Seedling is the latest game by Connor Ullman, prolific creator of many deliciously pixelly games. Clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda and other such classic action-adventures, you play as a mysterious creature, spawned by the wind itself and tasked by a mysterious hermit oracle to complete a quest on his behalf. The unusual thing is that he mentions outright that so long as you complete your goal, he doesn’t care how you achieve it. Good or evil, victory matters above all. Sounds like we’ll be making some judgement calls here.

Seedling makes the interesting decision to make the player sprite tiny, but the movement speed quite high. This creates the feeling that you’re charging wildly through the various dungeons and overworld areas at a ridiculously unsafe speed, and given how easy it is to die from drowning or running into enemies, ‘unsafe’ sounds about right. The game checkpoints with every screen boundary crossed, though, so death is only a setback of a few seconds. Good if you like to play Super Meat Boy style, trying to dodge through all the enemies in a room and dash for the exit. It also makes the world feel simultaneously big and small. Paradoxical, but true.

The combat and core gameplay are instantly familiar to anyone who has played a Zelda game. You explore dungeons, find new items and spells, use the abilities you collect to unlock access to new zones via a gradually expanding over world, then rinse and repeat until every boss (there are 8 of them scattered around the map) is slain and the day is saved. At least, that’s how it should go. The story is a little more subtle and nuanced than that. It’s no grand, deep epic, but there’s a little more to it than just rushing around and blatting monsters, all tying back to that hint from the Oracle that you’re free to carry out your mission via good or evil means.

The gameplay flow is well-paced and the game doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s aware that it’s a fast, browser-based game, so doesn’t waste time with lengthy exposition or scene-setting. The dungeon rooms themselves are often very deadly, capable of killing you in just a second or two, but it also means that successful play can get you through them just as quickly. Again, there’s some faint shades of Super Meat Boy, although no replays of your repeated deaths. Quite a few rooms contain Sokoban-esque block shifting puzzles, so those light on spatial awareness/coffee might end up stuck once or twice, but it’s pretty quick and easy to reset a room.

If you’ve got a couple hours to spare, then Seedling won’t cost you a penny, and is an entertaining, involved little bit of low-fi adventuring. There might even be an extra playthrough or two in it, if you want all of the Newgrounds achievements for the game, and want to fully explore the hinted morality system that the plot seems to hinge on. Interestingly, the music seems almost excessively low-fi. Almost disjointed – strange, but it fits the slightly strange feel of the game perfectly. It’s just one more element adding up to a greater whole.

You can play Seedling on Newgrounds here, and buy the official soundtrack by Rekcahdam on Bandcamp here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Browser Game Pick – ‘Seedling’

La-Mulana is one of my favourite freeware games, and will officially become one of my favourite retail ones come the release of the remake tomorrow. We’ll have our full review up before long, but newcomers need to bear something in mind: This is Metroidvania meets Dark Souls. The game is huge, non-linear and doesn’t hesistate to kill you again and again until you get the message. While things are more straightforward and accessible than in the 8-bit original, it’s still not an easy ride. Thankfully, handy tutorial character Mulbruk is here to guide you through your first forays into the ancient ruins. Nobody told her she had to be nice about it, though. Sucks, doesn’t it?

I fully approve of this sort of silliness. I wonder how many other games could do with tutorials like this? Maybe a guide to X-Com from a skittish grunt, sure that he’s going to be the first on the firing line once you’re in command. Anyhow, the tutorial above recommends you check out the official manual here. Right now it’s fairly hastily translated by the programmers themselves (English is their second language, but it’s nice that they try anyway), but I’ve been assured that localization crew Playism are going to give it a once-over by the time the game launches tomorrow. If nothing else, it’s worth it for the many amusing cartoon illustrations, detailing the many misadventures of demi-ninja/archaeologist Lemeza Kosugi.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Get Sassed To Success In This Cheeky ‘La-Mulana’ Guide Video

It’s not often you see an indie bundle accepting Bitcoins as a viable payment option, but this is the brainchild of Reddit, after all. Introducing the GameDev Bundle. So, what we have here is your usual, run-of-the-mill indie bundle. Not much different from all the others: Six different developers, six games, a bonus title if you pay over $6 and a percentage of the final takings squirrelled away in a magic box for the charity-fairies to cart away afterwards. While none of these titles are available on Steam, you do get DRM-free downloads and a handy Desura activation code for the whole set. If you’ve been keeping up with the Indie Royales to date, you should have quite a collection there already.

It’s an unusual little pack of games, this one. First up is puzzler AstroSlugs, which has you arranging a variety of Tetris-like shapes within a grid, although the game dresses this up as space-slugs living in metors. Auralux looks almost identical to Galcon, which in turn was very much a clone of Eufloria (formerly Dyson). Arcade strategy-lite with particle swarms and ambient deep-spacey style. Cardinal Quest is a light, fast-paced Roguelike that was also released for iOS, which explains the chunky, finger-friendly UI. There’s plenty of cute, good-looking sprites here, and a catchy, semi-chiptune soundtrack. If memory serves, development got a foot up via our own 8-Bit Funding site. Nepotism: It works!

Influence looks to be one of the more interesting games in the pack. A quickfire action-strategy game about controlling a swarm of particles. Your personal ‘control’ unit has a variety of stats affecting how much of a gravitational pull is, how quickly it converts particles to your own swarm, how resistant your particles are to conversion and so on. Winner’s hat of glory goes to the player who rules the board. Girl With A Heart Of is a rather odd looking adventure-RPG type deal. I’ll have to dig further into this one, but as far as I can gather, it’s a branching, multi-ended story about a young girl living in an oppressed subterranean city where light is harmful to the people.

Pitman seems to be half traditional roguelike, half board-game, with the playfield expanding as you enter new areas. 3D, with chunky, cartoonish models, although I can’t help but notice in the video above a distinct lack of animation other than hopping in place. Those that pay over $6 in real money (or Bitcoins) get an additional game-and-a-half. Astroslugs Adventures  is an unfinished, short prototype for a platformer spinoff from the puzzle game included in the main bundle, and The Sun Is Deadly is a simple and silly stealth-puzzle-action game about a vampire chewing his way through a town full of bumbling guardsmen and easily distracted maidens.

It would appear that all the sites for the individual games involved have already been trampled flat by the tsunami of Reddit hits, so it might be some time until you can get a closer look. This bundle will be running two weeks, and as a tangential final bonus, you get the soundtracks for Pitman, Girl With A Heart Of and Astroslugs if you go over that $6 boundary. The charity of choice for this bundle is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Not the most popular of choices, but given the efforts governments are putting into internet controls these days, it might be worth dropping them a buck or two.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Reddit Rolls Out The Gamedev Bundle – 6 Games for Bitcoins… Or $

Here’s one for fans of Dwarf Fortress’s ‘Adventure’ mode. Ultima Ratio Regum is a new Roguelike with old-school ASCII graphics, and a focus on exploring and questing in an enormous open world with its own procedurally generated history and characters. Right now, it’s still early days, but there’s a ton of potential here. The core gameplay seems to be patterned closely after DF’s adventure mode, right down to the UI having a similar layout. Likewise, there’s an interesting focus on semi-realistic and extremely brutal combat, with layers of armor, flesh and bone individually simulated.

What differentiates URR from most roguelikes is the fact that you’re not alone. Far from it. Plans are for the game to allow you to command an army of effectively unlimited size, and to clash against similarly enormous enemy forces. There’s some definite strategic elements here. While you’re not in charge of building cities or mining for ore, it looks like the ultimate goal of the game is leading a grand legion across the world, driving your foes before you and hearing the lamentations of their significant others.

It’s still early days, and this first Alpha build is a little crash-happy, but I’m already excited about how this one could grow and develop. The game is going to be a full sandbox, with no set quests or goals beyond what you set for yourself, and the self-set goals of various NPC factions and leaders. I wonder whether it’ll be possible to set two factions against each other, and hoard the dropped loot afterwards? Maybe…. maybe.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Roguelike Sandbox ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ Releases First Public Alpha

It’s always nice to hear that a game will be officially moddable, and it’s even nicer when it’s a stalwart PC favourite. Nigoro’s La-Mulana made a comparatively huge splash on the nascent indie scene of the mid-2000s, helped kickstart the popularity of the entire ‘Let’s Play’ video concept, and was one of the core inspirations for Spelunky. The updated remake of it got trapped in Wii development hell for quite some time, but now it’s coming home, and this time you can tweak and tune it to your hearts content.

While it sounds like the game won’t be completely customizable according to this official blog post, you should be able to alter all the sound, music, graphics, translation and time-attack stage files to taste. Nigoro themselves suggest that someone try porting all the original version’s graphics and audio to the new edition of the game. The developers also say that they want as many people around the world as possible to play the game, so are completely cool with unofficial translation patches.

Don’t like the new look? Re-retrofy it, then!

There’s no release date on the remake set in stone quite yet, but there’s rumblings that it’s coming out sooner, rather than later. I can say with a dash of mystery and some surprising certainty that the remake is looking spectacular, and is a genuine improvement on the original faux-MSX stylings of the freeware original, which you can find here.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – ‘La-Mulana’ PC Remake To Support Modding

Not quite a Kickstarter, but close enough – here’s one that lies close and true to my heart. It’s no secret that I’m a Roguelike addict. Give me Dungeon Crawl, TOME 4, DoomRL and more, and I’ll keep on hacking my way through randomly generated challenges til’ the cows come home. Ancient Domains Of Mystery (aka ADOM) is one of the old giants of the genre, and lead developer Thomas Biskup is planning on dusting it off and resuming development of it. He just needs $48,000 so that he can work on it full-time, and is raising funds via IndieGoGo.

ADOM is different from most roguelikes. For starters, it’s not set in a dungeon, but rather an entire world with villages, quest-givers, rolling hills and wild animals. There’s an overarching goal, and a rolling tide of mutating, corrupting evil sweeping across the land. It’ll even affect you, if you take too long and don’t take measures against it. It’s a much grander-feeling adventure than most dungeon crawls, although it’s notorious for being especially hard, almost up to Nethack levels of difficulty, requiring extensive research in order to make real progress. Hopefully that’s something that’ll be addressed in this update.

Probably not the most representative screenshot, old or new.

There’s a team of four people working on this new version – two programmers, an artist and a musician/sound guy, which suggests that this is going to be a fully graphical, high-budget update of the game. While there have been demands by some fans (although the use of the term is questionable in this context) for Biskup to release the source code for the game instead of trying to profit off it, he has amusingly put a special goal to anyone who funds the game by a full $50k – the entire ADOM source code. Printed. On paper. Not exactly the most useful of things, but an amusing shot at those making unreasonable demands.

The funding already has a few notable backers. Minecraft maestro Notch has already tweeted his full support for the project, describing the original ADOM as one of his favourite games. You can try the original freeware version of the game here, and throw some bucks at the updated version if you want here. I’m really hoping that this one gets funded – it really is one of the best games in the genre, and I’d love to see it updated to modern spec.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Classic Roguelike ‘Ancient Domains Of Mystery’ Seeks Revival Via IndieGoGo Funding

Remember that first spark of creative inspiration that paved the way for your first ham-fisted voyage into the abyssal void of gaming development?

If your naively well-intentioned attempts at forging a legacy of innovation were as futile as my own, you’ll no doubt also recall the sobering aftermath of your fetid endeavours. As it turns out, no, nobody wanted to play through a half-baked LittleBigPlanet 2 platforming level in the style of SuperTed and, yes, you should probably follow your gut instinct and leave the artistry to the grown-ups.

It’s perhaps ironic, then, that one of the prime examples of creative dynamism from said grown-ups is actually a sprightly embodiment of the innocence of childhood imagination. Andy’s Notepad (Saucers) was released a couple of days ago via the Xbox Live Indie Games service amidst a parade of youthfully-inspired, yet ingeniously crafted doodles and a hearty serving of frenzied space shooting gameplay, and we at IGM couldn’t be more intrigued if it came with a William Shatner voiceover and a free box of Fuzzy Felt.

With my interest well and truly piqued, I engaged in an in-depth chat with developer Coneware’s Ken Cone (KC), who, along with right-hand man Justin, poured his heart and soul into what’s shaped up to be a package of mercurial proportions indeed.

IGM: First and foremost, can you give us a brief outline of the concept behind Andy’s Notepad (Saucers) and some of its key gameplay mechanics?

KC: Sure. The first part of the concept is a kid with a yellow notepad who likes to draw. Andy is imagining flying saucers piloted by aliens.

Before you ask, I’ll just tell you that Andy’s a made-up person. People ask, “Who’s Andy?” And we say Andy’s just a kid, you know? So, he likes to draw and this time, he’s using one of those old four-color BIC pens – remember the blue and white plastic ones with the four-color buttons at the top? Black, blue, green and red were the colors you could choose from, and those are the only colors we use in this game.

Andy’s Notepad (Saucers) is a sketchy-style game, and we intentionally kept everything as simple as possible, from the graphics to the sounds to the gameplay. We want our players to be able to use their imaginations, do their own thing and invent their own story every time they play the game.

One of the first thing players will notice (after the graphics and whimsical soundtrack) is the gravity mechanic. There is a strong gravitational pull toward the planet. Because of this gravity, some play testers died once or twice before they learned how to pilot their saucers. It’s quickly learned, though.

IGM: We’re aware that the game will feature both single-player and local multiplayer gameplay, but in what ways will each gameplay mode differ from their counterparts? Can we expect the presence or absence of human opponents to affect the player’s tactical approach?

KC: That’s an interesting question. Saucers is one game with consistent gameplay, graphics, sound and vibration, but single-player and multiplayer do have a significant difference.

The multiplayer game is pretty cool, especially if you play the game with four players. Our families both think Saucers is the most fun when you’re playing with a bunch of people. You can hang back and play with each other, experiment, whatever. Each game is new because people are unpredictable and you can play with them.

The single player game is interesting in a different way. It’s more of a “leveler.” Each new round, players meet new aliens with unique saucers, custom weapons and significantly changing behaviors, so you have to develop and learn new tactics for each one. You don’t play with them; you fight them. It’s a bit more fast paced and a lot more aggressive.

This is the first real AI that I ever developed. So when I was playtesting it one evening, and my wife had to ask me which saucer I was; that was a huge compliment. The computers can play fairly realistically. Of course, they will never be your friend, so the feel of the game is very different between the single-player mode, which is very tactical, and the multiplayer mode, which is more of a party game.

IGM: Speaking of tactics, what can you tell us about the game’s upgrade system?

KC: Each round, you’re awarded a certain number of points, depending largely on the number of enemies that were killed. After the round is over, you get to take the points you’ve earned in the round and purchase weapon upgrades.

There are four basic weapons: Photon Torpedoes, Phase Bombs and Lasers, and then you’ve got the Death Ray. The Death Ray’s not upgradable. The other three weapons have six weapon levels, and you can see what level your weapons are when you pull the triggers and see the HUD expand out of your saucer. The icons you see there match the icons on the weapons upgrade screen.

The upgrade screen shows your saucer and then you can upgrade each of the first three weapons. There’s a visual difference between each weapon level along with an increasing damage effect. And by the way, there’s increasing vibration power for each weapon level on the lasers. I’m especially proud of how we used vibration in this game. I wonder if players will notice…

IGM: The game’s official trailer was striking for a number of reasons, but its most immediately eye-catching facet was the hugely impressive manner in which it showcased the game’s hand-drawn graphical style. Was this particular aesthetic something that you were pushing for right from the get-go? Were there any major revisions that had to be made during the development process?

KC: Thanks! We’re really glad you liked it; we were happy with our game trailer too. That was all Justin. As far as the style goes, we always knew we wanted this to be some sort of sketchy game, but the first few concepts Justin sent me were nothing like what we have now. I really like how Justin works; I guess he’s used to working with others over long distances, so he’s gotten really good at communicating using electronic media. Because of that, we have quite a collection of concept art.

Anyway, yes, the notepad concept came very near the beginning. Justin has done some indie development with another friend in their company, 3DAL. They do iOS apps more with an educational focus for children. So I had this idea for a space game and asked Justin if he’d do graphics for me. He talked with Bruce of 3DAL and we all agreed that Justin and I would start Coneware and focus it in the Xbox / Windows area. I also had the crazy idea that I was going to code this game in a couple days and we’d have something simple and fun that we could release. Boy, was I wrong! We started over Christmas break and released on 6/29 – six months!

Anyway, the major revision wasn’t the graphical style, or even the soundtrack and sounds. It was the single-player mechanics; we had to do a full rewrite of the AI.

IGM: Given that Andy’s Notepad marks your first foray into console development, we’d be interested to get your take on the Xbox Live Indie Games service. We’ve heard plenty of mixed reports on the approachability of Microsoft’s development tools from a designer’s perspective, but it’s also been a platform upon which several success stories, most notably FortressCraft, have been forged. Was there anything that particularly attracted you to the idea of Xbox 360 development?

KC: What really attracted me to Xbox was that I really wanted to get into indie games with Justin, and he had an exclusive agreement with his partner in 3DAL for iOS, so that wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t really look at Android; any developer can see the incredible fragmentation there; that’s untenable. Justin and I both have Xbox consoles, and I’m familiar with MS tools, and really, I love to play indie games on the 360, so that was the venue that made sense.

As far as the mixed reports go, I think you’ve got to take those with a bucket of salt. There are some pretty impatient people out there who think they should be able to develop a game in two weeks, release it and everyone at Microsoft needs to drop what they’re doing and work on their problem. At the same time, it’s pretty clear that the app hub and msdn just aren’t MS’s core business. I’ve sent emails and received nothing, not even an automated response. Problems will occur on the service with astoundingly little feedback to developers, and then, one day, the problem is gone. No explanation; it just works again.

The biggest negative experience I had didn’t affect me too badly, but that was only because I had to go on a business trip for a week. I was still pretty frustrated, though. Sometime in March, I think, all of a sudden the XNA Connect app wouldn’t allow my host computer to talk to the target (the Xbox). I got on the forums and nobody could deploy their projects to their Xbox. Can you imagine how frustrating this is? I wanted to give Justin a test build to hammer on while I was gone, but I couldn’t. I had to get on a plane and while I was gone, I followed the forums everyday. There was a thread where a lot of frustrated developers vented. I got home a week later and it was fixed just a few hours after that. It took a week! To this day, I have no idea what the problem was, just that MS was working on it and then they got it fixed. So the support side of things could use improvement.

On the other hand, the tools are good. I mean, Visual Studio 2010 is just a great embedded development environment. I’ve got that tied in with Bazaar and a couple other plug-ins and it just works. Also, when we went to release this game, we had prepared ourselves for a 48 hour delay, but from the time I pushed the “Publish Now” button to the time it showed up on the store, well, it was about two hours. We were shocked.

IGM: What would you consider to be the areas in which you’ve needed to be the most meticulous over with regards to the game’s fine-tuning? Were there any particular aspects of the game the required a significant amount of tinkering to meet your creative vision?

KC: Oh, absolutely. Our first attempt at computer player AI just didn’t work. Justin kept saying that he hated it; I mean, he was polite, but that’s what he was really saying. I threw all that code away. I still have a file (called AI_Collection.cs) with the thousand or so lines of code I ripped out.

So at one point, we had resigned ourselves to releasing a game that was 2-4 players and had no single-player mode.We released the game to playtest and people enjoyed it, but they kept saying we weren’t going to sell as many copies because they didn’t have anyone else to play with. Justin knew we had to have a single-player mode, but I hadn’t figured out how to do it yet.

Well, I read and read, and finally found a book someone recommended on the XNA forum that talked about steering behaviors. I was making it way too complicated. Once I discovered steering behaviors, it all worked out. So then we started implementing each round of single-player with the unique weapons and saucers and piloting. We probably spent 6-8 weeks just developing and fine-tuning the computer players.

IGM: As a two-man team, you’re arguably the quintessential example of an independent studio. Going forward, are there any plans to continue Andy’s adventures with his fanciful notepad and, if so, are you intending to remain a dynamic duo?

KC: Oh, of course. If you read the splash screen, you’ll see it says, “Andy’s Notepad (Chapter One) Saucers.” For our next game, we’re working on… well… Chapter Two, and yes, for the foreseeable future, Coneware will be building a library of Andy’s Notepad games.

We both really love doing this and hope to do this for a long, long time. And since Coneware is a partnership of Ken and Justin, we plan to keep going forward developing with each other.

IGM: There’s evidently a fair few string to the game’s bow, and it’s clear that it will boast several features that resonate with gamers at face value. Still, we’re always eager to discover an extra secret or two, so could you make our day and confirm the existence of an Easter egg or two?

KC: Sure, why not? One of the many cool, unadvertised features (or Easter eggs) is that when your saucer is destroyed, you expect that to be it, right? I mean, you think, “There I go; I’m dead now,” but that’s not quite the case. When your saucer explodes, your alien flies out (and sometimes your pet), but this alien is still yours. You still have control. It’s limited, but you’re still part of the game.

So somebody wanted aliens to fall out of saucers when they exploded; I can’t remember who. We talked about it and Justin sketched this concept to show me what he had in mind when a saucer explodes. You can see here that each saucer has its own alien, and each alien has its own pet. He had implemented kind of a random thing that the saucer explodes and all these parts come out, and one of these aliens do too and then maybe a pet does or maybe it doesn’t, but it was random. He wanted each unique saucer to be matched with each unique alien, so that’s what we did.

Again, in playtest, we learned that people bring something new to our game – our creation – that we didn’t plan or expect. As soon as we allowed the players to control their aliens, we saw them using them in multiplayer mode as a strategic part of their gameplay. It just added another small dynamic to the game.

I really like how we work together. If I have an idea, or one of our wives, or even our kids have an idea, we’ll say, “Let’s playtest that.” Justin will draw something; I’ll hack it out, and we’ll try it. That’s when we know if it works or if it doesn’t.

IGM: Thanks for all your co-operation. In closing, how can our readers keep an eye on your studio’s ongoing progress in the world of independent gaming?

Anyone can go to our website , and we’ve got a Facebook page. We also have a Twitter account. We’ll keep these updated, but of course we’ll also keep in touch through IGM!

Andy’s Notepad (Saucers) is available for 80 Microsoft Points on the Xbox Live Marketplace, where a free demo can also be downloaded.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Sketchy Saucery: ‘Andy’s Notepad (Saucers)’ Interview

A cute launch trailer has been released for Mush, which will be released on Windows Phones on July 4th. This quirky puzzle adventure will challenge players to get in touch with their emotions, or at least get in touch with the emotions of the character. Mush features a fuzzy little character, which players control by touching, tilting or shaking their phone. Each emotion evokes a different response or ability, as the trailer showcases. Drawing a happy face causes him to float, while shaking the phone sends him into a rage.

Mush has been in development for two years, but its potential has been realized. The game has been nominated for a 2011 BAFTA under the Ones to Watch Award and was a winner at Dare to be Digital 2010. Project Lead at Angry Mango, Henry Hoffman, said that the team has enjoyed every moment of the creative process. He added, “We really look forward to putting it out there and finding out what the players think. Hopefully they’ll love it!”

Mush will be released for Windows Phone 7 on July 4th. More information regarding the game can be found on its official website. Angry Mango can also be followed on Twitter or Facebook for more information about Mush or future titles.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Adorable Trailer Released For ‘Mush’

Fun fact: This can be played standalone/free without owning Doom 2! Read on.

Nazis! Everyone hates those guys. They’re right up there with zombies as far as guilt-free videogame villains go. Possibly moreso – most zombies aren’t undead by choice, after all, but nobody has ever felt bad about shooting Hitler. Despite the base game closing in on two decades old, the Doom modding scene will likely never die. The quality of tools and ease of producing content means that we’re still seeing a steady stream of new levels and mods to this day, many of which take advantage of updated engines such as ZDoom.

Nazis! by WildWeasel, is the latest in a series of gameplay-altering mods by him. It essentially takes Doom, strips out everything that looks like Doom, and replaces it with something roughly akin to what Wolfenstein would look like if iD Software had decided to go back to that franchise immediately after Doom 2. While compatible with just about any level pack, it’s highly recommended that you pair it up with Epic 2, an egyptian/occult themed campaign that meshes just fine with the desert-camo garbed villains.

Do note that the above video is of a slightly older version of the mod, back when it was less balanced, had fewer weapons and there was no friendly fire between enemies. The combination of Nazis! and Epic 2 is a match made in heaven – it’s the late-90s Wolfenstein sequel that we never had, with tons of guns, well-paced combat, interesting level design and as much crazy superscience and secrets buried in the desert as there are normal fights against MP40-toting stormtroopers. It’s a full 32-level campaign to boot, which should last most shooter fans a good few days of intensive play.

Do be warned that especially when played with more modern level packs (such as Epic 2), the five difficulty settings really should be taken as ‘Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard and Insane’. With vanilla Doom, Ultra-Violence (Setting 4) was just about the base minimum to find a challenge. Even on Normal mode, Nazis! played with Epic 2 is an intense combo, and you’ll do well to save regularly. On Hard more or above, enemies can’t even hurt each other, which makes a few open field battles brutally difficult. If you do play on Normal, just remember that you can thin out a crowd by circling it and letting them clear out some of the fodder for you. Their fervour to serve the Reich seems to override their ‘don’t shoot friends in the back’ training.

You do have some things working in your favor, even on higher settings, though. Rather than use the classic Doom/Wolfenstein style of hitscan (instant hit) projectiles, every bullet is a visible tracer round that can be evaded if you’re moving fast enough. If you’re out in the desert with no cover to hide behind, you can evade almost all damage just by strafing at full speed, and enemy fire should largely lag behind you. You can also hold a stock of up to 9 off-hand grenades, which are bound by default to G, and can clear a room or soften up a larger enemy quite nicely.

It’s a really solidly put together mod, and exceptionally polished. The creator even went as far as properly sourcing German soundbites for the majority of enemies, and the occasional accented comment in English for larger ‘boss’ type baddies. Despite the slightly more realistic set of guns for the most part, this is Wolfenstein, not Call of Duty, so expect evil Nazi ghosts, Hitler-clones in giant mech suits and generals dual-wielding automatic rocket launchers. You’d do well to save higher-caliber guns for the bigger, tougher enemies. The old stalwart MP-40 can make short work of any room of regular human fodder.

While writing this, I discovered that the combination of both Nazis! (changing all the core gameplay elements) and Epic 2 (replacing all levels and most textures and music) plays very nicely with Freedoom – an open-source and legal-to-distribute ‘generic’ Doom 2 data file. Just to be helpful, I’ve gone and bundled it all up together in one quick-install package for Windows users. Just grab it, extract, and run ‘Play Nazis!.bat‘ to begin your adventure in the desert. Just remember to configure your controls – this mod requires full modern mouselook to control recoil. If you do own Doom 2 and want maximum authenticity, you can just replace the included Freedoom version of Doom2.WAD with your own.

Failing that, you can just get GZDoom, Nazis!, Epic 2, Doom 2 itself and assemble it all, if you know what you’re doing, but that’d take a while. And lastly? Don’t feel bad about shooting the dogs. They’re totally evil too – I swore I saw one do a Nazi salute.

Here’s a handy public service announcement to everyone who likes nice things such as steampunk style, fluid dynamics, clever puzzles, platforming, mutton-chop-sporting inventor heroes and fantastically moody soundtracks. As of just a couple hours ago (so you’ve still got almost a full day) Strangeloop Games’ excellent Vessel went on sale for $5, down from its regular $15. The game is on Steam, but buying direct from the official (Humble Bundle-run) store not only gets you a Steam key, but also a DRM-free version to do with as you please. Double the fun, better for the developers, and cheaper for us Euro-dwelling folks to boot.

Our resident inventor Gerrard Winter went and reviewed it a while back and found it to be a lengthy, deep and satisfying bit of gaming. His two core complaints – glitchy animations and poor platforming – have since been addressed by an impressive series of patches and updates for the game, so you can feel free to add a few percentage points to that final score in your head. It’s a surprisingly varied and expansive game for a small indie release, and the graphics are spectacular in motion, albeit a little odd looking in screenshots.

It’s a bloody good game, and something I’d wholeheartedly recommend to almost anyone, but if you’re still on the fence after all this enthusiastic poking and cajoling, then there’s a playable demo available on Steam as well. Be warned that the demo is based on the original/pre-release codebase, and isn’t nearly as tuned, optimized and refined as the post-patch release. Just remember – buy it direct from Strangeloop, if you can. Better for the developers, and you get a Steam key for your troubles anyway.