Previously available only to those who pre-ordered the PS Vita, surreal party game Frobisher Says has now been made available for everyone who owns a PS Vita, for free of course.

We rather enjoyed serving the brat needs of Frobisher in our review, but its limited availability meant that not everyone could have joined in with the fun we were having. Well, they say time’s a healer and in this case it has brought a free game to all of you have a PS Vita.

Just to add to that, the game is getting some DLC that will bring 15 new mini games to appease the brat within on May 2nd. This will cost those who want it €1.99/£1.59. Without that extra content, Frobisher Says is still a might fine game that will brighten up (at least made more amusing) your day in your home, at work or just about town.

More information on Frobisher Says can be found on the developer’s official website.

It seems that the beta demo of the award winning Tiny And Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers was enough to not only impress the media and the community, but also the folks behind Steam as it is now listed for a Steam release in June.

One game we know a lot of people have been on the lookout for is Tiny And Big, it’s been acknowledged at a few award shows and exposed to the public through a beta demo which you can grab over on the official website. If you haven’t already, make sure you go and play it, there’s some great fun to be had slicing through rocks and yanking them on to the heads of tiny burrowing creatures.

It’s the combination of the gadgets which can be used to manipulate the environment and the game’s striking visuals that give Tiny And Big the edge, we reckon. As we’ve only been able to see the game’s prologue, we can only hope that the game feels fresh all the way through it’s multitude of environments. We’ll be able to find out for sure when the game is released on Steam for PC and Mac on June 19th, as revealed with this very early listing.

Steam continue to impress us by adding more and more indie games to their library, so let’s just hope they continue to keep doing so and more and more indies get the exposure the platform can give them.

More information on Tiny And Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers can be found on the game’s official website.

Via Pixel Prospector

Indievania has launched a new cheap as dirt bundle, this time dedicated to just one studio, Milkstone Studios in fact. Three games for a dollar anyone?

Bundles are all the rage at the moment – or are they dying out? Does anyone know any longer? Well, let’s just avoid that word and report the facts: you can spend $1 on Indievania right now and get three games from Milkstone Studios. It just so happens to be called the Milkstone Studios Bundle.

The games included in this deal are:

• MotorHEAT
• Infinity Danger
• Zombie Football Carnage

That’s all well and good providing you didn’t buy Indievania’s previous Bundle4Dead which also had Zombie Football Carnage on offer. Of course, a dollar is still a good deal even if you have one of the games so don’t moan about it and just cough up the cash. How long this deal will last – nobody knows!

You can purchase and find out more information on the Milkstone Studios Bundle over on the official Indievania page.

It’s no secret that sandbox space shooter/strategy/RPG Starfarer is one of my most eagerly anticipated indie releases of 2012. As with many major indie up-and-comers, this game has been letting people buy in early at a 50% discount for access to development builds as they’re released, and a huge new update just landed. The change-log from the last major public build is over 2800 words of tweaks, tuning and major new features.

If you’re still in the dark as to what Starfarer is, and why you should be following it like a particularly space-bound hawk, check out our full preview from a few months back. So, what does this hefty upgrade bring? Well, the most immediately obvious change is music. Space was silent, previously, outside of engine-hum, machinegun fire and cataclysmic explosions. You know – normal space noise – until now. Now there’s a brooding and ambient soundtrack. It’s rather nifty.

Gameplay-wise, the biggest new addition is the issue of logistics. Spaceships are big, and can carry lots of stuff. But what happens when you try and cram in too many people or cargo pods? In other games, you’d get an error message telling you that’s not possible, or just find your ships moving slower. Not so in this case. Beyond a certain limit, you can support excess fuel, people and cargo by just spending some of your emergency supplies.

You can push even further beyond what money can buy, though, and try hauling as much as you want. Your crew will jury-rig solutions to let you carry more than is safe, but the further you go, the higher the risk of an accident. It could be fairly benign, like a fuel leak costing you some of your excess space-juice, or it could be catastrophic, like a cargo container coming untethered, smashing into one of your ships, almost crippling it and killing half the crew. It’s an interesting risk/reward mechanic and fairly typical of the creativity being poured into the game.

The AI (which was already excellent) has been further refined, and ships now know their own capabilities better, and the UI has been tweaked to provide more information on key events in and out of combat. There’s even a little additional mod support. Despite being in Alpha, Starfarer already boasts dozens of mods, some small, some huge, including whole new playable races.

The game is still heavily in development, and the universe-spanning grand campaign mode is very unfinished. Right now, you’re limited to swanning around in a single self-contained solar system with a couple of NPC factions and regular pirate raids, with dozens planned for the final release. Of course, there’s also a good number of standalone combat missions, which are good for structured practice.

Two big indie games have received a big update and, to mark the occasion, they’re both on sale on Steam at the moment. Big discounts ahoy for Bastion and Dustforce!

Don’t you just love sales? Of course you do, especially when the games on sale are of such quality! Bastion and Dustforce has both been updated very recently and so they are both part of the Midweek Madness sale on Steam right now until Friday.

Bastion, as Supergiant Games outlined earlier in the week, has just been released on the Mac App Store and has also received a SteamPlay update so one Steam purchase means you can now play it both on PC and Mac. At the moment, Bastion is a whopping 60% off on Steam so if you haven’t purchased it already, go and do so right now!

As we covered just yesterday, the level editor for Dustforce was released today so if you purchase that from now on you can expect to find lots of user-created levels as well as the default ones to challenge you. That’s a lot of replayability. There’s a dedicated level sharing website now live for the game right here, so head there for your custom map needs.

The game is now available on Mac as well and also comes with a revamped overworld and key progression system so as to allow players through the game a little easier but to ensure the challenge for the hardcore players remains. All of these updates are being recognized on Steam with a 50% off sale so head over to its Steam page and grab it while it remains at bargain price.

More information on Bastion can be found on its official website, and more information on Dustforce can be found on its official website.

Having been waiting on the wings for a good while now, interest in sanguinary Mario spoof Tiny Plumbers has been rejuvenated with the release of a brand new trailer, complete with all the Brooklyn accents and testicular-based puns one could ever wish for.

Oh, there’s a fair amount of gameplay chucked in too. The new footage demonstrates a few bits and pieces of the traditional platforming mechanics on which the basis of Tiny Plumbers is built, and there’s a brief insight into the procedurally-generated level designs as well. Of course, you’ll get your fair share of obligatory 8-bit blood physics, dinosaurs and jetpacks to tide you over once you’ve picked yourself off the floor after a bout of unadulterated ecstasy.

If Minecraft captured the first-person sandbox market, Terraria arguably carved its own identity on the side-scrolling sandbox genre. And it’s the latter that Jenito’s MicroTale appears to be attempting to emulate, with the game now available for purchase through Desura.

As our own Alex Bokan noted in his preview of the game back in January, MicroTale is a creative sandbox title with a few RPG elements thrown in for good measure. Set in a randomly-generated 2D environment, the game encourages players to explore and experiment with the landscape in order to gain loot, cash and resources. Much like many of its counterparts in the sandbox genre, MicroTale  also contains its fair share of NPC enemies and, thus, combat encounters, which aim to secure a happy medium between structural planning and battle preparation.

After approximately eight months in development, Magiko Gaming’s Platformines will soon be upon us, the developers have announced.

As the game’s title would infer, it’s an experience modelled around the principles of running and jumping, but chalking Platformines up as a run-of-the-mill platformer would be to do it a grave injustice. The game employs a substantial reliance upon the player’s proficiency with a firearm, with the fully-customisable player character compelled to blast away enemies in order to secure a safe passage through a series of connivingly-crafted landscapes. Deadifying enemies results in item and cash drops, with which the player can purchase upgrades and better weaponry in order to efficiently scale the heightened learning curve of the game’s more challenging levels.

What if LSD: Dream Emulator was made nowadays? Well, there’s no need to imagine it because that’s what surreal exploration game, TRIP, basically is.

Unfortunately we didn’t hear about TRIP prior to this date, because if we had we could have funded it and got ourselves into the playable alpha. Nothing we can do about it now though. What we can do, on the other hand, is to tell you about it and stare at its imagery, dribbling a little bit.

Pitched an art game and even cited to be a remake of LSD: Dream Emulator with a slight twist, TRIP is headed for PC and Mac. The troubling thing is that it was originally said to be ready for purchase in late April…maybe not then. The game is presumably finished though, or so we surmise by going through the jumbled development blog, but a release seems to be hanging around if imminent.

Enough of these boring words though! More screenshots are demanded:

More information on TRIP can be found on the game’s official website.

Thanks Gather Your Party!

Grab your swords and your magic potions – it’s time to enter the Dungeons of Dredmor once again as a new DLC expansion will be released for free very soon!

Dungeons of Dredmor is one game that has built up quite a large fanbase and is therefore one of the few games that can actually be expanded with the help of its most dedicated modders. Gaslamp Games teamed up with their community’s bravest and most experimental to produce a free DLC pack called…wait for it…You Have To Name The Expansion Pack. Seriously.

So what will you get with this ludicrously free, ludicrously titled expansion pack? The list scribed by the developers awaits you below:

• Steam Workshop; mod integration with Steam! We’re turning it on! It’s Steamy!
• Battle Geology, a wizard-like warrior skill with earth-shattering consequences by the terribly mysterious Null (how mysterious? terribly.)
• Clockwork Knight and Rogue Scientist, a pair of crafty steampunk skill lines by the too-clever-by-half Ruigi
• Warlockery, the wizard skill for wizards who would rather by warriors, by the utterly mad Essence — he wrote over 500 lines of xml for one spell.
• A mess of twisty little rooms, all different, created by the deranged architect our mortal speech renders “Bergstrom“; The geometry is all wrong.
• And to inhabit the renovated Dungeons of Dredmor we’ve summoned a pack of new monster variations dug up by one FaxCelestis, from the existentially troubling Poorly Cloned Hero to the lofty Diggle Rocketeer.
• Naturally there are some new items and other such nonsense happening which you’ll have to discover on your own.

Rather exciting list of features hey? We’re guessing that at least the very top feature is Steam only – just an inkling. Unfortunately there isn’t an announced release date for this but Gaslamp say that it will be very soon.

You can find out more information on Dungeons of Dredmor over on its official website.