January 12, 2010 / Harris

Some free games and the continued wait for Darksiders.

So Tuesday has rolled round as it naturally does following Monday and my copy of Darksiders still hasn’t arrived, I’m going to put this one down to the weather yet again or somehow the box is bigger than my letterbox and they couldn’t post it, either way I’m going to head to the Post Office tomorrow with 3(!) failed delivery notifications and claim what is rightfully mine as I had a couple of other packages that haven’t arrived; so the packages I am going to collect are either the first 3 books of the Wheel of Time series or the first volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, both series having been recommended to me some time ago but I had forgotten them until recently. Anyways, enough of that onto the free games!

In between bouts of Dragon Age and waiting for the visceral pleasure that is Darksiders I have been messing around with a few free games that friends have recommended, all are developed by people with a real passion and in most cases the old trope “The Dev Team Thinks of Everything” is extremely apparent.

First up is Captain Forever, a fantastic Space Shoot-em-up from a true blue game developer, Jarrad Farbs, who quit 2K Australia to concentrate on his Indie gaming career, I’m glad he did as Captain Forever good fun even if sometimes difficult. You start off as a little pod that is the core of your ship, a handy information node pops up and gives you some girders, lasers and boosters to build your first real ship, from there you zoom around the playing field destroying other space ships and acquiring what you haven’t damaged, all the pieces are colour coded so you can tell what is stronger at a glance, I believe the scale goes from green (weakest) to white (strongest) but don’t hold that to me.

A simple concept maybe but it works brilliantly and I hope you check it out. Just watch out for the bigger guys early on!

My most successful design before I was destroyed.

Next up is Angband, a dungeon crawler in the most classic of senses, you start the game by choosing your sex, race, class etc, set up your character and prepare for an epic 100 floor journey as you loot more and more equipment eventually being well equipped enough to defeat the big bad at the end. I won’t spoil anything for you, mainly because I can’t, I don’t think I’ve been past 10 levels in the dungeon before getting my arse handed to me. Angband isn’t a particularly difficult game and I quite like its pace which as it is pretty much turn based, however quick you want to go.

Angband takes most of its inspiration race-wise from Lord of the Rings, which is nice as I’m a big fan and it is always fun to go bodding round a dungeon as a dwarf regardless of the setting, I believe there is also a multiplayer version available, but I’d have to check. For such a simple game though it is strangely addictive and fun, especially facing hordes of monsters down with only a torch and a broadsword

My dwarf Tarik facing off against the seemingly endless worms!

Lastly is NetHack, what is really the genre setter for dungeon crawlers since its first release way back when in 1987, itself a descendant of Hack, which is a descendant of Rogue. It has pretty much been in constant development since it was released so when I was first linked to it I was expecting some pretty big things from a game that is older than I am.

There is no doubt that this is a deep game, hell it is probably more complex than my beloved Dwarf Fortress, though this complexity is not readily apparent there are some definite hints to the unwary, take for example during my first venture into the game my character was thirsty but I didn’t have any water or rations to give him so spying a fountain in the distance I wandered over and drunk from it, half a second later a messaged popped up informing me that drinking from the fountain had summoned a water demon which proceeded to demolish me in one hit. This is something I didn’t even account for especially not in the first level of the dungeon, so I was surprised a bit, I have tried to get into it again but completely random things happen which is making it difficult to appreciate this game which is apparently loved by so many.

I don’t mind hard games but random things do not please me.