Let’s build a spacecruiser!

After lots and lots of hours chopping wood and digging for diamonds in minecraft
I thought how awesome it would be to be able to build spaceships in a minecraftish sandbox game. Wouldn’t it be awesome to put together your own starcruisers and man it’s different turrets and stations?
Yes, of course it would.
And wouldn’t it be awesome to have a game tailored to that?
The answer, again, is YES.

Meet Blockade Runner:

It’s got multiplayer coop in an open world, errr, space, fully customizable fighters/cruisers/deathstars to be built from scratch, manned by you and fellow nerds.
Awesome? Not if you don’t like spaceships. But you’re not an idiot!
It’s currently in Alpha-state and costs $10 at this point.
Support them and construct interstellar battleships of ridiculous proportions!

And for those who like their spaceships landed on alien planets,
there’s Voxel-based game Planet Explorers currently in development by
independent Devs Pathea coming later this year.
It’s got a (sadly, NOT procedurally generated, but large) alien planet,
sandboxy building, defense turrets and angry aliens.

Yes.

Mobile gaming! Awesome!!1

Tiger handhelds were the mobile phone games of the past and they shared a lot of characteristics:
Limited possibilities, awkward controls, the need to squint your eyes… what’s not to like?

Looking back at the tiny games that were the appstore games of my elementary school days is actually pretty fun and luckilly, somebody made a very nice page that gives you the chance to not have fun with these games:

Check it out here

Image

Remember how the coolest kids had digital watches with a built-in game?

Whatsup?

Not much.
So why not kill some time sending astro marines to defend Earth from Martians. On Mars.
Mars Commando by Vidroid Studio is another defense game with charming 8 bit tunes and pixelated weird Aliens that look like retarded doughmen. Lo-Res Awesomness!
While recruiting Astro Marines to take position next to your Mars probe, a scout droid under
your control gets to shoot its machine gun at the approaching derpoids.

You like?

Play it at Armor Games or Kongregate.

Upcoming Indie Games that should make you throw cash around.

Here’s a (by no means complete) list of upcoming indie games that you should buy. Period. In no particular order.

Botanicula

Amanita Design are the Czech developers that already brought us the amazing Point & Click Adventure Machinarium. But you probably already clicked the shit out of that epic game. Botanicula will again be pointy and clicky but this time has cute plant and seed people exploring an exotic floral world.

Legend of Grimrock

Remember this rarest of gems?

If not, go back some years, don’t waste valuable time on homework or playing outside
but venture into the deep in FTL’s “Dungeon Master”! Now.
Those who know it will remember the panic of being caught in a deadend with knights
preparing to bash your heroes’ skulls in, eating tons of screamers and being super-pissed off at those little furry thief creatures and their stupid giggle sound.

Now, a few industry veterans are working on Legend of Grimrock:

If you like dungeon crawling and Dungeon Master’s / Eye of the beholder’s timeless gamemechanics, you WILL buy this.

Castle Story

Imagine this certain sandbox block building game… y’know… Minecraft (there, I said it) and instead of building everything yourself, you have a bunch of cute yellow fellas that look like naked lego people build everything for you. But unlike Minecraft, Caste Story’s way of constructing castles and stuff brings Stronghold to mind. And that means awesomness.
And don’t we all like Voxels? Sure we do.

Starbound

Starbound will be incredible.  Well, the premise alone and the fact that the artist did a good Job on Terraria before should be enough to make the big biz players look like retards. Again.
The player or players, as this will also have coop and competitive gameplay find themselves on an abandoned space station which they will use as a base for exploration and travelling in a sandbox universe.
Unlike AAA RPG dinosaurs pooping their pants and primarily entertaining us with hilarious glitches Starbound relies heavily on procedural content generation. That means everything
will have a unique feeling to it. Think of Terraria with exploration of alien planets, more (optional) quests and NPCs. You CAN boldly go where no nerd has gone before.
The meteor will shit money all over Starbound’s Devs.

Hell, this game will have M41 PulseRifles, tentacle planets and penguin kings. With little crowns.

Zynga screws over Indie devs! Nobody’s surprised.

It’s not the freshest chunk of news, but Zynga, who have made a great effort to successfully turn games into happy clickfests with no challenges whatsoever seem to be very good at that whole business thing. At being nice: not so much.
Apparently the studio well known for such epic gamedesign masterpieces like farmville, fishville and a shitload of other villes have screwed over indie developers Nimblebit.
Read about it here.
But well, all is fair in love, war and the big biz I guess.
Still – needless to say – the meteor is angry.

On the lighter side, here’s a little game we can all enjoy:
Griefer! is about buildings that are carefully constructed by the Computer
and then get blown to shit by you, the player. It’s got voxels and explosives
and that’s pretty much all I need for a few minutes of fun.
It’s one of the results of a Java max 4KB size competition.
More about the competition here.
A lot of fun in 4 KB I’d say.

Skyrim’s out. I don’t give a fuck.

Skyrim’s out. It won’t have attributes and skills. But perks. And lots of action.
I’m an old, wise and bitter asshole, so I’m not a fan.
The good thing: We don’t have to give a fuck. Instead, check out Legend of Grimrock.

First person? A party of 4 heroes? Puzzles? Dungeon Master? Fuck yeah.
It’s taking us halfway back to the late 80s, when computer games were a refuge for smart kids with acne and enough patience to switch disks during a game.
It’s currently in alpha. Go visit the game’s page and tell the developers that you love them.

KeyboardDrumsetFuckingWerewolf

Yes, this game is called Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf.
It’s a rather weird trippy journey through a bunch of different stages
and it’s awesome. Why? Because. That’s why.

I could write my interpretation of what the game seems to depict,
but I guess you better find out yourself and give it a try.
It’s also got a nice soundtrack that fits the rather unsettling gameplay pretty well.
Get it, download it, play it and have a look at your brain on crack and orange juice:

Download @ Developers page

“A lot of the games on my site are just small experiments dressed up as games.”
No, they’re fever dreams dressed up as hallucinogenic warfare.
I love it.