The Indie Gala Sim
The Indie Gala Sim is here, with 7 simulation games at a pay what you want price.
The games are: Bus Driver, Deer Drive and Euro Truck Simulator by SCS Software; Police Simulator, Police Simulator 2 and Traffic Manager by CyberPhobx; and Bridge Constructor, by Headup Games. (more…)
Max Payne 3, Tomb Raider, and More Bundles
Rockstar Games’ Max Payne 3 is out today.. along with the Rockstar Pass, which provides access to all the planned DLC as it is released over the year: five map packs, and Deathmatch and Co-op modes have been confirmed this far. Max Payne 3 is on my wanted list, but I’m probably going to wait for a Game of the Year edition.
Tomb Raider‘s release date has also finally been announced: 5th March 2013, worldwide! There’s also a new trailer out, with some gameplay showing poor Lara being put through her paces!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkBZ6kKeoTI]
Also out at the moment: three more indie bundles! These are the Indie Royale’s Graduation Bundle, the Bundle in a Box, and the fifth Humble Indie Bundle! (more…)
Indie Royale’s The Alpha Collection Impressions
Indie Royale’s latest bundle, The Alpha Collection is now available, featuring three currently-in-development games: Towns by SMP, 3079 by Phr00t and Wyv and Keep: The Temple of the Lost Idol by a jolly corpse.
Towns is a city building and management game where you organise your villagers to gather resources, build a town, craft weapons.. and then try to withstand the forces that come up from the depths, because your town is built on top of a dungeon!
Be Mine.. Or Not..
The traffic to Groupee’s Be Mine games and music bundle was rather more than expected, with the site going down almost as soon as the bundle came on sale.
Server capacity is currently being boosted, and the bundle, along with the Antisleep music bundle, will be relaunched tomorrow instead.
Be Mine will contains five games: Wasteland Angel, Sideway New York, Xotic, Beep and The Ball. Customers can pay what they want, with a minimum of $1, and 20% of the proceeds will be given to Child’s Play.
The Indie Royale Valentine’s Bundle: Pre-Order
The Indie Royale have now opened their Valentine’s Bundle for blind pre-orders, with a recommended £10 contribution and a minimum of $3.99 USD.
The games in this bundle include a fantastical first-person action-adventure game (Steam for PC), an IGF-nominated puzzle adventure title, a ‘scorching’ single and multiplayer arcade-strategy game, and a world premiere on PC for a pair of retro RPG-defense games.
Those who pre-order the bundle will also receive a bonus compilation album, Music To Play Games By Too from One Life Left, and will gain access to the games when the bundle officially launches.
The Valentine’s Bundle will launch later this week on a pay what you want scheme, starting with the minimum price of $3.99 USD.
Indie Gala 2 – Quick Overview
I grabbed my bundle of shiny new indie games from the Indie Gala 2 yesterday, adding Greed Corp, Roboblitz, Critical Mass, Fortix 2 and Bunch of Heroes to my Steam library, and to my ever-expanding backlog! So on to trying them out, in no particular order..
Fortix 2 is a reverse turret defense game by Nemesys Games, an indie developer from Hungary. The aim of the game is to capture the castle by capturing the land bit by bit, while avoiding the dragons, cannons, and other monsters..
I tried out the Fortix 2 demo a while ago, and found the gameplay rather easy.. maybe too easy. At the time I resisted buying the game in part due to that, but also because of the backlog.. so I was rather glad to see it in the bundle and have a bit more of an excuse to get it 😉
I’m happy to note that the full game includes more difficult enemies, including Blood Bats which travel along the base line, meaning nowhere is safe! Maps start to contain hazards such as bat caves, which when captured release more bats to plague you.. the added challenge was certainly appreciated!
One small niggle, though.. the game takes your name from your Steam profile, with no option for renaming. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care, but with a character limit in place, it trimmed my name to “Sir CoffeeScam”!
Vanguard Games‘ Greed Corp is a turn based strategy, where you need to find the balance between harvesting the land for resources and preserving it. Each hexagon of terrain has a number of layers which collapse as you harvest the land.. these can also be strategically destroyed to throw enemy units and buildings into the abyss!
Combat between walkers is simple.. the larger force on each hexagon wins.. but when it comes to the buildings, you need to look at the layout of the map before doing anything! Harvesters can be built on any land you own, then on each turn they generate resources out of the terrain they are on, as well as those around them. However, this erodes a layer as well..
You can use these to sabotage your enemy by destroying the land under them; when a hexagon falls, any buildings or units on it fall too!
I only took a quick look at this game, playing through the tutorial to see how it all works.. I’ll be coming back to this one later, and maybe trying out the multiplayer: you can take on up to three other players across a range of maps 🙂
Bunch of Heroes was next: a four-player co-op shooter by NGD Studios. Aliens are invading Earth, and summoning a Zombie army to assist them.. and the Bunch of Heroes are our last line of defense! 🙂
There are four playable characters in the Bunch, each with a different special attack: El Comandante, the Cuban Commander, throws exploding cigars, while Jared Joe, the Quarterback, can make a touchdown for his special move. Captain Smith, the Duke, can call in a bombing run to assist him, and Agent Liu, the spy, can set enemies on fire! To use the special attack, you need to kill enemies and pick up the energy they drop.
There are three modes: Campaign, Survival and Timed Mode, with a few different scenarios. Campaign mode consists of simple missions such as clearing enemies from an area, defending a point for a short time, and rescuing cheerleaders. I found the cheerleader rescue rather funny, as you have to sling her over your shoulder and carry her..
Aside from screaming when you pick her up or put her down, the cheerleader dances at intermittent points while not being carried. At one point I died while carrying her, and found it rather funny when she almost instantly started dancing at my corpse’s feet! 😀
The game is designed for four players, and as there are no AI bots, playing by yourself means being somewhat swamped. After trying the first Campaign, I tried out Survival.. my first attempt was rather brief.. 😉
Roboblitz, by Naked Sky Entertainment, is a puzzle platform shooter featuring a little robot technician who lives aboard a Space Cannon Facility. The Facility comes under attack from pirate robots led by the MegaNOAD, and Blitz has to get all systems up and running in order to fire the Space Cannon while fending off attacks from the various invading pirate robots.
You start off with only your grabby arms and a spin attack, which is fine for dealing with the Pirate Scouts, but ineffective on larger enemies. Blitz can also gather collectible Upgradium, which can be used to purchase new weapons: the first of these is the EMP gun, which stuns enemies for a short time, but other weapons are able to destroy them.
I liked the variety of puzzles, spread across different areas which you can access at will, but I found the controls and movement occasionally quite poor.
Blitz’s item handling wasn’t as accurate as I’d have liked, and in getting close enough to pick some items up, I found myself bumping them away instead. More frustrating was the jumping: in particular, I found jumping into one certain pipe in the Coolant Tower was more miss than hit, with a miss causing Blitz to get stuck on the edge, holding on by the arms. After a few misses in the fan room, and having to go back to try again, this annoyed me enough that I decided to move on to the final game in the bundle..
Critical Mass, a 3d action puzzler by Manic Games Studios! There are four modes: Classic, Survival, Meditation and Rush, but the core gameplay is the same in each.. destroy the mass by creating colour combos of four or more blocks. Simple to understand, but difficult to master! 🙂
I tried Classic first, and quickly realised that this has the makings of an addictive game.. winning a level means proceeding to the next, slightly more difficult level, while defeat means retrying the level. In this mode, the camera zooms in during play until the whole structure shakes and destroys itself.. producing a combo pushes the camera back and gives you just a little more time, while Survival ‘rewards’ a combo by throwing more blocks into the fray. Rush mode times your efforts, with the object to clear the mass as quickly as possible, and Meditation is the calm, thoughtful mode where you can aim for the biggest combos on the board, without distraction.
The bundle came with music as well, and I have to note I don’t really listen to game music outside of the games themselves. However, games without music wouldn’t be the same, so it’s good to see some support for indie music too 🙂
Indie Royale – The Serious Sam Lightning Pack
Indie Royale‘s first Lightning Round brings us a bundle of Serious Sam themed indies, containing Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam Double D, Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack, and Serious Sam: The First & Second Encounter. The bonus game is Serious Sam: The Greek Encounter, a top-down, 8 bit version of the game.
This bundle is on sale for just 100 hours, on the same pay what you want scheme all the previous sales have used.
The Serious Sam Indie Series was commissioned by Devolver Digital with the support of Croteam around the release of Serious Sam 3: BFE. More information on the pack is available here.
The AGS Bake Sale Bundle (Another Indie Bundle)
The AGS Bake Sale Bundle is the latest set of indie games to appear for sale, with all proceeds going to the Child’s Play charity.
There are fourteen games in this bundle, all made in the Adventure Game Studio (AGS) engine, by members of the AGS Community. These games have been created precisely for the purposes of inclusion in the Bake Sale Bundle.
Customers can purchase the bundle for any price they like, though with a minimum of $1.50 to cover the cost of the transaction. The bundle will be available from today, 20th Jan, through till the 29th of February.
The Indie Royale – New Year’s Bundle
The Indie Royale New Year’s Bundle has now opened for purchase!
There are four games in the bundle at present: Nuclear Dawn by InterWave Studios, Max & the Magic Marker by Press Play, Fractal by cipherprime, and Indie Royale exclusive Super Crossfire by Radiangames.
As usual, the bundle is pay what you want, above a minimum price. All the games are available on both Windows and Mac, with Steam keys for Nuclear Dawn, Max and the Magic Marker and Fractal, and Desura keys for Max, Fractal and Super Crossfire.
This bundle will be available for only five days.. so go and grab it now, over on www.indieroyale.com!
The Indie Gala
Another indie bundle? Oh yes.. and at this point I’m starting to wonder how many different bundles the market can sustain..
The Indie Gala is another indie games bundle, where you pay what you want, money being split between developers, charity and websites.. these games arrive via email Steam codes, which I prefer to downloads as I don’t have to worry about backing it up anywhere.
This bundle contains another set of games I hadn’t really heard of: inMomentum, a sci-fi racing platform game by Digital Arrow, hacking sim Hacker Evolution: Duality, by Exosyphen Studios, 2d platformer Saira, by Nifflas Games, creative puzzler Your Doodles Are Bugged! by Spyn Doctor Games, and Zombie Shooter 2, an action RPG with zombies, by Sigma Team.
There are also some bonuses, only available for the first two days of the gala: Bonus DLC doodles for Your Doodles Are Bugged!, Sigma Team’s earlier game, Zombie Shooter 1, as well as the official theme for the series, and one of Exosyphen Studios’ other hacking sim games, Hacker Evolution: Untold.. their website lists a lot of similar games for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Windows Mobile too.
Over the day, IndieGala.com have sold over 18,000 bundles, but the average price paid is on the low side at just $1.30, or about £1. I suspect they’d have had larger payments if they’d kept the bonuses for those who paid above the average.. though then again, those who didn’t know the games might have been put off that way.
I was a little reluctant to pick up the bundle at first due to not recognising the games.. but meh.. I’ve come across plenty of random games and loved them 🙂