The Pirate Bay Bundle: Cycle, Dark Tower, Death Moose, Dogfighter and Dorsaka

All these games are free and can be downloaded as a part of moshboy's The Pirate Bay Bundle, watch the trailer and download it here:

After this next 5 I will be a quarter of the way through, time to get playing.

Cycle

Cycle is immediately very appealing to me visually, I love the mix of smooth gradient backgrounds and pixel art. Possibly a reason why I think Fez is the best looking game ever made. Anyway, in addition to the pleasant graphics the music and sounds have a nice atmosphere to them also. You control your stick man with the arrow keys and attack with his glowing sword by pressing space. If you like the look of this game I would recommend you go ahead and play it now, because I spoil the cool gimmick of this game in the next paragraph. 

I didn't expect anything more than this but it gets better. Cycle takes it's name seriously, as you walk around the small planet, day changes to night and night changes today. More importantly when you walk all 360 degrees around the planet, you must kill a previous version of yourself which moves with your recorded actions of your last rotation of the planet. This makes for some really interesting situations where you try and fight the red monsters and yourself at the same time. Killing yourself restores all three hearts, so you can't avoid doing it. Beating the game took me at least 10 tries, and along the way not once did I feel my deaths were cheap.

A really great little game that looks fantastic, it was definitely worth my time and I hope you enjoy it.

Dark Tower

The gimmick of this wall jumping platformer is the randomly generated levels, which are full of crabs, bats and spiked blocks you must avoid. This was a Ludum Dare game and you can tell most of the time was spent on the randomly generated levels. Because unfortunately there isn't any music or sound effects. I'm not a professional games designer but I've made enough stuff to see how important sounds are in games. They actually make the controls feel better and more reactive, of course this is an illusion, but it makes a huge difference. If you like the sound of randomly generated levels though, why not give it a try.

Death Moose

I would be disappointed is this game wasn't nonsensical or silly. I was not disappointed. You play one hell of a bad-ass moose that can punch people in the face, eat the corpses of petty humans and summon rocks from the sky. That's right, SUMMON ROCKS FROM THE SKY. Makes perfect sense, I love it. Speaking of sound effects the ones in this game are fantastic in a lovingly stupid fashion. They were all done by a guy (supposedly the developer) making sounds through a microphone. 

The gameplay consists of you as the moose fighting wave after wave of humans. The humans come in a few different forms, knights, ninjas, marksmen and paragliding men dropping rocks, perhaps a few more. It doesn't control very well but it certainly made me chuckle and I think that's the point.

Dogfighter

Seeing this name I pictured a game where you play as a dog, but alas you play a space ship in horizontally scrolling space. In most scrolling shooters you play against many enemies at the same time, but in this case each level you fight one large ship. I guess it's like a boss fight as every level. You must try and land as many hits as possible while dodging the attacks of the big ship that come every few seconds. You can also deploy flares that attract small drones which the enemy fires at you occasionally. There are a number of power-ups that change the bullets you fire. These are temporary and only last so long, but I would personally like to see permanent upgrades too, of which there are not. Most of the skill comes from dodging the enemy attacks, which get increasingly difficult at quite a sharp rate. I found level 3 and 4 to be very hard to get past. I am pretty awful at these shooters, though. As a final note it would be nice to see a health bar of the enemy ship, since they can be quite the bullet sponges.

Dorsaka

Dorsaka is a maze game by which you are stuck in a desert. This desert isn't a friendly one either, a bar in the top left indicates how hydrated you are. You can increase this bar by walking into grass. This adds a nice strategy element considering maze games can be rather dull at times. There were many times when I was close to death, only just managing to grab some grass at the last possible second. It can get very tense at times as you rapidly try to plan an appropriate way through the maze. With trial and error however you will probably figure out the solution after a few tries. Dying also leaves a ghost of your character in the maze where you die, it doesn't change the gameplay at all, but a nice touch I thought.

Finally I really like the atmosphere of the game, it has a great feeling of mysteriousness, especially since the subtitle of the game, in the main menu is: The Lost Desert of Inter-dimensional Mazes, adding more to the intrigue. Definitely worth a try, but I think there's quite a bit more that can be done with this idea.

The Pirate Bay Bundle: Caldera, Cat Show, Connect, Cripple Apocalypse and Criss Cross

All these games are free and can be downloaded as a part of moshboy's The Pirate Bay Bundle, watch the trailer and download it here:

We have a nice variety in the next batch of 5, lets find out what they entail.

Caldera

Caldera would be the perfect game to have on your phone, and I mean that as a compliment. It's a little awkward to explain but you must press the X key in correspondence to the colour of the center square and the square that is selected. The selected square changes every split second so it becomes a matter of timing too. Whether you understand my botched explanation or not, as extra complexities are added to the game it becomes comparable to tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. The only problem I have with the game was it's length, I want to play more!

Cat Show

Uh...

Wha...? 

Speechless is a nice way to described my feelings for this game. And I mean that in a hilarious sense of the word. The humour of Cat Show is bizarre to say the least but it had me in hysterics. I don't want to spoil anything else, you will only find out what I mean if you play it yourself, go do that now.

Connect

In Connect you have to reduce all the nodes to the number zero by connecting them. Connecting them subtracts the number of each node from each other. For example connecting a "2" node to a "3" node will leave you with one node of "0" and another of "1". I hope I haven't made it sound complicated, because it isn't. This would make for quite a fun puzzle game in itself but the stroke of genius is the time limit. There is a total of 15 puzzles all of which must be done in 60 seconds. If the 60 seconds run out you have to start from the first puzzle again. This means the puzzles can't be solved by trial and error very easily.

The aesthetic is nice and simple, plus it's actually rather hard to complete, haven't finished it myself yet.

Cripple Apocalypse

The world has become infested with cripples and it's your job to, uh... Run them down with a car that also happens to have spikes attached to it's bumper. Careful though, don't crash into another car head on, or you'll burn to death.

I really don't know what else to say, the graphics are purposefully garish and I guess it's satisfying to run down numerous cripples with a nice squish sound. Of course the game isn't very deep on a skillful level, but that's not the point. The point is, you shouldn't feel guilty about running over cripples. Wait, maybe not... I don't know, maybe I should feel guilty?

Criss Cross

Criss Cross is a maze game by which you must gather 5 keys and reach the exit in the bottom left corner. The twist is, other strange creatures can pickup these keys too. Once you kill a creature holding a key by shooting it with your blaster gun, the key is randomly placed somewhere else on the level. Where it might be picked up by another creature and so fourth. The thing I really like about this game is how the different creatures interact. Pink ones are harmless, green ones can eat pink ones and orange ones can shoot. This means there's always something happening on-screen. Also, creatures spawn again if they die so you can't go around spamming the shoot button. Another reason not to spam the shoot button is that you might end up shooting yourself. If you go to the edge of the screen you appear at the opposite edge, pacman style, your bullets can also travel like this.

It becomes a game of accuracy, killing the correct creatures and memorizing the mazes. As some of them can be quite confusing, unfortunately later levels simply become too chaotic for my liking, reducing the fun. I still had a very good time with this game though.

The Pirate Bay Bundle: Blockage, Blockman gets more, bullet.collect, Bunnies back into your cage and Burgle

All these games are free and can be downloaded as a part of moshboy's The Pirate Bay Bundle, watch the trailer and download it here:

I missed 3 whole days, but I must continue; the next 5 games of the bundle!


Blockage

In one sentence I would describe Blockage as a cerebral isometric snake game. In many ways, that's exactly what it is. You move around a snake-like creature with the E, R, D and F keys. Because of it's isometric nature the controls can take a while to get your head around. But I would recommend you persist as it's certainly worth it.

To begin with you navigate your snake to the end door, unlike snake your length is infinite once you go over a square, a block of your body stays there. It doesn't require the finesse of the original snake though as you can actually back track and taking a wrong turn doesn't have major consequences as restarting is easy. The interesting part about this game is that once you complete a level your previous route becomes a part of the level. So you have to constantly think ahead.

Definitely worth a try, even if you aren't into puzzle games the difficultly curve isn't too steep so I had a great time.

Blockman gets more

This game is a twist on the game we all know, Pacman. It acts more as a puzzle game, than a game of quick thinking as you can't go back on yourself. That is unless you pickup a power-up that replaces the white dots you ate previously. It plays very well and the music is nice, especially the level select music. There are 6 worlds in total each with 3 levels. Every world has something new in it, for example in one you can break through walls, in another the controls are a bit different. I had fun but I did find my patience dwindled as some levels require you to get quite a few points before you can complete them.

bullets.collect

As you might be able to tell by the title, this game in a scrolling shooter with a programming theme. It also has a number of pretty unique mechanics that punishes you if you're too greedy. Defeating one enemy completes that level by which a few coins fall downwards which you need to collect to increase your time. The interesting thing is you don't start with any bullets yourself. Some of the bullets the enemy fires can be collected by you, the red ones in fact. Once you collect one of these bullets, of course you can fire it at the enemy and end the level. However the more bullets you collect in that level determines how many coins fall, so you don't want to end a level too quickly.

I hope you understand my explanation but really you should try it for yourself. It had me thinking in ways these shooters usually don't.

Bunnies back into your cage

An adorable little puzzle game with funky simplistic graphics where you have to guide a bunny into a cage. To do so however you will need to pickup the environment Minecraft style and replace the blocks for the bunnies and yourself to climb up. You control the bunnies with a carrot block which they lovingly follow. I really like the style of it but unfortunately puzzles can be a little boring to complete. Seeing the solution is often easy but the levels take a while to complete as you simply rearrange blocks. Maybe I just don't have the patience for it though, it might definitely appeal to you.

Burgle

In burgle you play... Yes, a burglar. You are tasked with robbing a large house of as many possessions as possible. You can snatch almost every item you can see in the house including house plants which you can use to hide behind. However the more you steal the slower you run as your swag bag gets heavier with all the stolen items. A timer is also counting down, when it reaches zero policemen start entering the house and searching for you. As you can imagine risk versus reward is a huge factor, it can be so very tempting to grab anything you see even though it makes you slower.

It's a simple concept that works very well, but I do think your character becomes too slow, too quickly. This greatly reduces my enjoyment with the game. With a bit of balancing I would love this game though. However it's still worth a try, the graphics are ace and encounters with the police can be exciting.

The Pirate Bay Bundle: Ahriman's Treasure, Akasa, Battletrack, Betasuppe, Bite Me and Block Faker

All these games are free and can be downloaded as a part of moshboy's The Pirate Bay Bundle, watch the trailer and download it here: 

I certainly enjoyed yesterday's 5 games, so today I'm going to write about the next 6. Lets do this.

Ahriman's Treasure

Ahriman's Treasure is the first "endless" game of the bundle. You play an explorer standing on a flying carpet with sword in hand ready to grab as much treasure as possible. With some well suited music playing in the background you set off on your adventure scrolling from right to left. Hopefully avoiding pillars, flame traps, bats and falling rocks. The most apparent thing is certainly the lovely glowing particle effects along with the well done pixel art. The screenshot below doesn't really do it justice, it looks much better in motion. The more the play the faster you start flying, making avoid obstacles much more tricky.

The endless temple is randomized so at times I came across frustratingly difficult situations which killed me before I knew what was going on. Maybe that's just my own incompetence though. After playing for a few minutes I got in an addictive loop of instantly restarting when I died. There's also gamejolt leader-board support, so if you're into that sort of thing you know what to do.

Akasa

Akasa, is a 3D vertical scrolling shooter, you shoot your guns with a nice "pew-pew" sound effect and drop bombs on stuff below. The sound effects are very satisfying and the destruction is fun when there are a lot of enemies on screen. The controls are also good, except for one major thing which bothers me. You can't move backwards while shooting forwards. Your whole ship turns around and you shoot behind instead.
This makes lining up shots awkward and frustrating. I've never been one for scrolling shooters though, maybe you'll enjoy it more.

Battletrack

I have always had a fondness for top-down racers since the times I used to play Micro Machines 3 over LAN at a friend's house. There are four tracks in Battletrack each is different but not very distinctive, you race around the track with 7 other AI racers. It would be cool to have local multiplayer, but I guess crowding around a keyboard to play a game like this isn't very common nowadays. You also have the ability to shoot after the first lap. This damages racers in front and sends them off course to leave small puddles of oil. The game plays just fine but unfortunately there are just too many laps required to finish a race and since you have to get a certain position to proceed to the next track it's annoying. It's a shame as I think it would be such an easy fix. Either way, you do get to play beside some rather funky background music.

Betasuppe

At a glance Betasuppe looks like a simple platformer, but actually it isn't in the slightest. It's a sort of puzzle adventure game, by which you use your keyboard to type certain commands. The main character Colin acts out these commands if he understands them. It only involves simple stuff like "Pickup X", "Walk Right" or "Look Sea" but it's rather pleasant. The puzzling involves simply trying to workout what you can do with each object or environment. Of course some problems arise where it's uncertain if you simply can't do something or you're just typing it wrong. But because it's so simple these issues aren't such a big deal. I have never played a point and click adventure game so despite it's simplicity I still enjoyed it.

I managed to complete it without any help but there's some hints in the readme file if you get stuck.

Bite me

Bite me is a question and answer tug-of-war where you try to convince a giant not to eat you. The more questions you get right the closer he gets to freeing you and the more questions you get wrong the closer you get to his mouth. Get too close to his mouth and "nomnomnom" you're dead, there's also another losing condition by which you run out of things to say. None of these questions are actually factual ones so you can win the game by trial and error after losing a few times. But that's not the point, the fun part is the amusing answers you can do, and the interesting reactions the giant replies with. It doesn't take long to complete so certainly worth a try, also who doesn't like this style of pixel art?

Blockfaker

I'm sure Blockfaker looks like a few games you've seen before, you play a character that moves from square to square with the desire of reaching the end point, a green tile. To reach the green tile you much push matching blocks into lines of three to make them disappear and therefore clear the way. It's the kind of puzzle game that requires quite a few restarts in the later levels, since you can accidentally make it unsolvable. One level in particular had me very stumped for a good 10 minutes. The interesting thing is, it's not hard in the typical sense of a puzzle game. It's difficult because there are certain parts of the puzzles which act as distractions and aren't required to get to the end. So it becomes a matter of figuring out the useful blocks to the pesky distractions. That said there might be many multiple ways to complete a single puzzle, making those blocks not distractions, just a different method of completion. It also controls very tightly, recommended for any puzzle nuts.

The Pirate Bay Bundle: 45 Guys 1 Brain, A Lonely Moon, A tale about life death and a looser, Abandoned and Abomination

All of these games are featured in moshboy's Pirate Bay Bundle, watch the trailer and download it here:

Over the next few weeks I'm going to write about 5 of the games in the bundle and give you a reason why you should try them for yourself. I will try to do 5 games each day, but I might miss a day every now and then. I will only finish doing this until I've written about all 101 games in the bundle. So without further ado the first 5 games of the Pirate Bay Bundle!

45 guys 1 brain

In 45 guys 1 brain you control 45 clones all at the same time, as you might imagine this can get pretty hectic as you try to keep all of them alive. The art style is simple but stylish with a funky chip-tune-esque loop of music in the background. The clones also enjoy making a load of strange random noises, so don't worry you won't feel too guilty when you kill them. Yes, you will kill many of them in your attempt to save the rest. They can die by either falling down a pit, or getting electrocuted into tiny particles of dust. It would be nice to see more variations of death, but I'm not fussy.

Definitely an interesting concept I haven't really seen before, it could be expanded in a philosophical sense about the morality of clones too. There's only 4 levels but perfecting them isn't easy, most of my clones where doomed to die on each of my attempts.

A Lonely Moon 

The first thing that strikes you about A Lonely Moon is the smooth simple graphics. While the graphics might not be technically impressive but it certainly looks really nice, especially for a Ludum Dare game. As you can tell by the image below it's a platformer where you play a rather adorable grey cube that crashed his rocket on a moon. A very lonely moon. While it may only be a few minutes long, and isn't very challenging I enjoyed my time with it.

A Tale about Life, Death and a Looser

I think one can assume the looser is supposed to be spelled "loser", but perhaps there's a reason for the misspelling? Either way this game isn't a game in the typical sense. It's more of a series of scenes with a few lines of dialogue following the life of a disillusioned person. There isn't even any music or sound, but the graphics are beautiful and the experience itself was very thought provoking. There's a decent amount of meaning in here, in my opinion it was about how life can easily pass you by if you don't take an active role in your decisions. I'm sure it means different things for different people though, why not give it a try.

Abandoned

In Abandoned you play a malformed creature with wings that hatches from an egg. Are you a strange alien being, or a grotesque bird that mutated inside it's egg? It's not clear which one, but either way you are abandoned. One can assume this is because of your ugliness, but maybe there's another more disturbing reason?

Abandoned plays like a few different games, VVVVVV, Anodyne and the original Zelda come to mind but on a few websites it's classified as a "maze game". You collect different power-ups that help you get to certain areas of the map, which further gives you upgrades that let you get to another area and so forth. There is also a timer ticking down which can be increased by getting oxygen tanks. It certainly isn't an original concept, but my god Abandoned oozes atmosphere. I haven't played such a mysterious game in some time, this is helped greatly by the disturbing ambient music. I'm not over emphasizing when I say Abandoned has one of my favourite soundtracks in a game, ever. I'm a sucker for ambient stuff though, I don't think it's to everyone's taste.

The look of the game works nicely with the soundtrack. There aren't any bright colours here, it's dark and dismal, but I like it and it suits.

The game requires you to use your memory as traversing the maps can be confusing if you don't keep track. Because of this I haven't finished Abandoned yet, but I'm keen to get to the ending due to the excellent atmosphere. I might actually start drawing a map of the in-game areas to take some pressure off my memory, as I really want to complete this game.

All in all, I would pay money for this game. Not much money perhaps, but I really do love it. Highly recommended.

Abomination

In Abomination you play (yes you guessed it) an abomination trying to get his teddy bear. It's a sidescroller that involves numerous interactions, wall jumping, wall climbing and traversing ceilings. This happens over 25 different levels of varying difficulty. On the whole each level is well designed, introducing new elements of the game one by one, this is without tutorials so you learn about the game quite naturally. Unfortunately the controls take a little getting used to as they have some frustrating quirks, but I got the hang of it after a while. I managed to beat two of the levels using an exploit, one level being the last one.

The character you play isn't very lovable but it's satisfying when he holds up his teddy bear in glee at the end of a level. Like your character the environment isn't pretty. I mean this in a good way though, the pixel art and animations reflect the disturbing character very well. It would be nice if the animations were a little smoother or faster though.

I enjoyed my time with Abomination but if the controls were polished up a bit more it would be much more fun to play. The music is also good, nicely reflecting the game's theme.

My thunks: Shelter

Shelter is by no means a long game, neither is it very deep on a gameplay or mechanical level. That said, Might and Delight have undoubtedly worked to their strengths to make a game that I won't forget. In Shelter you control a mother badger protecting her five cubs. While it's also a very linear game it never presents you with a goal. This is perfect, as the player I was always focusing on the task at hand, remaining in the present I tackled what faced me, rather than think about what was ahead. I found this to be very suited to a game where you control an animal, considering animals mostly think in the present. Unlike us humans.

Interestingly enough, for one of the first times in a game I hardly thought selfishly about my own character's safety. I was always worried about my little baby badgers, not thinking about myself, or my own safety, I didn't even consider if I could get hurt or hungry myself.

It's lucky you don't have to worry too much about your own safety, since caring for five badger cubs doesn't come easy. I won't ruin the ways in which you can lose them, but lets just say you probably won't get through Shelter without losing the majority of them. Each time I lost a badger cub was actually rather depressing. I was the one who felt like a monster, not the thing that took it away. However with each cub I lost, feeding the remaining ones became much easier, a guilty reminder I had failed them.

Feeding the cubs is a simple matter of uprooting a carrot, headbutting a tree to make apples fall or pouncing on a small rodent or fox. The cubs can't acquire the food themselves, so once you obtain the food you have the choice of which badger to give it to. A cub's hunger is determined by the tone of it's fur, when it's markings are more of a grey tone you know it needs to be fed. That said, this isn't very easy to tell nor does the game tell you this, so often you have to rely on your memory for which one to feed next. Obviously this works nicely as it adds to the pressure.

As a few final notes, Shelter doesn't look like a horror game, but in many ways it is. I haven't been so afraid and stressed in a video game for such a long time. I was obsessively counting how many cubs I had left, even jumping out of my skin at any sudden noises. This was definitely helped by the fact I played the game in one sitting without getting up. I was extremely absorbed, often forgetting I was was playing a game. It left me with a great new experience but not one I want to repeat any time soon. The most heartbreaking moment that comes to mind; I was hiding in a bush with my last two cubs. As we were moving around in the undergrowth I could swear I saw a third cub, for a second my heart leaped. Alas, on closer inspection there wasn't a third, I knew true and well he/she wasn't alive anymore.

So all in all, I highly recommend anyone anyone to give Shelter a try. Like I said earlier it isn't long, only clocking 88 minutes to finish it myself. The gameplay isn't very deep either, but it left me with an experience I will never forget. That experience alone certainly makes it worth full price to me. And I haven't even talked about how brilliant the game looks and sounds. However, if you don't want to take that risk be sure to pick it up in a sale. Remember to play it in one sitting, no interruptions, all the way to the end of the credits.