If you took one part Doom, one part Diablo, and mixed em up in a pc-only piece of freeware, you’d end up with Doom:Fall of Mars:
It’s exactly as fun as it looks – if you loved Diablo you’ll like this. It’s a tiny download and should run on pretty much any modern machine, its needs are modest. Definitely worth checking it out.
I’ll never pass up an opportunity to praise Gothic II – it’s one of the finest CRPG‘s ever made. GOG.com, a DRM free digital game portal specializing in older games, just announced that they’re carrying it. For $9.99 you get the game and it’s expansion plus a few extras. There are few better bargains in gaming – Gothic II is an epic fantasy adventure with arcade combat and an absolutely huge world to explore. There really have been very few games as good as this one. I played through and solved it along with it’s predecessor and recommend them to anyone who has an interest in CRPG’s. A bonus is the fact that these games are old enough now that they’ll run on older hardware. I’ve bought things off of GOG.com a few times now and really like their service. Anyway, check it out, it’s this week’s Friday fun link. Oh – windows only, sorry folks, though it will run fine under boot camp if you’ve gone that route. Here’s the link to the gog.com product page for Gothic II.
A little gameplay to give you a sense of it is below.
Take one dose rogue like, one pinch of 80’s vector graphic arcade game aesthetic, a smidgen of diablo II rpg action, mix up in Wouter van den Wollenberg’s brain, and you get Triangle Wizard, a real time arcade rogue like:
Free, a tiny download, and worth checking out if you’re a fan of any of the above genres. My only real complaint is the walking speed of your wizard is on the slow side – I wish the action was a bit faster paced. Then again, I keep getting whomped at low level so maybe it’s for the best –
If I told you someone’s managed to build elements of the Battlefield series of FPS along with elements of combat flight sims into a tiny ~400k executable, you wouldn’t believe me, so instead make your way over to Cryptic Sea’s page for their upcoming game A New Zero. It’s in public beta right now, is a tiny download, and has fun multiplayer in a tiny download. It’s all a bit spartan right now but they plan for much more and it’s worth checking out even if only to marvel at the achievement. This is Windows only at present, sorry mac folk. Here’s their trailer to give you a sense of the gameplay:
Image of Desktop Tower Defense via Wikipedia
I mentioned a week or two ago how I had finally gotten the last and hardest badge for Desktop Tower Defense over on Kongregate.com and how I needed to find a new pastime for my lunch hour. I’ve found it. It’s called Warzone, and it’s cast from the same mold that DTD is. You purchase various kinds of towers and place them on the board, building a maze to channel the enemy forces through, slowing their march towards your home and exposing them as effectively as you can to the firepower of your towers. Warzone doesn’t add much in the way of innovation to this formula, but it’s well executed, comes with a number of maps and game modes, and so far, 5-10 games under my belt, it seems pretty well balanced. I wish it had some kind of slowing/freezing tower, and I wish it was over on Kongregate with badges etc would be the only things I would say in terms of enhancements. This is flash based so it should play on any machine. Check it out for a little friday fun, and good luck trying to beat my current high score, ~85k on the original map using cash mode.
Here’s a great little friday fun link – a flash based puzzle game. Every level presents you with a golden totem sitting at the top of a stack of blocks. You can click to destroy 1 of these blocks every couple of seconds, which will cause the block to disappear. Your goal is to get the totem safely down without causing it to fall too far, and destroying the blocks can destabilize the tower the totem sits on, jenga-like, so you have to think carefully about where you remove blocks. Add in a few different block types and scoring based on how quickly you can retrieve the totem on each level and you have a simple little lunchtime diversion for your friday afternoon. Check it out!
Today’s friday fun link is something of a cop out. A poster to one of my favorite gaming forums mentioned this list of the top 100 indie games. There are samples of virtually every gaming genre, from action to rpg, including free, shareware and commercial offerings, and there are tons of excellent games in the list. I’m familiar with at least half of them but was psyched to find a number of unexpected gems in the list. Heavily biased towards Windows but many of the games, especially the roguelikes and rpgs, have linux/osx versions available. Enjoy!
Dave's Place/Metamusing 