Game: Scorched 3D v43.3d
Released here

Review 1

Scorched 3D is a modernization of the classic DOS game Scorched Earth "The Mother Of All Games" on which it is based. Scorched 3D incorporates a lively three dimensional landscape that includes animated jets, naval vessels, water, and even birds, in addition to detailed tanks and projectiles. Other enhancements include LAN and internet play and music. Scorched 3D is a simple turn-based artillery game and also a real time strategy game in which players can counter each others weapons with other creative accessories, shields and tactics. Learn skill in timing, aiming and judgment, move around on the landscape, or even out-smart your opponent economically. Learning how to play is easy, just point the turret, adjust power and trajectory, select a weapon, and shoot.

What's new in this version: Version 43.3d has fixed memory corruption bug (deletion of void *), socket leaking when disconnecting from a server, and fixed bug where lots of sounds played during level load or sync. - source

Review 2

Scorched3D is the perfect all-family game. It has everything for everyone. In the worst case, you can use the game to teach your kids about wind resistance and ballistics. Or just have some innocent fun blasting the world to bits after a long day. Free, cross-platform, light on the machine resources, colorful, beautiful, and funny.

Even if you have no friends, you can still spend many a merry moment honing your spatial skills playing against the computer, which can put us some rather feisty resistance, even at moderately easy levels. Do not crank the difficulty to high, as you will be JDAM-ed within seconds. Hoard that gold and then watch your finest weapons blast the map to tiny bits. I voted the game the best of 2010, and it's still true today. Have fun, dear readers! - source

Game: Juniper’s Knot
Released here



Juniper’s Knot is a short visual novel from Dischan that any player may download and play for free. Actually, ‘play’ is too strong a word for this genre, since interaction is solely based on reading and enjoying the story and visuals that the authors devised for us. And they managed to grab our full attention for the hour or so that this tale lasts.

It’s the story of a female demon that is entrapped for centuries and a boy who is lost. The two very different beings stumble upon each other and a lot of feelings and fears occur. The boy is naturally kind but suspicious and the demon is haunted by the lengthy entrapment and the desire of using the boy to finally be set free. The tale is told from the two perspectives and the player, or reader, gets to know what torments each one of the characters and what could possibly be the outcome.

Will the demon’s true instincts take the best of her or is there another way for two so dissimilar creatures to put aside their differences and work out a solution?
The quality of the artwork may be the first thing that strikes us, but the writing quickly proves to be of great detail, even daring to go to some foul-mouthed passages that actually seem consistent with the feelings that the demon experiences.

Some sound effects add a nice touch to the situations and the beautiful music creates a great atmosphere. After the ending we get access to the extras, including the soundtrack and some artworks.

Juniper’s Knot is a nice way to spend a few minutes with a compelling story that may touch readers and that actually may lift some spirits. Just remember that it’s not a proper game and you’ll enjoy the most of it.

source

Game: Orbiter
Released here

" Orbiter could be your winning (and free) ticket to space."

Review 1

Pros: Very well done in all aspects.

Cons: The only down side is it will take some time for new users to master the controls. Not that the controls are rough or hard to use, but there are a great number of controls. Don't get me wrong, once you have taken the time to get the feel for this amazing space flight sim you will have alot of fun with it.

Other Thoughts: The graphics of this are simply amazing. All flight models are extremly well done. Inside each craft there is an array of displays for almost any guage needed for spaceflight. The controls will take some time to master, but once you've done that this space flight sim will keep you occupied, and interested, for long periods. - source

Review 2

I’ve been a space flight enthusiast since childhood, collecting and reading books, watching videos, and in recent years, keeping up with space developments through the web. I’ve even played with a few space-related simulators in the past, but these were so limited physically and/or graphically that none of them held my interest for long. Orbiter is different. The combination of realistic physics, a well-designed flight-sim-like user interface, outstanding graphics, and expandability has created a “sweet spot” in terms of the immersiveness, the variety of experiences, and the range of challenges. Many tasks in Orbiter are challenging at first—thinking and maneuvering in 3-D and zero-G are not familiar experiences for most people. These require learning, and to me, learning is fun—especially learning about space flight. If you or someone you know has similar feelings, and until commercial space-tourist flights become available, Orbiter could be your winning (and free) ticket to space. - source

Program: Simutrans
Released here

" if you're a transport fan, or like business management games, it is hard to go wrong with Simutrans."
Simutrans, a freeware transportation and economics game, is in spirit similar to the famous Transport Tycoon series. The aim of the game is the same - to connect cities and industries using road, air, water, and rail systems, and of course to get rich doing so.

On the surface, there may not be much of a superficial difference - both share an isometric viewpoint and similar network building concepts, but beyond the surface, there are many differences that make Simutrans unique.

In Transport Tycoon, the player can transport any mineral to any facility that accepts it on the map. In Simutrans, this is not so simple. Coal mines, for example, have workers (a feature totally lacking in the Microprose game) that come from certain predefined cities and the coal only goes to predefined customers. This is a very realistic and well thought-out touch.


Passengers are set up similarly. Just as in real life, you do not get on a bus to go anywhere the driver tells you to. Passengers in Simutrans have set destinations they want to go to, they have places they have to be too and want to be at with the least amount of transferring from vehicle to vehicle!

There are different grades of roadways and railways in newer revisions of Simutrans, with different speed limits. Will you build a cheap road, but slow your trucks down? Or spend more upfront and on maintenance but have vehicles going top speed?

Simutrans's learning curve, is a bit more steep because of these differences, but it becomes a bit easier over time. Don't expect your first few networks to become huge successes!

Another great feature is the fact you can plug in your own graphics sets, which are often done as fan-made add-ons. There's a wide variety out there, including a set to make Simutrans look like Transport Tycoon.

In all, if you're a transport fan, or like business management games, it is hard to go wrong with Simutrans.

source

Program: Crimson Fields
Released here


Review 1

Crimson Fields is an open-source, freeware turn-based strategy game clearly based on the Battle Isle series by Blue Byte. A third-party tool can be used to convert the levels from the 1991 classic, its two expansions, and the related Historyline: 1914-1918. A level editor is also included to create custom maps and campaigns.

The game comes with a tutorial, a full campaign and several individual maps, offering a wide range of multiplayer and network options. The gameplay mimics very closely the style of the original, where two players, human or computer-controlled, take turns moving military units on a map with hexagonal tiles for the terrain, trying to take hold of resources and buildings while eliminating the opposition. Map objectives are usually displayed as a briefing text at the beginning of a new game. The text can be changed from the default English to German, Polish, French and other languages.- source

Review 2

Crimson Fields 0.5.0 is arcade software developed by Jens Granseuer.
Crimson Fields project is a tactical war game in the tradition of Battle Isle.

The outcome of the war lies in your hands. You decide which units are sent to the front lines, and when to unleash the reserves. Your mission objectives range from defending strategically vital locations to simply destroying all enemy forces in the area. Protect supply convoys or raid enemy facilities to uncover technological secrets or fill your storage bays so you can repair damaged units or build new ones in your own factories. Lead your troops to victory!

Tools are available to create custom maps and campaigns. You can also play the original Battle Isle maps if you have a copy of the game.

You can pit yourself against another human player either in hot-seat mode in front of the same machine or via e-mail, or against the computer.

Crimson Fields is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It has been developed and tested on Intel architecture with Linux, but it shouldn't be too hard to make it compile and run on other operating systems as well. So far it has been reported to work with Linux, various flavours of BSD, Sun Solaris, MacOS X, BeOS, and MS Windows.- source

Game: Oolite v1.76
Released here

" It surpasses commercial examples of its genre, and offers a deep, sometimes humorous, and long-lasting gaming experience"
Some 26 years ago, two students, Ian Bell and David Braben (who went on to become a rock-star game developer) met at Cambridge and compared notes on games they were both working on, and pooled their efforts to release one of the most influential games of all time, Elite. While this was not the first ever title of its kind, it was a major breakthrough, and the one that launched, if you’ll pardon the pun, the space combat and trading genre. Even to this day, the occasional game developer will cite Elite as an influence and inspiration for his work. In the past few years, however, the “space sim” genre has been somewhat unpopular with developers, perhaps due to the joystick losing so much ground to the keyboard and mouse (in fact, one of the most famous space sims of recent years, Freelancer, doesn’t even support the joystick.) Nevertheless, there is still considerable demand for the genre, as proved not only by the likes of EVE Online, but also by a number of open-source projects out there. One such is Oolite (Object Oriented eLITE), which was started several years ago, and continues with great enthusiasm.


When we hear “open source”, we can’t be blamed for immediately assuming second-rate, user-unfriendly stuff that might only be appreciated by the Linux crowd – all too often that is exactly the case. Not so here. Oolite is a polished and completed game, impressively put together, which runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux.) It is a meagre 22MB download (which is still 1000 times the size of the original, which fitted in 22 kilobytes!), but to enjoy the full experience you will want to also grab some OXPs – Oolite eXpansion Packs. These vary in size between literally a few kB and many MB (for the larger model and texture packs), but mostly weight in at around a megabyte or two. They add a variety of extra features, but I’ll get back to those just now.


The core game is a re-creation of Elite, right down to the placements of all 2048 worlds (yes, that’s right – over 2000 of them!) in the 8 galaxies, their names, descriptions, and properties; the market prices; the ships; the stations; the missions – everything. The only differences are a couple of interface tweaks to make the game more friendly to today’s audience, and the ability to buy new ships (in the original, you could upgrade your ship, but could not trade it in for another.) The vast universe is procedurally generated using the original algorithm that allowed Bell and Braben to accomplish this on primitive machines such as the Spectrum 48K. The only major differences are graphical: the wireframe models have been replaced by solid models (though retaining their original shapes), and planets have been given textures. The gameplay itself revolves around flying around, trading, and kicking ass. The trading can be typical buy-low/sell-high shenanigans, or contract cargo-hauling, or passenger freight. Of course, one can also go the pirate route and attack vessels for their cargo (the cops will get upset!), or be a bounty hunter and go after criminals for the prices on their heads and their (often contraband) cargo. The game can be controlled with keyboard and mouse, but a joystick is highly recommended.


While a faithful reproduction, the base game gets tired pretty quickly: we have come to expect so much more from games these days, and while it is damn impressive that all this was achieved 26 years ago, today it fails to measure up for long, except as a curiosity. However, this is where the OXPs come in, and there are literally hundreds to pick from. They add a wide variety of content to the game: some are graphical enhancements that add high-definition models and textures to ships, stations, and planets, and transform the game into something that easily rivals, and even surpasses, commercially available titles. Others add custom HUDs (interfaces) to replace the default one, or alternative sound schemes (there is a variety of ship computer voices that can be added, though the game also offers synthesized messages – pretty darn cool!) The majority, however, add new ships, missions, or gameplay features. The latter can be things like refuelling satellites, in-system jump-gates, additional planets and moons, more realistic repositioning of planets relative to their suns, new weapons, new types of bases, flavour content for various government systems (each planet has its own political, economic, and technological profile), and more. The new ships OXPs are pretty self-explanatory – they generally add ships for both players and NPCs. And the mission OXPs provide either serialised campaign missions, or procedurally generated ones (such as the Random Hits OXP, which expands bounty hunting as a profession by generating felon NPCs to be hunted down, and adds seedy bars at Anarchy systems where hardened veterans can swing by to pick up contracts.) Literally, you can shape the game how you want it by adding the OXPs you want – and simply removing any you end up not liking.


Overall, this is an amazing game put together by a handful of fans of the original title. Fleshed out, it surpasses commercial examples of its genre, and offers a deep, sometimes humorous, and long-lasting gaming experience for the discount price of – nothing! It supported by an active and very friendly community forum, frequented by the game’s developers, OXP developers, and just plain gamers like you and me. Oolite’s main drawback is that it has no multiplayer and, due to the structure of its universe, is unlikely ever to get it. If you want to check it out, head on over to Oolite v1.76

source

Game: Tag
Released here

" An original blend of puzzles, platformers and first person shooters in which the main ammunition is paint."
Review 1

Not since Narbacular Drop (spiritual forefather of Portal) has a student of DigiPen produced such a compelling piece of puzzle design. The short first-person puzzler lets players deface a monochromatic urban landscape with paint-filled super-soakers. Each paint has a different property that results in things like speed boosts, bounces, and wall-walking, giving players a new way to solve some very clever platform puzzles. While Tag is something less than a full fledged product right now, we should all keep our fingers crossed that it will get the chance to grow. - source

Review 2

We're all used to managing bullets, grenades and knives in first person shooters. But what if paint was your main ammo?

This is precisely the idea behind Tag: The Power of Paint. This original game, developed by a group of students of the Digipen Institute of Technology, challenges you to find your way through several levels in a mixture between puzzles, platform games and shooters. The trick is using paint to obtain different powers: green makes you jump, red boosts your speed and blue allows you to stick to the surface.

All you have to do is grab your machine gun – which looks more like one of those guns used in paintball games - and start making your way through each level in the game, using each color as you need it.

Tag: The Power of Paint is generally easy to play. Some puzzles are quite challenging at first, but once you get the knack of it the whole adventure runs smoothly – in fact you'll have the impression that it's too short. Also, I missed having at least a few enemies to wipe out, which would definitely make the game more exciting.

Tag: The Power of Paint is an original blend of puzzles, platformers and first person shooters in which the main ammunition is paint.
Pros

Very original idea
Easy to control
Cons

No enemies
Too short

source

Game: Mightier v1.4
Released here

" Design your own puzzles in this creative platform game"
No matter what you favorite videogame genre is, you've probably played a platformer at any point in your gaming career. But I'm sure you haven't seen anything like Mightier.

Mightier is an original platform game in which you design and create your own levels. This means that you can actually play the game as two characters: the engineer who designs the puzzles, and the explorer ('actionaut', in Mightier's jargon) that solves them and collects all the items on each level.

Designing Mightier levels is really easy. If you're skilful enough you can draw them directly on the screen with your mouse; but if you prefer more traditional methods, you can draw the puzzle on a piece of paper and then scan it (either with a scanner or a webcam) to open it with the game.

Mightier is certainly different from anything we've seen so far. I personally think it's a great game for children, because it challenges them with creative tasks. Unfortunately it tends to get repetitive and a bit boring in the end.

Mightier is an original platform game in which you have to design your own levels.

Pros

Very original
Creative challenges
Works with scanner, webcam or on-screen editor

Cons

A bit too simple
Gets repetitive

source

Program: Danger from the deep v0.4.0
Released here

" Submarine buffs, do yourself a favor, and check out this game. "
Review 1

I was excited about a particularly cool-looking submarine simulator, Danger from the Deep. This month, I'm proud to feature it. According to its Web site:


Danger from the Deep (known as dangerdeep or DftD) is a free (as in free speech), open-source World War II German submarine simulator....This game is planned as tactical simulation and will be as realistic as our time and knowledge of physics allows. Its current state is alpha, but it is playable.

DftD currently is being developed on Linux (i386 and AMD64) and Windows. There are binaries available for Linux (i386 and AMD64) and Windows (32-bit), and there are some old packages for Mac OS X. Danger from the Deep makes use of SDL/OpenGL and, thus, should be portable to other operating systems or platforms.

DftD has even been reported to work on Windows (2000/XP/98), Linux (i386/x86-64/SPARC64) and FreeBSD (x86-64/SPARC64/IA64).


Authenticity and romance are almost taken to extremes here, and touches like the captain's quarters (see above photo) really help you get into the feeling and atmosphere of the game.


Ah, authenticity! Don't speak German? Too bad! The controls stay that way, whether you like it or not (which I do).


Installation

The installer will go through the usual Next, Next, Next...Finish process, and once it's done, you can run the game by clicking the launch icon on your desktop.

Usage

As soon as you're at the main screen, you'll be flooded by a wave of romantic nostalgia that never lets up! From the sepia-colored menus, German-labeled controls and wartime background imagery to the crackly WWII-era music, this game wears its heart on its sleeve.

Assuming you have a decent graphics card, you'll want to crank up the video resolution in the Options menu, as the graphics in this game actually are quite impressive at times.

Because this game is currently in alpha stage, the number of gaming options are limited. Nevertheless, several kinds of missions are available in single-player mode. For those wanting something to blast at from the get-go, try Historical Mission first under the menu Play single mission.

Before you embark on any voyages, however, I suggest that you print out the game's PDF manual, which is downloadable at the Web site. This game's controls are extensive (hey, you're piloting a submarine), and each key often is assigned to something different between other view modes. Here are a few basic universal controls to get you started though.

F1 through F12 all have a different view or function on the ship. Some keys bring you to actual locations within the submarine, such as the torpedo room or captain's quarters, and others bring up equipment, such as the ship's sonar. Of particular joy and amusement is the control screen on F1 and the torpedo screen on F6. The gauges and dials are in German, and as far as I know, there's no option to have them in English, so you'll have to find out what HalbeFarht and Lagenwinkel mean on your own.

Now, I'm sure at this stage you'll be keen to blast at something, so let's cover that. You may want to try surfacing for this, as it makes the above-water enemies easier to spot using more view modes, but it also shows off some of the cool graphics this game has.

Press the S key to surface, and when you're up there, have a look around with various different view modes (check out that deck for starters, and, yes, you can man that surface gun). If a target is somewhere in sight, press I to identify the target. Pressing the spacebar selects it, and T fires a torpedo.

I could go on and on, but it's been a privilege to see a project with such polish and passion as this one. In the hands of your average open-source team, a submarine simulator like this could be a bland, grey, blobby mess, and spending several hours with it might be a guaranteed cure for insomnia. This, on the other hand, is a colorful world of fine touches and authenticity that's guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

Considering this game is in the alpha stage, it's an extraordinary effort with nice graphics, a brilliant installer and even a small soundtrack! Submarine buffs, do yourself a favor, and check out this game. - source

Sometimes the environment can be quite beautiful, such as this sunset, which makes long hours in a sub much easier to bear!

Review 2

A free, open source submarine simulation.

In the free game Danger from the Deep, you have five vehicles at your disposal, amongst them three submarines and a destroyer. The career menuand also the multi-player modes are not yet finished and hence cannot be played in this version. Individual missions can be played according to your wish and the fun element is not lost even after multiple games.- source

Game: The Cat and the Coup by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad
Released here

" The Cat and the Coup is a fantastic experience."
It’s rare when a video game manages to teach you something beyond its play mechanics. That’s one of the core reasons why The Cat and the Coup, co-developed by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad, is an especially interesting title.


I first saw The Cat and the Coup in action at this year’s IndieCade festival, and its art-style (based on Persian Miniatures), immediately stood out as one of the more visually arresting titles on display. On top of that, the game’s deft handling of its atypical subject matter helped Brinson and ValaNejad snag the festival’s Documentary Game award.

Though I was only able to spend a short while playing the game at IndieCade, Peter and Kurosh were kind enough to furnish me with a nearly-completed pre-release build of the game after the show.

As covered in our IndieCade preview of the game, The Cat and the Coup tells the story of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. More specifically, the game presents events from Mossadegh’s life in reverse-chronological order, beginning on his death bed following the CIA-sponsored coup d’etat in 1953. The coup was brought about by Mossadegh’s decision to nationalize Iran’s oil fields – an event I wasn’t aware of until playing the game. The game’s historical events play out in a way that takes the player back in time to the moment he was elected Prime Minister.


What on Earth would inspire the creation of such a game? At IndieCade, I asked the developers where they got the idea to make The Cat and the Coup. Brinson replied:

Every time I see the statistic of the age of the average gamer, it’s always exactly my age. It’s been like that for about ten years, ever since they started talking about that kind of stuff. I know that when I was a young gamer, I was interested in fiction. I was interested in fiction books. I was interested in fiction movies. And I still am. But I’m more interested in the real world than I ever have been. And so, I think that this audience of “games for people who are interested in the world” is a new one, and that there’s going to be more and more [games like that].

In another unusual twist, you don’t play the game as Mossadegh, himself. Players instead control the Prime Minister’s cat. As his cat, you’ll solve these puzzles via cat-like activities such as jumping around, knocking stuff off of shelves, and scratching. Each “stage” of The Cat and the Coup is presented as a puzzle that also serves as an artistic representation of key moments in Mossadegh’s life. Brief snippets of informative text are woven into the backgrounds, which helps to keep the player aware of the tale’s chronology and milestones.

The look of the game is gorgeous, giving you the feeling that you’re navigating a giant historical tapestry. The Persian Miniature art-style also has some touches of collage-style madness. Some of the art seems like it could have been ripped from Terry Gilliam’s subconscious, circa Monty Python’s Flying Circus. As odd as it may sound, the disparate art-styles really enhance the uneasy mood of the game. It’s important to note that not all of the art in the build I played was final, but it already looks great.

The feeling I got while playing The Cat and the Coup was one of unease and wonderment. The Alice in Wonderland-way in which the player tumbles down the rabbit-hole of events from Mossadegh’s life is always undercut with the thematic resonance that the United States was the “bad guy” in this case. After all, the CIA ousted a democratically elected leader of another country for economic reasons. It’s not a story you’ve likely heard taught in American schools, though as Brinson notes in the “About” video, the story of Mossadegh can readily be researched online by those looking for more information.

The Cat and the Coup is a fantastic experience. It’s one of those rare games that will likely teach you something you didn’t already know about world history, without actually making you feel like you’re being taught. The puzzles are perhaps a bit on the easy side, and the game itself is a fairly brief experience. That said, it’s a title that continues to stick with me, even having completed it, and is a shining example of how interesting, unexplored subjects can make for intellectually stimulating game-time.

The Cat and the Coup will be available for download on PC and Mac sometime in 2011.

source

Game: Don't Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story by Christine Love
Released here

" Love has created something that is brave, captivating and utterly fantastic."
Review 1

I have been a fan of visual novels ever since I played 999: 9 hours, 9 persons, 9 doors, a Nintendo commercial game. Christine Love, first created magic with her critically acclaimed game, "Digital:A Love Story" and continues it with DTIPB. Her writing weaves an engrossing drama with, surprises and twists, natural and believable dialogue sequences and like her name, has an element of love.

DTIPB is an interactive visual novel, all about love, sex, trust, guilt, internet, sexuality and privacy. You are John Rook, a high school teacher, handling a class of socially networked hooked students in the year 2047. At school, the students and teachers are equipped with a tablet, and the students use AmieConnect on this tablet. This is very similar to Facebook, and is used to interact with their other classmates, to post their status on their profile and wall; make gossip, send private messages, argue with each other and even to flirt.

This very interactive novel becomes really interesting when you, as John Rook, have access to all the messages that students post, including their public and private conversations which the students are not supposed to know about; thereby, breaking every moral of privacy. As the story progresses there are elements of tension and drama created; not only do you get to know about the good, the bad and the ugly sides of these teenagers, but also the problems they face in their personal life and how to help them if needed. The game has 3 different endings, depending on the choices you make, thanks to the smart and creatively told piece of narration. - source

Review 2
Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story is the newest game from Christine Love. Love is well known for Digital: A Love Story, a game that made people realise they did have a heart instead of just a black hole.

Love moves Don’t take It personally in a whole new direction style-wise. Whereas Digital took advantage of roughly three colours, Don’t take it personally is a visual novel — a game heavy with text and featuring limited interactivity — brought to life using colourful anime. The added colour suits the game well and compliments what it’s trying to do.

Don’t take it personally is set in a high school and has you playing as John Rook. He’s been through two divorces and has decided to become a teacher after a midlife-crisis, a totally reasonable way to deal with things. Your class is full of 16 year-olds who are all equipped with Amie tablets. Amie tablets are iPad-esque devices that give the students access to the game’s own version of Facebook as well as a personal messaging system.

As a teacher you’re also given an Amie tablet, this allows you to spy on any communication between your students. The story is then almost exclusively forwarded through finding out about the student’s lives through reading their public and private messages. Throughout the game I often became obsessed with reading the messages, and grew impatient waiting for the familiar sound to let me know there was another.

Navigating the Amie tablet can become confusing and isn’t as intuitive as it should be. At certain points messages build up and become overwhelming. They are minor annoyances overall, but they can be quite frustrating when you’re trying your best to keep up with a number of different plots.

The issue of privacy is one of many questions raised by Don’t Take it personally. Sexuality, bullying and relationships all play a part in a game that makes my school days look very dull indeed. At certain junctures you’re also given choices that will ultimately not affect just Rook, but the children he is teaching.

The choices in don’t take it personally are very well constructed as well as some of the most meaningful I’ve come across. For a good number of them I had to really consider what I was about to do. Despite Rook feeling like his own character, you are allowed to change his life. This is what I find so powerful about Don’t take it personally; I realised this isn’t my story, yet I’ve been given the power to harm or help. This meant within a short space of time I cared more for these characters than I have done for ones I’ve spent hours upon hours with.


Sometimes throughout the game you’re not given a choice of what to say, simply what approach to take. Whilst a little frustrating at first, it became an effective way of emphasising the point that this isn’t your story.

Don’t take it personally pulled me through so many different emotions that by the end I had no idea what I was feeling. That is what I found to be so brilliant about the game. It had the ability to at one minute have me feeling incredibly upset and then a short while later, overjoyed. This to me is what makes Don’t take it personally much more than just a visual novel. It’s a game that if you let it will become ingrained in you, and stick with you long after finishing it.

At certain points in the game you’ll also visit 12chan. 12chan is an image board, akin to 4chan, that is obsessed with an anime that you never see and only read about. During the visits you’ll read replies about events in the anime that are familiar to what’s happening in the game. The internet slang can get boring but for the most part it was an interesting storytelling technique that served up some very funny and occasionally powerful moments.

Love’s skills as a writer shine in Don’t take it personally. Through well written messages and dialogue, Love creates a believable group of teenagers in a limited amount of time. The writing also reflects the heavy subject matter. Some of the language is incredibly daring and makes use of words not often seen in games. I was left feeling a little uncomfortable when reading some of the messages, particularly when homophobia was involved. Love’s on-the-edge writing provided an uneasy atmosphere that benefited the game, and drew me further in.

Next time you have a few hours spare, as well as a few hours to reflect, play Don’t take it personally. Love has created something that is brave, captivating and utterly fantastic.- source

Program: Nous By Adam Smith
Released here

" At once unsettling and amusing, and both wildly entertaining and quietly artful..."
Review 1

Welcome To The Machine: Nous

All games have spikes, sometimes they're just well hiddenr
The autumnal quasi-summer has abandoned me and more than ever I am in need of indoor entertainment, preferably without spending a single penny as I’ve squandered all my money on garish Bermuda shorts. Enter Nous, a free game which claims to be a computer program seeking its purpose and identity. In order to learn it offers to teach the player, a quid pro quo in which both discover something about themselves. I should stress, that’s what the program does, not the game itself. It’s a top-down shoot ‘em up with a weirdly compelling narrative and there isn’t a fourth wall in sight.


It’s almost obligatory for any game with an apparently emotionless or friendly computer guide to contain a thoroughly expected twist in which nerve toxins are released, promises are broken and it turns out benevolence was not an available subroutine. Nous knows this and it knows that you know this, so it plays with the idea. That’s what it does the whole way through its brief existence – plays with ideas.

Did you try a pacifist run on Human Revolution, or any other game that allowed it? Nous knows all about that. Want to try it in a top-down shooter? It will tell you how. It will also tell you to use an Xbox controller and I did, but then I went through again using the keyboard and managed just fine. Definitely don’t be dissuaded if you don’t have a controller connected.

I’m intentionally not saying too much about what you’ll actually be doing in the game beyond moving and shooting because the narrative is really a deconstruction of tutorials. Nous asks, at first, “what am I?”, but the way it approaches the question is to tell you and to see how you react to different types of instruction and output.

It’s amusing, it’s thoughtful and it’s fun. Best of all, it gives the strong impression that Awesome Shark Volcano, based at DigiPen, are thinking hard about self-referential design without ignoring the apparently simple things, like combos, dodging and destruction. - source

Review 2

It’s a top-down blaster in which you attempt to kill enemies or convert them into health. You can rack up combos while trying to avoid spiked squares that seek to squish you from every direction. But that’s only scratching the surface. As well as being an entertaining, high-speed arcade shooter with a twist, it’s also an engaging science-fiction story and an experiment that examines the nature of videogames and technology. It is, essentially, a deeper beast than a mere description of the game mechanics would let on.

You’re being psychoanalysed by a computer program – one that breaks down, gets confused, and alternates between seeming like it wants to help you, and becoming seethingly angry with you. This program thinks that maybe it’s a guidance counsellor, but it appears to need some counselling itself. As you progress through the story, the program sets you action-centric tasks that supposedly will teach you something about yourself. Whatever you do, don’t admit that they didn’t.

At once unsettling and amusing, and both wildly entertaining and quietly artful, Nous is an absolutely essential play: a game that proves thoughtful storytelling, smart game design and heaps of fun can go perfectly hand-in-hand. - source

Game: Viriax
Released here

" Very impressive box-art, considering the lack of a box."
Review 1

Viriax – Crazy 8-bit-style shmup has amazing soundtrack, puts you in germs' shoes
Wait, do germs wear shoes?

Leave it to video games to make molecular biology and human anatomy fun. Viriax, the new PC-only freeware offering from indie developer Locomalito, is just as kooky as it is simple to play (Don't worry: It isn't the slightest bit educational). You're a tiny virus attempting to infect and hopefully fell your host human, but doing so isn't so easy. Each level consists of different body parts, with the lungs and intestines being your first points of entry. And unlike other shmups, learning the level layout is rather difficult because they're randomly generated here.

Complicating matters stillmore is how every move your virus makes takes away some of its health. That health can only be regenerated by collecting coins or strategically swimming above and bouncing off antibodies and scooping up their leavings. You might be thinking, "Ugh. Collecting coins? Swimming?" And we know, it sounds like one giant water level, but Variax is paced so excellently and the concept so straightforward that we found it more akin to Kid Icarus' flying levels than Mario's dreadful water levels.

Then again, a great inspiration to keep playing is composer Gryzor87's sublime eerie soundtrack. Yes, it sounds very 8-bit, but it's better than that lazy genre tag bandied about so often implies. It's more like 8-bit with dying sirens, soaring Theremins, and driving arpeggiated synths. The soundtrack is also available for free, and available here. But first, get a taste of the music and the game in the trailer below, and then swipe the game here.- source

Review 2

I’ve Got A Fever… Viriax

Very impressive box-art, considering the lack of a box.

One-man Spanish indie powerhouse Locomalito (and much credit to his musical compatriot, Gryzor87) has come up trumps once more. Today marks the release of his fourth game, Viriax. Like his previous three titles, it is two things above all else: Brilliant and free.

Billed as ‘Arcade medical terror’, you control an adorable, murderous little 8-bit viral creature, on a mission to not only demolish every single major organ inside the human you reside in, but (presumably as a final act of microscopic spite) also destroy the implanted nanomachine factory that has been generating all the obstacles between you and the delicious, juicy core cells of each organ.

Over the course of the game, you’ll traverse six regions of the body, each consisting of 80 vertically stacked and randomly generated ‘floors’ worth of action (every 20th containing a boss). It’s an incredibly simple and accessible game, played entirely using the arrow keys. Up makes you jump, and repeated taps make you ‘swim’ upwards. The left and right keys maneuver you, and the down arrow causes you to pounce on whatever lies directly below you, dealing damage, and cracking open glowing cells in order to reap bonus points or temporary powerups.

Simple, but not easy. Every action beyond moving left and right or the initial jump from a solid platform will drain your energy bar. Every attack, every stroke of swimming will take a chunk out of it, and more often than not, you’ll have to attack or swim to progress. So along the way, you need to collect a steady stream of red blood-cells to restore your health. Some dropped by enemies, others occurring naturally, they’re always in short supply. You really need to pick and choose your fights. Do you leave an enemy alone and keep swimming, or risk attacking them in the hope that they contain more health? It’s very easy to back yourself into a corner and doom your little red virus-monster to an early disintegration.

It’s intense and very stressful. You’ve got no time-pressure working against you, but every action you take beyond the very most basic is a drain on your limited resources, and it forces you to really think hard and fast, as the quick-and-easy route of just swimming upwards at full speed is one of the fastest ways to die. I could spend a lot longer gushing about just how tightly designed this is, just how cleverly the powerups trick you into pushing too hard and making mistakes, and how scoring high requires a vastly different playstyle compared to mere survival, but I won’t. It’d be fairly redundant, considering that the game is free, under 3mb, and available to download now.

Grab it, and get down with the sickness.- source

Program: Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole.
Released here

" Endless fun. Zero cost. What are you waiting for?"
We're in a kind of love/hate relationship with stealth games, here at FHM. While we love being a sneaky secret agent and gain a tremendous amount of satisfaction from a perfectly-crafted kill in games like Splinter Cell and Hitman, there're three main problems with stealth games that we can't quite get around.

1. They're often really slow, and we spend a lot of time waiting around to do stuff
2. If we fuck up - and we fuck up a lot - then we have to sit in an air vent waiting for the guards to get bored of looking for us and return to their patrol routes, rather than (say) checking the air vent
3. They cost actual money from our pockets

And we need that money to buy chips

Stealth Bastard elegantly solves all of these problems. Taking standard stealth mechanics of hiding in darkness and behind stuff and blending them with the frenetic play of Super Meat Boy, it's a fast-paced 2D platformer of sorts. You play the titular Stealth Bastard who has to sneak around levels and not be detected doing so. Simple enough.

It's not slow and there's no waiting involved, because if you're spotted by one of the many robots scooting around the level searching for you, you're instantly killed. Luckily, the missions are short enough to make this only a minor problem.


Plus, it's free. Entirely free. Not a bit free, like Team Fortress 2, in that the main game costs nothing but you're screwed over on buying hats. Or like World of Warcraft, in that it's free at the start then once you've made friends and established a character Blizzard casually mention that you'll not get any further in the game until you start slipping them some cash once a month, what a beautiful Night Elf you've got here, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it etc.

No. It's free. Plus it comes with a level creation mode and online leaderboards. We're not entirely sure how they're getting away with pricing it at NO POUNDS, but here we are. If you're not busy playing Skyrim this weekend, and you can force yourself to pull away from MW3 multiplayer for a while, give it a download and try it. After all, you've got nothing to lose.

Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole (that's genuinely the full title) is available now for PC.

source