series at best; I love the atmosphere of Metroid games, I think Samus Aran is a great character, but I don't spend hours doing speedruns or getting 100% of the secrets.

So why pick up Other M on release day (aside from being able to get a discount, which I admit helped)? Honestly, it was largely because of the controversy it's generating. Reviews are sharply divided, and while they're trending towards good scores, there are some surprisingly low scores in there from big review sites. 6.25 out of 10 from Game Informer. 3 out of 5 from Gamespy. Contrast those to 9 / 10 and 8 / 10 scores from sites like Eurogamer and Gametrailers.

Now, I've said before that I'm not really interested in writing scored reviews here, and I don't intend to start with this one. But the wide range of reactions did make me more interested in trying the game for myself. This is the first core Nintendo game to generate any serious controversy and division of critical opinion since Wind Waker, and that was almost entirely about art style, not character, story or gameplay. Before that, I'm not even sure I know what the last one would have been. I'd say Metroid Prime, but there was very little division over that - pretty much everyone loved it. So it's nice to see the Big N being willing to take a step outside their comfort zone with one of their flagships, even if it ends up being a stumbling step. Obviously Metroid was a good candidate for that, since they'd already done it once before with Prime. I'd like to see them give other franchises a taste of the same diversity.

How do I think it turned out? After about two hours, I'm really enjoying it. A lot, actually, considering how harsh some of the reviews were. It absolutely feels like Metroid to me, however much as I'm qualified to say that. Is it the Metroid we know? No, probably not quite. But I don't think that necessarily means it can't be a Metroid we love.

Story Stuff:

Unfortunately, I think that the complaints about story delivery that many reviews have levied at the game are spot on. It's stilted, it's awkward, and it goes on far too long. The voice acting is (charitably) adequate, but the writing is flat-out bad. I disagree, however, with the claim some people have made that Nintendo and Team Ninja have somehow destroyed the character of Samus - at least so far I do. Let me offer my take on this, with the understanding that there will be spoilers, but only from the first two hours because that's all I've played. If you don't want to know anything about the story, just skip down to "Gameplay Stuff."

A lot of heavy exposition is front-loaded at the beginning of Other M about Samus' past in the army, and how she constantly felt bitter and resentful because everybody treated her like a delicate flower, couldn't see past her being a woman, etc. It doesn't exactly match the independent badass characterization she's had in other games - she comes off as a bit whiny - but it's all clearly portrayed as ancient history... from before she became a bounty hunter, before Metroid 1. Some unspecified bad turn of events takes place, and she leaves the army to strike out on her own, clearly pissing off her commanding officer Adam in doing so. All of that seems true to character, and I have no trouble buying young Samus as a rebellious outcast in the army, even if the "thumbs down" thing (you'll see) is silly and way overplayed.

At the point of Other M, the events of Metroid, Metroid II and Super Metroid have transpired. Samus has spent all of that time effectively alone, fighting space pirates, fighting Metroids, fighting Ridley, and getting the occasional handshake from the Federation for her trouble. The beginning of Other M is the first time she re-encounters the folks who used to be her old comrades, and she accidentally walks in on their mission. She's stepping on their toes but they clearly need her help, so she agrees to assist. Her old commander obviously still has a chip on his shoulder about her leaving, though, so she also agrees to follow orders to keep everything calm.

I really don't have issue with any of the above. The "following orders" bit to restrict your weaponry is contrived, yes, but no moreso than their usual way of doing it by just taking all your powers away in the first 5 minutes and scattering them around the planet for you to collect. The only place the story starts to get weird is where she delivers an overwrought "I viewed Adam as a father figure" monologue, and starts apparently longing to have that male authority back in her life. I can see how this could come off as sexist, especially seeing the sort of figure Samus has been cast as in the past, but I honestly don't think it was consciously written that way. She's been out in space alone for years, and this team was the last human camaraderie she knew. She's a loner reconsidering her solitude, reaching for what used to be familiar. Viewed in that light, her wistful recollection of a simpler time in her life seems easier to swallow.

Besides (actual spoiler here, skip this paragraph if you don't want to know), Metroid Fusion - the GBA Advance game that is the "last" piece of the Metroid story so far - tells the player that Samus' commander Adam sacrificed himself to save her. I can pretty much guarantee that's going to happen in this game, and it'll probably be where she reaffirms that it isn't safe for her to have friends, reclaims her solitude, and strikes out on her own to be gaming's most independent woman again. In order to have that moment work, the Adam / Samus relationship has to go from tension to reconciliation over the course of the game... or at least, that's my guess. I may be giving them more credit than they deserve, but it's the only reason I can think of to start the story this way.

Gameplay Stuff:

This part will be shorter, because it's good! I like it! It doesn't require any arguably-stretched excuses like the story does! The auto-aiming works fine, and the fact that you need to be Ninja Gaiden-dodging and powering up shots while you do it keeps it from being an Easy Button. Targeting the screen for firing off missiles and scanning things is a little awkward to get used to, but I'm already feeling comfortable with it. The sense of speed and mobility is really, really good, and they definitely have the "keep your eye out for hidden stuff" motif going on strong; I already found one missile pack that wasn't indicated at all by a blip on my radar (because it was behind a hidden enemy), and there's all sorts of places I'm noticing that I'll have to backtrack to later in order to pick up things I can't reach yet.

I also like that they balanced out the missile auto-recharge by having each missile pack only add one missile to your total instead of the standard 5. Nice choice.

Long story short (too late!), it's Metroid. It's a different spin on it for sure, but if you like Metroid I feel confident in saying you should give this a spin, even if it's only with a rental. Personally, I'm eager to keep going.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Speed and elegance are two of the most addictive qualities a game can have, for me; largely, I think, because those are qualities I know to be lacking in myself. I'm not a nimble person - I'm nonathletic, I'm a little overweight, etc - and while I possess some verbal grace, physical grace is not a trait I'm burdened with. So when a game allows me to take the role of a character who exhibits these characteristics with ease and style, I get hooked pretty easily. All of which is to say, as of this last weekend I had the 7th highest global score at this week's Free and Worth Every Penny installment, with over 60 million points. Yeah. Little bit hooked.

A slick combination of ideas from Canabalt and Line Rider, Solipskier challenges you to keep a tiny skier alive as long as possible, hitting targets, avoiding obstacles, and pulling off sweet tricks to rack up points as you go. You don't control the skier himself, though - you draw the world on which he will ski. As you paint the ground in front of him, he zips along from left to right, speeding down or climbing up hills as you make them, leaping off ramps you create, and plummeting to his doom should you fail to catch him when he comes back down.

It's an extremely simple premise, but the solid execution makes it a completely addicting experience. The scoring mechanic is straightforward: you earn more points the longer your skier stays alive, and earning multiplier bonuses scores those points much faster. Multiplier bonuses can be earned by hitting randomized gates, traveling through "tunnels" (rapid gate sequences), and pulling off mid-air tricks. Hit a gate in mid-air, and it's an extra bonus. Jump so high over a gate that you're off the screen, and it's an extra bonus. Basically, the game rewards you for doing stuff that feels awesome, which is a fine design principle in my book.


Ski like the wind, little skier man.

Of course, it wouldn't be much of a game if reward didn't carry risk. The higher your multiplier, the faster you go, up to truly insane speeds. Two types of obstacles pose the constant threat of failure: blocked gates, which will instantly kill your skier if he runs into them; and "jumps", areas of the track where you won't be able to draw ground, so you must make sure to get your skier safely in the air with enough speed to clear the jump before coming up on one. The game does a great job of giving you advance warnings for both beneficial and harmful elements, by popping up distance indicators on the right-hand side of the screen, but when you're going 90kmh it's hard to react in time.

Aesthetically, Solipskier is a delight, with a simple but effective visual style that pulls your attention right where it needs to be at every moment and gives you lots of visual feedback when you're doing well. The music is a great touch - when you start, you'll be accompanied by a fast, energetic soundtrack to get your heart racing, but go fast enough, and your skier's headphones will blow off, leaving you with only the rush of the wind (and allowing you to concentrate just a little bit more). Gentle classical piano music serves as a eulogy after each death, and then it's back to try again.


If you want to see it in action, here's someone having a very good run.

We've seen a lot of these distance-based randomized games hit the web in the last year, with titles like Canabalt and Robot Unicorn Attack taking the lion's share of the attention, but Solipskier may just be my favorite of all the ones I've played. The control scheme takes a little getting used to, but once you do, controlling your skier becomes an almost effortless dance of deciding what you want him to do and willing those actions into being. Just use a gentle hand and have a little patience, and you'll be leaping through gates perfectly in no time. Then the only trouble will be making yourself stop.

Solipskier is...

  • a very stylish and polished presentation of a simple concept.
  • extremely pleasant to look at and listen to.
  • one of the best-controlling webgames I've played in a long time.
  • occupying far too much of my free time. And some of my not free time.

Should you enjoy the game as much as I do and have an iPhone / iPad, it's available in the App Store for $2.99, which is where I marked my 60 million point high score. Either way, though, it's totally free on the web, so go play!

EDIT: Turns out, if you're using Internet Explorer, that second link will also take you straight to the Apple iTunes Store instead of to the game. Apparently the developers are redirecting all IE users there, rather than letting them play the game on their site. Which is pretty awful.

The game is still great, and if you'd like to play it in IE, this link to Kongregate should work fine, but shame on them for pulling a trick like that without disclosing what they're doing.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Machinarium is a visually gorgeous, very slow-paced point and click adventure game, somewhat in the vein of old-school LucasArts games like Maniac Mansion or The Dig. You'll wander around alien-looking landscapes, solving puzzles, combining inventory items, and generally clicking on everything until you find the right combination of doodads and actions to let you proceed. Clicking the link above will take you directly to a demo - the whole game is done in Flash, so you can get a very good sense of how the game plays right there in your browser.


Your strange little robot must navigate a strange world full of other strange robots.
It sure is pretty, though.

You'll notice on the front page that Machinarium's price has been knocked down substantially, from $20 to only $5 for the next week, in what they're calling a "Pirate Amnesty Sale." According to their blog, the DRM-free Machinarium has been pirated by somewhere between 85 and 95 percent of the people who played it, and so they want to entice those people to come buy a legal copy with a deeply discounted price.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about their stated numbers or their response, as I mention in the comments below the blog post. I played the demo for Machinarium when it first came out, and while I didn't buy it, I didn't then go pirate it either. I just didn't play it. It frankly didn't seem like something I wanted to pay $20 for - it was a visually remarkable game, but not all that much more so than Amanita's two previous games, Samorost and Samorost 2, which were entirely free and $5 respectively. It was also hampered by a rather cumbersome interface - you need to walk your character next to an object before you learn whether or not you can interact with it, for instance, and the walking speed is quite slow.

I have no idea how Amanita came up with the 85-95% piracy number for Machinarium (the blog calls it their "estimate from the feedback", which could mean almost anything), but I'm skeptical of it. I'm a little bit skeptical that there are that many people who want to play through a slow-paced point and click adventure game at all anymore, and I'm more skeptical that those who really do would choose to steal rather than pay for one of the very few ones that gets made these days. And given that my initial response to the game was, "It's very pretty and neat, but it's not worth $20 to me," I'm naturally inclined to blame their poor sales on overpricing their game rather than on too many people stealing it.

That said, I think $5 is a fine price ($10 also would have been reasonable) for a great-looking independently produced adventure game with a lot of charm, and Machinarium certainly is that. I wish the undertone of "obviously you pirated it before and now we're guilting you into buying it" wasn't there, but I did pick up a copy, and if it looks like it might be up your alley, I'd recommend trying the demo and if you like it, buying a copy as well. They obviously could use the extra sales.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Let me get this out of the way up front: this is not a post about abandonware. I know that there are umpteen sites where you can go and download DOS and Windows classic games for the low, low price of $0, under circumstances that some folks consider A-okay and others consider more dubious. This is not the place for that argument, or links to those sites. We all have Google and know how to use it, yes? Okay, cool.

That said, though, sometimes publishers give us the gift of a piece of our youth - repackaged, or just as it was - free of charge. Over the last few years we've seen several instances of this: Rockstar with their Classics Collection and Mektek's recent re-release of Mechwarrior 4 come most readily to mind. It was recommended by one of the forum members over at Colony Of Gamers (thank you!) that I do a writeup of the free Star Control 2 remake The Ur-quan Masters, and I decided I'd do one better and just do a round-up of all the totally legal, totally free old games I could think of. So brace yourselves, it's a...

#1. The Ur-Quan Masters

Let's start where CoG member NotJeff suggested, with the open-source remake of 1992 classic Star Control 2. Bringing the galactic adventure of Star Control 2 into a slightly more modern era, The Ur-Quan Masters is essentially an enhanced port blessed by the original developers that's been underway since 2002. Version 0.6.2 was released in 2007, and adds online multiplayer to the already considerable content of the original game.

If you aren't familiar, it's a little bit of a 4X game, a little bit adventure game, a little bit top-down combat, and a whole lot wacky. I didn't get to play a lot of Star Control 2 as a kid, but what I remember is the extremely strong characterization of the alien races - you will laugh at some, and tremble at others - the fun of hunting for minerals on planet surfaces, and the great music. All of that has been preserved here, including optional updates to the music if you prefer them.

If you fondly remember Star Control 2, it's all waiting for you just as you remember it. If you've never tried it, now's a great time to give it a whirl.

#2. Sierra Adventure Games

Next up, some games that I do have a much deeper personal connection with - Sierra adventure games. These were quite literally my introduction to gaming, playing King's Quest I through IV on a Tandy 1000 EX in the mid-80's with my parents. A fair bit of noise has been made (and rightly so) about the long-awaited successful release of The Silver Lining, but those guys aren't the only ones who are keeping Sierra's legacy alive.

For starters, AGD Interactive has been lovingly re-creating Sierra's adventures for years now - I first remember coming across their work on the original King's Quest sometime in college. They've now done three full games - the first two in the King's Quest series, and Quest for Glory II - and the scope of their work is difficult to overstate. Entirely new VGA graphics, music, voicework for both of the KQ games... truly, I think of these as the definitive versions of the games I loved as a kid. It's wonderful work, and if you have any love for adventure games, you need to check it out.

Quite apart from them, Infamous Adventures released a similarly complete graphic, music and speech overhaul of King's Quest III back in 2006, and while I confess to not having played it myself yet, it certainly looks excellent. Between AGD and Infamous Adventures, revisiting memories of Sierra games is easier - and better - than anyone could reasonably expect.

#3. ScummVM Adventure Games

Let's stay on the adventure kick for a moment and point out how great ScummVM is. If you've never used it, it's basically a modern player for all the classic SCUMM adventure games, of which there were a metric ton. Almost every classic LucasArts adventure (Monkey Island 1 and 2, Sam & Max, Loom, two Indiana Jones games, The Dig, Full Throttle) can be plugged into ScummVM, which runs on damn near anything, and they'll run like a dream. Many of the classic Sierra games will work as well. Of course, those games you need to legally own before playing them in ScummVM, so that's not the purview of this article, but there are three classic adventures you can download completely free that will work right out of the box.


Remarkably, this image with monkeys in pirate hats is not from a LucasArts game. I was shocked too.

Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen and Lure of the Temptress are all now freeware, and are only a click away. BaSS is a classic post-apocalyptic tale of a man on the run (and in addition to being a great game has the distinction of being animated by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame). Flight of the Amazon Queen, pictured above, is a much more light-hearted Indiana Jones-style jungle adventure. Lure of the Temptress I'm not familiar with, but is apparently fantasy-themed. But hey, it's free, so if you like adventure games, hop to!

#4. Rockstar Classics Collection

I feel like there isn't a whole lot to say here, because it's GTA, right? I mean, we all know what GTA is about. If you've never played the first two, it's hard to say that they hold up tremendously well in a world where GTA IV and its expansions can both be had for well under $20 in a sale, but they're still pretty good top-down fun and perfect for gaming on a laptop if you're on the go. They also had great multiplayer long before the 3D GTA games figured out how to do that.

Wild Metal, I confess, I have not played. It won't cost me anything but time, so maybe I should get on that? If you've played it, leave a comment and let me know if I should.

#5. Mechwarrior 4

This one probably isn't news to many of you, since it was a big deal a few months back, but MekTek has released Mechwarrior 4 for free, one assumes at least partly to drum up interest for their new Mechwarrior game, which is coming... someday.

That's the good news - and don't get me wrong, it IS good news. Mech 4 is a pretty great game and not a whole lot of people played it at release (myself included). The bad news is, MekTek kind of stealth-bundled the whole thing with their own Impulse-esque delivery service, MTX, and that didn't go so well. A lot of people weren't able to download the game at all, and those who were able still sometimes had problems with MTX as a launcher.

MekTek promised quickly that they would release a downoad free of MTX, but as far as I can see they have not yet done so. The community has come up with workarounds, which you can feel free to try if you're so inclined, but it's unfortunate that this game comes with a side of either a lousy delivery client or required back-end tinkering.

#6. A Whole Lot More

We're only scratching the surface here, really; for all that we PC gamers complain (and rightly so) about restrictive DRM and fear of not being able to play our games down the road, there are still a lot of publishers happy to create goodwill by giving away older wares. The original Railroad Tycoon is free now, if you feel like building trains across the country. If you want to play through the predecessors to Halo, all three Marathon games are completely free. For strategy buffs, Command & Conquer Gold can be had gratis, and one of my favorite strategy games as a kid, Defender of the Crown, is free now too. M.U.L.E. has been completely overhauled and is available with online multiplayer, and the classic text adventure version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is playable as a webgame provided by the BBC.

And there's probably a lot more I don't know about. If you do, leave a comment and share it with everyone. And here's hoping that more publishers in the future go through their back catalogs and choose to donate some of their older work to the public good. These games aren't just good for nostalgia, after all; they're part of our history, and helped build the industry we care so much about. It's great to see them kept alive.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Just an observation - I saw an announcement from the Amazon Games account on Twitter that Assassin's Creed II for the PC is on sale for $15 "while supplies last". That is, of course, an absurdly low price for a triple-A title that came out less than 5 months ago and reviewed extremely well. It's the sort of thing you might expect to see in a Steam seasonal sale, except that this is a boxed copy, not a digital one. The platform-specific nature of the sale is also interesting. Let's take a look at the listings for each platform for a moment.

Here's the XBOX 360 version of the game:

The PS3 version:

And the PC version:

You may recall that back before the game came out on the PC I wrote about Ubisoft's anti-consumer DRM scheme - how I felt it was going to give Ubi's legitimate customers a worse deal than the pirates they were ostensibly fighting. As a commenter noted below that post, there were many reports of the DRM doing exactly what I thought it would after the game released, locking out paying customers and preventing them from enjoying the game they bought.

Now, a deep sale on a recently released game isn't solid proof of anything, but notice that the PC version of Assassin's Creed II enjoys only a 1.5 star rating on Amazon, while the two console versions each have ratings of 4.5. It's a great game, and there's no difference at all between the PC and console versions except for the DRM on the PC (though the PS3 version was noted in some reviews to have performance problems compared to the X360 one). In fact, the PC version has the DLC from the console versions built-in, so it's otherwise a slightly better deal even if the price were the same. That low rating is 100% due to the DRM; reading just one or two of the user reviews bears that out. And a 1.5 star rating probably isn't too great for sales. And now, after less than half a year on shelves, ACII is $15 on the PC while its 360 console counterpart still sits happily at more than twice that, even though it's been out 4 months longer.

Unfortunately I fully suspect that if any lesson is taken from this by Ubisoft, it will be only that it isn't worth making PC versions of their games at all anymore. On the other hand, though, if this was the only way we were going to get them? We're better off without.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

Non-digital gaming time! If you happen to read my Twitter feed - which I suppose there's no reason to assume you do, but at this point I think a fair number of my readers are from the same community I interact with over on Twitter - you may have seen me begin a strange and rapid love affair with the board game Forbidden Island over the last week.

I heard about it for the first time last Sunday, when Mike from Penny-Arcade mentioned it. As both a huge Penny-Arcade fan and someone who likes tabletop gaming, that was enough to send me off in search of more information, and the game's page on BoardGameGeek finished selling it by telling me that it's essentially a faster-playing, lighter-themed version of Pandemic. And that it's only $15.

Now, Pandemic and I have a rocky relationship. If you aren't familiar, it's a cooperative game in which all players compete against the board - everyone wins, or no-one does. Diseases are spreading across the globe, and your team of medical professionals / disaster movie cliches (the medic, the dispatcher, the ops expert, etc) must scramble to contain and cure them. I've played it several times, and while I'm playing it I'm always having fun, but far too often after the game I feel like I've wasted my time. Pandemic can seem like it's going well for much of the game, and then all fall to pieces really quickly. That can be frustrating when it feels like there was no way to prevent failure.

Forbidden Island shares the same problem to a degree, but minimizes it by both playing faster and being a shorter game overall. The game mechanics are almost identical, though the theme is different - instead of four diseases, you have four lost treasures that your team of treasure hunters / adventure movie cliches (the pilot, the engineer, the diver, etc) must rescue from a sinking island. The board is randomized each time, which is a notable difference from Pandemic, and since the island is sinking as you play, your plans will change frequently as the game progresses. By the end of every game I've played so far it's felt frantic and fun, whether we won or lost. I've tried it with 2, 3 and 4 players, and have enjoyed it each time. And it's $15! Fifteen bucks for a game this good and pieces of this quality in a nice metal tin is crazy. If you've played Pandemic and really hate it or something, this might not be for you, but otherwise, go read the BoardGameGeek page linked above. If it sounds like your thing, snag a copy. I think you'll like it.

My frequent Twitter ravings about the game prompted a couple of questions, so I'll address those here.

(1) Do you usually get your [board] games online?

I try not to, but more often than not the answer is yes. There are some good board game shops here in Pittsburgh, and one in particular over by the CMU campus that I try to make a point to go into every month or two and pick something up if it looks good and is at a reasonable price, but it's really, really hard for those shops to compete with the 'net. I knew on Monday that I wanted to pick up Forbidden Island, so I called every shop in town to try to buy it locally. I know the game is relatively new, but not only did nobody have it, nobody even knew when they would have it. They all offered to make calls and call me back, but that would mean probably at least a week, maybe 2, before getting it, and I wanted a copy before Friday because that's when we play games at lunch at my office. Amazon had it to me by Thursday. Add in the fact that most online game retailers can offer the games at a lower cost, and... well, it's rough.

In terms of online shops I have used and can recommend, obviously Amazon's a pretty trustworthy site, as long as they're selling it directly and not through a reseller (though even then it's probably fine). Funagain Games has never done me wrong, and will frequently have prices a few bucks below Amazon and several bucks below a retail store. The guys over at Troll and Toad are okay, as well. Sometimes you can order directly from the publisher, as I did with Steve Jackson Games when I got Zombie Dice. In general, I'd recommend just doing a Google search for the game you're looking to buy, see what kind of prices come up, and then shop intelligently from there. [Edit: Adam in the comments also recommends ThoughtHammer - I haven't purchased from them yet, but their site looks good and I can confirm after some quick browsing that their prices are nice. Thanks, Adam!]

If you have a local shop, though, at least give them a chance, and maybe say a little prayer for them as you browse.

(2) Could you do a top 5 rundown of board or dice games good for 2 to 6 teams/people?

Well, I can give you some of my favorites. Meghan and I play games between just the two of us fairly frequently, so I tend to prefer games that at least CAN be played well by two, though we also get together with friends at least a couple times a month and need games that roll with more. Here are some that always end up getting pulled out, with BoardGameGeek links and summaries:

Carcassonne: The game the defines tile-laying gameplay for me. Very easy to teach, but highly variable on each playthrough and with a lot of depth, especially depending which expansions / variants you have. Players take turns drawing tiles at random and building a map, placing units on the map that will score them points during the game and at the end. Plays 2-5. I'm a big fan of the Hunters & Gatherers variant. It can also be played free online at BrettSpielWelt (I could write a whole 2nd post about BrettSpielWelt, and may at some point).

Ticket to Ride: One of Meghan's favorites and also very popular with our friends, I get cajoled into it even though it's not my favorite, but I seem to be the outlier, everyone else loves it. Earn points by building train routes across the U.S. / Europe / other places depending on which version you play. Plays 2-5, also depending on what version you play.

Ruse and Bruise: Very few people have heard of this one, and it's a shame because it's great. All players start out with the same deck of cards, but will draw randomized hands and use them to bid on point cards. Each card has a special effect, and many of the cards counter each other - cards are played face down, so you don't know which card an opponent played until you challenge their bid to reveal it. Lots of psychological warfare and trickery goes on with this one. The rules are terribly translated from German, but the folks on BoardGameGeek have done an admirable job of clearing them up on the page linked above. Plays 2-6.

Plunder! Another hidden gem that sold poorly and very few people have played, but almost everyone loves it when they do. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether you can still buy Plunder!; I believe it may have gone out of print. If you stumble across a copy like I did, pick it up. Players build a map of the Caribbean dynamically using the map cards in their hands, and then compete to pillage it for the most gold. It has some great, subtle mechanics, all based on the same deck of cards, it plays out differently every time, and it's got a really solid piratey theme. Plays 2-4, or 2-6 if you print the optional ruleset from BoardGameGeek ("Commodore Rules").

Zombie Dice: This is a "filler" game, but a good one. Essentially a press-your-luck game, players roll dice trying to eat brains and avoid being gunned down. Get gunned down 3 times, and lose your points for that round. First player to 13 brains wins. Cheap (about $10), quick, and plays however many people you've got.

Dominion: Take a collectible card game. Now take out the "collectible" part. You've got Dominion. ...Okay, sorry, that's a little oversimplified. But if you've ever played Magic: The Gathering or any other similar CCG, you know that the appeal is in building a deck to beat your opponent's. That's the appeal of Dominion as well, but all the available cards - attack cards, defense cards, victory point cards, etc - are on the table, and you build your deck as part of the gameplay rather than beforehand. By making smart choices about which cards to buy, you can open up your purchasing options on later turns, and limit your opponent's. Of course, they're trying to do the same to you. Plays 2-4, or up to 6 with expansions. This one is also available on BrettSpielWelt.

So there's six, in addition to Forbidden Island of course (which plays 2-4) or Pandemic (the same). Meghan and I also have some favorite two-player-only games like Lost Cities and the Settlers of Catan Card Game, but I'll leave it to you to follow those links if you want more info about them.

Happy gaming! I'm going to go see if I can convince my wife to go treasure hunting with me again. I don't want to burn this game out... but man, right now I'm really kind of hooked.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie
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We gave you a brief hiatus to recover after Mike wrapped up our "Best of Indie" lineup with Cave Story, figuring that after such an onslaught of quality freeware, maybe you needed a breather. But now we're back, and I hope you spent the time well, because if you're a fan of classic 8- and 16-bit RPG's, you may be lacking free time for awhile. This week's installment contains not one game, but three, and they aren't short. ...Well, okay, the first one is. After that, no.

First released back in 2007, Pseudolonewolf's Mardek series is a loving part-homage, part-parody of the RPG genre. Backing tried and true gameplay with a wry sense of humor and a classic aesthetic style, he's managed to amass a respectable following for these games, and it's easy to see why. Best of all - and the reason for my focusing on it now - in honor of the new release of Chapter 3, the first two chapters have been updated and revamped, so if you've never heard of Mardek before, this is the perfect time to jump in.


This is the sort of dialogue you can expect from Chapter 1. Mardek is not ashamed of its cliches.

Gameplay-wise, what you'll find here is almost exactly what you remember from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games of our youth (well, my youth... I don't know when your youth was) - you'll guide your party through towns and dungeons, opening chests, managing items and equipment via a fly-out menu system, talking to NPC's, saving your game at save crystals, taking everything that isn't nailed down, etc. The overworld map is slightly more abstracted than those of most classic RPG's, with characters traveling between nodes rather than trudging across the world one step at a time, but once you enter one of the game's main areas, the look and feel will be very familiar. The plot, on the other hand, goes to some rather different places, but I'll let you discover that for yourself.


Dragon's Final Fantasy Quest XIV?

In combat, things are again more or less played by the traditional book, though there are a couple of changes that make the game feel a bit more engaging than your standard turn-based RPG. A timing mechanic accompanies each attack and defense action, similar to the one found in the Mario RPG and Paper Mario games. It isn't implemented in quite as nuanced a way as it is in those series, but it still keeps you on your toes. Experience gain is also handled in an unconventional fashion - every successful hit against an opponent grants XP, so characters will on occasion level up in the middle of a battle, rather than at the end. Not a huge shift, but an interesting one. Otherwise, it's standard fare - the usual Fight, Magic, Item menu - but be warned that the combat in Mardek is not easy, once you pass the short introductory first chapter. Early fights can still pose a serious threat to your party, if you're not careful.


Sure, you start out with rags and sticks...


...but keep at it, and maybe this is in your future. Maybe. No guarantees.

There isn't a whole lot else to say - if turn-based RPG's are your thing, there's a surprising amount of game to sink your teeth into, for a free Flash project. The gameplay is solid, the writing enjoyable, and the atmosphere nostalgic. The most recent installment is hypothetically Chapter 3 of 8, so there may be much more to come, though if it took three years to get Chapter 3 out, I must admit some skepticism about 5 more chapters showing up anytime soon. Still, what's there now is no less impressive for that, and worth checking out whether more ever arrives or not.

Mardek is...

  • an ambitious project, well-handled so far.
  • happily self-aware, something I'm always glad to see.
  • very traditional, but in ways I appreciate.
  • certainly worth a spin if you ever entered BKMG or THEF as a character name.

A note: The claim is made that you can carry your saves between the game's chapters. I tried transferring my save from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 without success. I haven't yet tried doing it with Chapter 3. Let me know if you have better luck.

Mardek plays anywhere Flash works - Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3.

Tally-ho! (Play the first chapter. You'll get it. It's something adventurers say.)

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

I'm going to admit up front that I wrestled for a bit over whether or not to include this game in our "Best of Indie" line-up. It doesn't quite measure up to some of the others we've featured in terms of polish. It's a little easier to levy criticisms against it, and I suspect there may be a few raised eyebrows about putting this in over some other possibilities. But we didn't set out to make a Top 10 list (besides, we're not doing 10 of them). This series is about our personal favorites, the freeware games that are most memorable to us, and I'm choosing to favor ambition over proximity to perfection in this case. Great ambition deserves recognition, I think, and I'm hopeful that once you try this game out, you'll agree that despite its blemishes, it deserves to be featured among the best.

Set in the wake of an alien invasion of Earth, Iji tells the story of a young woman by the same name who wakes up with only a strange weapon and a disembodied voice to keep her company. With most of her family presumed dead and her brother Dan able to communicate to her only over the facility's PA system, she is surrounded by hostile creatures who will attempt to shoot her on site. She needs to survive, and if possible, she needs to either destroy the Tasen invasion force or get them to call off their attack.

How she does this is completely up to you.

While much more of an action game than an RPG, Iji takes a lot of its design cues from games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, presenting the player with a myriad of options for developing their character and encouraging them to experiment with solving problems in different ways. Experience ("Nanofields") can be absorbed through combat or exploration, and after gaining a level points can be put towards any of seven primary attributes: Strength, Attack, Assimilate, Health, Crack, Tasen, or Komato.

If that sounds like a lot, it is, and each one of those can have wide-reaching ramifications. Some, like Health and Attack, are fairly obvious. Strength allows you to break open security doors, potentially opening up alternate routes that avoid enemies or lead to hidden items; it also allows you to engage in melee combat more effectively. "Crack" levels up Iji's ability to tamper with electronics, and the game's hacking minigame (shown briefly in the trailer above) is employed all over the place - you can hack into some doors, you can unlock crates with special items, even the weapons and armor of your foes can be hacked, if you have the skill. Crack will also allow you to combine weapons more effectively at stations scattered around the map. Assimilate lets you regain health and armor from pickups more quickly, as well as increasing your ammo capacity. Tasen and Komato increase your affinity for the weapons of these alien races, allowing you access to better guns as you progress.

Of course, you won't have enough points for everything, especially early on - you're going to have to choose your path and change your playstyle to match. What's special about Iji is that to a surprising degree for a freeware title, the game will change to suit you, as well. Play Iji as a bloodthirsty warrior, and her tone and the tone of characters who interact with her will noticeably shift. Events may transpire differently than they would if you played her as a pacifist, sneaking and hacking your way through situations without violence. There are even enemies who will treat you differently if you haven't been aggressive towards their comrades, and overtly passive or aggressive playthroughs will each yield their own rewards in the end.


Iji begins as a blank slate. What sort of hero will you be?

Aesthetically, Iji alternates between pleasing and passable, depending on your tolerance for decidedly low production values. The visual resemblance to 2D sidescrollers like Out of This World and Flashback is strong, for any who played those games in their youth, though the animation isn't nearly as detailed. Level design is somewhat spartan, with a lot of repeated areas and not a whole lot of graphical variety. Some nice special effects help to make up for the otherwise bland look, though - explosions and particles specifically are well done, with some nice rudimentary physics taking over when things start blowing up. Frequent cut-scenes also provide a break from the sameness of the early levels, and they're generally well made. The music is good - it does get a bit repetitive from time to time, but never to the point where I turned it off.

From a gameplay perspective, there are also a few complaints to be made: for as many places as it gets used, the cracking minigame is extremely straightforward and not actually that much fun. Iji isn't quite as agile as I'd like her to be, even after leveling up - at no point can she shoot her weapons in midair, and avoiding enemy fire is often a practical impossibility, so you just need to level her Health up enough to take the damage until she can find pickups and recharge. Playing as a pacifist is also a little less satisfying than one might hope, and while it is a valid option, it often just involves running away.

Despite these minor issues, Iji is an impressive title and deserves to be played. Iji's developer and author, Daniel Remar, also created the previous Free and Worth Every Penny entry Hero Core - if that was his attempt at making an incredibly tight, focused game, then Iji was his "everything and the kitchen sink" game. Spanning 10 chapters, the game tells an intricate story that shifts to accommodate your actions; tension and uncertainty will chase at Iji's heels as she attempts to secure humanity's survival and her own in the midst of battle between two alien species. And please don't let the quibbles I wrote above mislead you. At some point you'll find yourself running down a hallway, ducking rockets from the sentry behind you and deciding on the fly whether to take the time to hack the door in front of you, turn and fight, or jump down the nearby elevator shaft and hope it isn't a jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, and you'll realize: Iji is serious, can't-believe-this-is-free fun.

Iji...

  • is one of the most ambitious freeware games I've ever played.
  • encourages you to play your way, and responds when you do so.
  • might be a tad too broad for its own good, and won't win any beauty contests.
  • has nonetheless stuck in my head ever since I first played it, more than I can say for many games I've paid for.

Iji is Windows only, and comes in a little under 40MB. Pick it up here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie

It occurs to me that Derek Yu may be a saint. And if not sainthood, surely he holds some revered position that implies near-superhuman charity and grace. Derek, you see, is no stranger to developing excellent games - his 2007 title Aquaria was the Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner of the 2007 Independent Games Festival, and is a great Metroid-esque action game with a unique control scheme that's (in my opinion) well worth your time and money. You should play it.

But last year, Derek made an action adventure game that easily stands among some of the finest of all time. A game that looks and plays like the best titles the 16-bit era of videogaming ever produced, but lives in a genre none of them lived in. It's a hybrid of platforming and Roguelike dungeon-crawling that will delight and humble you. It's simply sublime. And he gave it away.

For this week's "Best of Indie" installment of Free and Worth Every Penny, we examine Spelunky, easily one of my favorite freeware titles of the last 5 years. If you've paid attention to the patterns between my entries in this column and Mike's, you may have noticed that I have a pretty serious fondness for Roguelikes and their derivatives. You might call it an affinity. I'd appreciate it if you didn't label it an obsession, but if you want to use that word, I'll understand. Something about randomly generating an unforgiving world and then giving the player just enough in the way of tools (and usually not nearly enough in the way of instruction) to conquer it taps into the most addiction-prone pieces of my psyche. So I'm prone to ramble on about games like Desktop Dungeons, or Super Space Rogues, or ro9, or Torchlight... you get the idea.

Spelunky is nothing like any of those games in terms of presentation - 16-bit sidescrollers provide the visual inspiration here, and the controls feel much more like those of a Capcom title from the 80's than a methodical turn-based dungeon crawl. But make no mistake, from a game design perspective Spelunky is a Roguelike through and through, and it's one of the best to come along in a long time.

You won't start Spelunky in traditional Roguelike fashion, picking a class and other attributes. No, your hero here is always the same, an adorable Saturday morning cartoon version of Indiana Jones, equipped with a few lengths of rope and some bombs - and, of course, his trusty whip. From that point on, though, the similarities to games like Nethack are deliberate and delightful. Each level is randomly generated, and fraught with peril - an arrow trap or a fall from a great height poses as great a threat to your adventurer's well-being as enemies do. Randomized, too, are your rewards, with breakable pots, crates and chests holding the promise of treasure (a promise that is, on occasion, a lie). The variety is almost overwhelming - you'll have the chance to stumble on or purchase climbing gloves, spring shoes, parachutes, a jetpack, and all manner of other useful items to help you in your quest. Damsels in distress wait for you to rescue them... or use them as bait to distract your enemies. And golden idols tempt you from conspicuous pedestals - if you think you know what happens when you pick those up, you're exactly right. As in most Roguelikes, you have only one life and no saves, so tread carefully.


Yes, the blonde is just as annoying as the one from Temple of Doom. Saving her is profitable... but optional.

Luckily, for a game with so many challenges, the control scheme is simple and extremely precise. When I compared it to a Capcom sidescroller, I meant it; Spelunky sometimes demands as much precision as a Mega Man game, but it gives you the tools to live up to the challenge. Running, jumping, climbing and attacking are all performed with only a few buttons, and the game handles equally well with a keyboard or a gamepad. It's a tremendously scalable game, as well, and while it looks great blown up to 4X and fullscreen on my desktop, it also plays just fine in a window on my underpowered netbook. An included config utility helps you tweak it to fit whatever settings you need.

I want to take a moment and make note of some of the little touches in Spelunky, the details Derek Yu put in there just to let you know he cares. Arrow traps are triggered not just by your character, but also by any thrown object or other character; how and when to set them off becomes a strategy all its own. Shopkeepers, in classic Nethack tradition, may be robbed. In the same tradition, there are dire consequences for doing so - but of course, they can be avoided if you're clever. Most of each level is destructible, and you can use bombs and other tools to forge your own path. Experimentation with attacks and enemies will sometimes yield fruitful results; blow up a giant spider by catching a bomb in its web, and sticky bombs are your reward. The secrets and unlockables in this game run deep. There's a Wiki out there, of course, but I'm not going to link it. You can find it when you're ready... first you should discover some things for yourself.

There's a lot more I could talk about - how delving deeper into the dungeon reveals entirely new tilesets, enemies and traps; how tense the levels without easy access to light sources can be; how much you'll come to dread the words "A chill runs down your spine! Let's get out of here!" - but the bottom line is that Spelunky is an incredible achievement and it's amazing that we all get to play it at no cost. I was very happy to hear earlier this year that Derek is revamping the game to sell on XBox Live Arcade. I certainly intend to purchase it when he does, but the original is and will remain free to download. If you haven't, you should do that, right now.

Spelunky is...

  • one of the most polished freeware games I've ever played.
  • tremendously challenging, and equally addictive.
  • an excellent blend of genres, full of both creative experimentation and loving homage.
  • a permanent resident on the hard drive of every PC I own.

It's easy to make it a permanent resident on yours, too; it's a less-than-10MB download, and it's zipped up to make it portable. (I keep my Spelunky folder sync'd to all my machines via Dropbox.) Derek has even released the source code, if you're into that sort of thing. Like I said: he just might be a saint.

Windows only - get it here.

"Free And Worth Every Penny" is a column I collaborate on with Mike Bellmore at Colony of Gamers. This piece also appears there.

Posted
AuthorEric Leslie