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Tag Archives: friday fun link

Friday Fun Link – Forget-Me-Not

Check out Forget-Me-Not, a tough as nails riff on the gameplay mechanics of the arcade games of the 80′s. It’s free on Windows and OSX and $1.99 for iOS. I bought it on the phone but didn’t like it because it’s hard to control on a touchscreen. No such difficulty with a keyboard though and you can’t beat free. Gameplay is a combo of pac man-esque pellet munching, simple shooting mechanics, and maze escape. Did I mention it’s tough? Remember – you can (and will) shoot yourself, and that’s not a good thing. Gameplay video:

Friday fun: Id’s Doom in your browser

A great demonstration of how much progress is being made with javascript. Spend some time at lunch today playing the original Doom from Id in your browser. Performance is a little sluggish on my middle of the road imac at work, and the sound lags behind the action, but it’s still pretty impressive. It also sort of mimics my original experience with Doom back in the day, when it was sluggish as heck on the old (386? 486? I can’t recall) machines we had at the office when it came out. Anyway, worth a little stroll down nostalgia lane. Mind that you should try this with a modern browser. Enjoy!

Friday fun link: Glorg

Glorg is worth checking out simply on the strength of its design. It’s a minimalistic one button rpg inspired by roguelikes with great art design and music. This isn’t a deep experience, but it’s perfect for your friday lunch break. Pay attention to the timing on your mouseclicks – it’s not obvious at first that timing plays an important role. A video is below:

Return of the Friday fun link: Cursed Treasure

Cursed Treasure is a fantastic flash-based tower defense game with a level up system. If you’re a fan of the genre you don’t want to miss this one. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, it’s just really well executed, has good graphics, UI, and sound, and enough depth to keep you engaged. I finished all levels with a brilliant rating. A hint: the fear power of Crypts is really powerful. I found it easiest to focus on leveling that tower type up. Also holding down shift lets you repeat actions, something that’s not obvious and which is critical to beating Ninjas with your fireball.

Friday fun: adventure games, old school style

Graphic adventures have made something of a comeback over the last couple of years, thanks in no small part to the success of the wonderfully funny episodic Sam and Max games, but they’re still very much a niche game genre. This wasn’t always the case – back in the 80′s graphic adventures were one of the most popular genres, and one of the biggest producers of this genre was Sierra, now sadly long gone. Their games live on though, and Sarien.net is this week’s friday fun link – they have many of the classic old Sierra games from the 80′s available to play for free in your browser. If you fancy a walk down memory lane from back in the day, check them out.

Friday Fun: Spelunky, a roguelike…platformer?!?

Mix together Jumpman, your favorite roguelike, and some inspiration from Indiana Jones, pour it into a PC and offer it up for free and you get Spelunky, a fabulous little platformer featuring retro 8-bit style graphics, rock solid platforming controls, and procedurally generated levels that are never the same. It’s a complete blast. Check out the video below then go download your copy over on the Spelunky site. Oh, and I should note the developer’s being rewarded for his excellent work – this is coming to Xbox Live Arcade.

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Friday fun: Ferrari Virtual Racing

Apparently Ferrari‘s marketing budget is so large they can afford to give away a quality racing sim for the PC to help sell their cars. I doubt anyone reading this is in a position to buy a new Ferrari, but you can make your way over to their site and register to get yourself a copy of their racing sim for free. This is not a quick knockoff, this is a quality release comparable to a commercial title you’d pay $40-60. Definitely worth checking out. Some video to give you a sense of it (fast forward a couple of minutes, the demo shows off the menu system in the beginning. The actual racing starts after a bit):

Their plan is to continue to enhance this as time passes with new tracks and cars, including historical Ferraris.

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Friday Fun: Gothic II for cheap

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.

Friday fun: Triangle Wizard

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 -

Friday Fun: A New Zero

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:

Friday fun – Warzone

Desktop Tower Defense in play.

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.

Friday fun, this time with physics – Totem Destroyer

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!

Friday fun link…make your own fun!

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!