Week #1

Hello, my name is Petey and I am totally broke. Well, not quite broke, but close. I only bring in a small amount of money each week. After bills, taxes, food, entertainment, and severe budgeting, I end up with a small amount of cash which I use to satisfy my gaming habits. That small surplus in my budget always totals exactly $5 and anybody who says anything contrary to that statement is a liar and terrible person. Now, I could go spend this fantastic $5 on a much (and I mean much) needed new bottle of body wash or buy a friend lunch, but I always end up spending it on the best possible gaming deal I can find. To supplement my $5 spending habit, I also play as many free-to-play games as I can find. It is near impossible to beat the price of $FREE (the technical way to say $0), and in the current era of technology, these free games have become impressive, and often, worthwhile. The digital era of downloadable games has cut down production costs, and thus product costs, to incredible lows.

So, with that said, here is my list of recommendations on how to game for $5 this upcoming week.

Recommendation for Monday

SWOOOORDS! Colon Lords of the Sword from Nihilocrat (Price: $Free on Kongregate)- So it is Monday and you hate the planet and all its inhabitants. You get out of bed and begin grunting and moaning, all the while forgetting to put the coffee on the burner and eating an expired bagel. It is a brutal morning. Luckily, I have a way for you to take out your aggression. SWOOOORDS! should assist your gaming needs. This game is outright vicious. The graphics are simple, the music is primal heavy metal, and the gameplay is unforgiving in its difficulty.  I have not made it past level 3 in that monstrosity of chaotic sword combat since each time you die it sends you back to the very beginning of the game. The combat is outrageously tight and rewarding, but punishes frivolity. Think of it as an isometric action RPG like Torchlight II, which strips out all of the RPG elements and forces the player to use skilled combat tactics. These qualities, plus a beautifully rigid metal soundtrack, make for a fun, yet brutal, game. You wake up early on Monday to play this and I guarantee you will be wishing you had a broadsword, guitar, amp, and long wavy blonde hair when you head to work or school after playing this one.

Recommendation for Tuesday

Dukes and Dirigibles from Backward pieS (Price: $Free on Kongregate and Newgrounds)- Tuesday has rolled around and you are happy to finally be away from that damned Monday. The week has now gotten rolling and you so badly need something casual, as you know your brain will be as fried as an egg which inevitably got left on the grill too long at waffle by the end of the week. Therefore I have something not so demanding, but incredibly fun which I have been enjoying when I have an hour or so off during the day. Meet Dukes and Dirigibles, a steampunk-inspired arena shooter from developer Backward pieS. Players control a 1930s (read: old) aircraft fitted with a turret and a shell launcher which they must use to defeat different bosses, who control massive Hindenburg-type blimps. D&D (reminds me of something else I do in my spare time) never demands too much out of a player, even though the latter stages get somewhat more difficult.  It demands only a joy of aerial assault and hilariously named enemy ships, such as “Sir Thomas Derringer’s Terrible Dirigible”. Backward pieS also is planning a full release of Dukes and Dirigibles which they have put on Steam Greenlight. Dukes and Dirigibles is perfect for a Tuesday afternoon lunch or coffee break where you want a break from monotony and want to spend $FREE.

Recommendation for Wednesday

VVVVVV from Terry Cavanagh (Price: $5 on Terry’s Website)- My best friend and SOMEONE WHO REFUSES AN INTERVIEW WITH ME! created a gem of a platformer in VVVVVV and you can now get it for $5 from his website. I suggest it for Wednesdays because that is about the time I feel I am going to lose my mind during the week. It is not the weekend and it is too far into the week for any human to keep their sanity. Thus, play something which further challenges your sanity, which VVVVVV absolutely does. It is so positively quirky and focuses on minimalism to such an extent that it challenges the way video games are approached. I do not feel the need to say much about it, as it is famous enough to have been heard of by the majority of indie gamers. All you need to know is that it is a focused and unforgiving platformer well worth the $5 it requires you to pay for purchase. Take Wednesday to embrace your craziness and play a game made by a man likely crazier than all of us. Play VVVVVV.

Recommendation for Thursday

Cryptozookeeper from Robb Sherwin (Price: $FREE from Cryptozookeeper’s Official Website)- Thursday is typically when I begin playing a long game for the weekend as the week is winding down and my schedule clears up a bit. Cryptozookeeper is about as long of a free game as you can find. It is a text-based adventure based on who the hell knows what idea and requires a little over 12 hours, but the whole adventure is well worth it. The story is teeming with hilarious moments and presents a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy style of delivery. The puzzles are insanely creative and require careful thought and abstract thinking. Within the first five minutes of gameplay, I had to make my character vomit to solve a puzzle. To me that just wreaks of greatness and solvable obscurity. The soundtrack is another highlight, which features over 70 tracks of methodically conceived original music. There was so much care put into Cryptozookeeper by Robb Sherwin and his team that I am honestly thinking about buying the physical copy, despite the game being available to play for free. If you are into comedy and need something free to occupy your weekend, look no further than Cryptozookeeper.

Recommendation for Friday

A Game for Ana from David S Gallant (Price: $FREE on David S. Gallant’s Official Website)- So it’s Friday: the work week is near over and you begin thinking about your boo. She exists out there somewhere and you want to be romantic with her, but still get in your gaming fix. Well here, I have for you an amazingly simple platformer which is a romantic statement David Gallant made for his wife on Valentines Day. A Game for Ana is simple in the message and in the gaming style, but it is positively adorable in the delivery of the sentiment. It is a gaming programmer using his ability to express a direct and personal emotion, which he makes apparent that he is not afraid to share with the rest of us. It does not do anything overly complex and can be finished in about 10 minutes, but all the while is touching in a way that these 200 words could never describe. Play A Game for Ana with your boo and do something nice for her the following night. He/she deserves it.

That is all I have for you this week! Now go out, game for $5 this week, and I will begin compiling a list of games for you to chew on for next week’s feature. If you have a free game you would like to see featured here, please contact me on Twitter: @indiepeteyigm. I am always looking to try out free games and getting the word out about small developers is kind of my thing. For this and all your other indie gaming needs, stick right here with indiegamemag.com.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – The Budget Gamer: How to Game on $5 Next Week (1st Edition)

Nicalis, the publisher responsible for porting Terry Cavanagh’s rage inducing VVVVVV to Nintendo’s three dimensional magic machine is busy making yet another port of the ever popular Cave Story. This time around the title will see itself realized in 3D using its original two dimensional engine (much akin to Mutant Mudds). Considering most of us have played Cave Story in one form or another, Nicalis has gone ahead and included several new features and game modes to hopefully breathe a bit of life into an otherwise old title, giving players a new reason to pick it up all over again.

The coolest of which is “Curly Story” in which I’d assume you get to play through the story from the perspective of Curly Brace as she tries to protect the Mimiga from the evil doctor. Other notably fresh additions include: Nemesis Challenge, Boss Rush, Hell Time Attack, and Wind Fortress challenge modes. Nicalis has also stated Cave Story for eShop will support a native 4:3 and “real” widescreen resolutions for the 3DS as well as two button configurations.

fyi: this is a normal cavestory screen

Expect to dive back in come October 4th for the rather fair price of $9.99, those of you without a nifty new 3DS can still get in on the Cave Story fun (if you have yet to experience it) by picking up one of the various other versions avaiable as DSiWare. Hopefully players won’t confuse this for NIS’ Cave Story 3D which runs on an entirely three-dimensional engine unique to that title.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Nicalis to release ‘Cave Story’ 2D in 3D

In February of this year during Pirate Kart V, an event similar to Global Game Jam but with its own kinks, Terry Cavanagh came up with Hexagon. Initially intended as a warm-up, Terry states it “got a little out of hand” for him. Hexagon is playable both at distractionware’s website as well as Kongregate — and the abundance of comments will surely let you know that it is brutally difficult. I mean, we’re talking about the same guy behind VVVVVV so it’s no real big surprise, right? Well, Mr. Cavanagh has taken it to the next level: Super Hexagon seems to be iOS bound — and holy crap, are we excited!

HookShotInc’s superb interview with Cavanagh at the beginning of July is incredibly revealing of his intentions: to make an awesome game that will be released when it is wholly and definitely complete. Cavanagh promises that that’s sometime “soon”; he also admits to not knowing which platforms will see Super Hexagon. However, the ambiguity of his comments has since dwindled quite a bit, especially after Terry blogged this picture of an iPhone running the game. While that may not tell us everything, it’s reassuring that the game is nearing completion and Terry has been investigating platforms for distractionware’s newest and possibly hardest masterpiece.

We await Super Hexagon with childlike excitement…

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – distractionware’s ‘Hexagon’ Goes ‘Super’ and iOS Bound?

Stephen Lavelle, flatmate to Terry Cavanagh and game developer extraordinaire, has made his own take on Cavanagh’s puzzle platformer VVVVVV that he calls MMMMMM and it certainly brings its own challenges.

If you have played VVVVVV then you’ll kind of know what you’re getting yourself into with MMMMMM. That being said, MMMMMM changes things up a bit concerning the gameplay mechanics. VVVVVV was game of ups and downs as you could flip gravity. MMMMMM brings forth a more diagonal and horizontal experience, alongside the vertical one. This is done via the introduction of slopes which the cutesy avatar can slide down, thus bringing in the diagonal part of the game in.

It can be a little tricky to judge just what is going on with the gravity in MMMMMM at times, but you can help remedy this by looking at the way the background is flowing – thus indicating which direction gravity is heading. You’ll have to think on your feet in this one too due to the slopes and multiple directions of gravity increasing the chances of you winding up amongst the spikes.

We highly recommend giving MMMMMM a go and if you do get stuck, just remember to think in diagonals and horizontals and not just verticals!

You can play MMMMMM in your browser from Lavelle’s official website.

Indie game developer and icon, Mr. Terry Cavanagh who you’ll most likely know for VVVVVV has started up a new blog that aims to highlight the freeware games that he finds interesting.

It took Cavanagh a little while to find an appropriate domain name, one that was suitable and not already take, but he eventually settled on freeindiegam.es. Cavanagh has already posted a few things on there, mostly it seems he’s going for a simple picture with a sentence and a link to download the game – appropriate really when games should be experienced.

Obviously all of the games he will be posting up there will be free but knowing Cavanagh’s taste, they’re bound to be games that push the envelope, have something to say or are just interesting in a way that not many other games are. Certainly, his picks so far reflect this. Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia, Kyratzes’ The Fabulous Screech and Vlambeer’s Yeti Hunter being examples of this. We’ll be keeping an eye on what freeware titles Cavanagh must share as we, as you would expect, share an interest in a game that is both “free” and “interesting”.

Just to remind you again, the site you’ll want to head over to for Cavanagh’s freeware pick is freeindiegam.es – how can you not remember that?

Terry Cavanagh always has the best ideas when it comes to micro indie games. VVVVVV was damn near perfect in its simplicity. His newest game, ChatChat, isn’t ripe with puzzles nor is it trying to be anything more than it is right now: a game where you are a cat. Oh and did I mention that it was a pseudo-MMO for your browser? Because it is…

Here’s a post-holiday Christmas present for you all, Terry Cavanagh’s fantastic retro-styled platformer is set to arrive on Nintendo’s 3DS handheld in just a few days time. No longer will Captan Viridian be stuck on your PCs screen, immobile.

Good news everybody! It looks like Terry Cavanagh’s newest game At a Distance has finally been given a release date and, well, it’s right around the corner. According to Terry’s own blog, the game is set for a December 7th release.

Aside from his coop puzzle adventure At a Distance (as reported on by me from Eurogamer Expo), Mr C has got another game entered into the IGFs this year. The Four Letter Word Thing, or “____” is his other new one, and he’s just taken to his blog to tell us about it.

The actual name of the game is this:

So that clears that up then.

Terry says “the entire game is in a made up alien language”. He’s not giving away much else just yet, but here he reveals some of the games origins:

____ is something I’ve been working on in this form since the last Ludum Dare (when I was calling it “Nyxgame”), but I’ve been thinking about it for much longer than that – the game is basically a mash up of a lot of small ideas I’ve had in the last couple of years that suddenly came together for me in a really exciting way. And it plays a bit like that too – it’s a combination of a bunch of different interconnected systems that do unexpected things, but in a logically cohesive way.

More here.

Terry’s always worth paying attention to, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this one. Any suggestions for how it should be pronounced?

[Distractionware]

After waiting patiently for nearly two days, Terry Cavanagh was finally alone. A slight reprieve had finally occurred in the single-file onslaught of adoring fans, aspiring developers, and fascinated media (full disclosure: I am all three) that seemed to be perpetually conversing with the popular indie developer. I had a seam, and took it: “Hey Terry, I’m Erik Johnson from DIYGamer. We met basically one year ago. I heard there was going to be a preview build of VVVVVV on 3DS here.”

The energetic, yet soft-spoken Irishman recognized me after a moment, and produced a 3DS from his shirt pocket. I laughed at my presumptions of how the demo display of his port would be set-up, then focused-in to play one of my favorite (and most frustrating) PC titles on a handheld device.

Terry mentioned the build was close to finished, with just a few bugs to work out. I played for about 15 minutes, escaping out of the first puzzle area in the game to Captain Viridian’s ship. I then enjoyed a tour of the overworld, past a giant crying elephant, and eventually to another puzzle area. Everything looked and felt beautiful as far as I was concerned. The persistent map on the bottom screen is just a perfect match as well for exploring the world map area for teleporters and, of course, shiny things. Perhaps most important of all, the original soundtrack by Souleye is there in all of its glory.

Other than that, there’s really not much to say here. It’s all the greatness of PC/Mac/Linux VX6 right there on Nintendo’s latest handheld. It’s a spot-on port of the game from what I looked at, and once publisher Nicalis launches it on the 3DS eShop it’ll simply be a must have for anyone with access to the service. What of the post-launch content though?

That part appears a bit muddy at the moment. Terry was adamant that the 3DS version was entirely in Nicalis’ hands and out of his own, especially when it came to that topic when I pressed him about it. It looks like where it goes from release is anyone’s guess at this point it appears. We do know that the features list for the port includes “future content updates”, but what content that exactly will be is at the moment a mystery. One wonders if any of the player-created content content from the PC version could make it over the 3DS. Wait and see for now.

Here’s my thumbs running around old hunting grounds. The controls definitely feel just as tight as they are on the PC. (When I mess up, it’s definitely my fault):