Digital scarcity is an interesting concept. There should be no logical limit on how many times you can copy a file or generate a key, some places seem to just run out of stock anyway. That’s a deliberate decision on part of the Indie Gala managers for this pay-what-you-want (kinda) sale, as rather than have a time limit, this particular sale will end with 50,000 bundles sold. In addition, there’s three different bundles available here, offering 3, 5 or 11 games respectively. Oh, and like the enormously successful Humble Bundles, a chunk of the takings goes to charity. Lots of choices. Hit the break for a quick run-down of what each bundle and game offers.

The Carebear Bundle – Minimum $4

This one includes just a trio of games – Critical Mass, Fortix 2 and Bunch Of Heroes, as well as 3 bonus albums of music.

Critical Mass (Click for trailer) is a straightforward puzzle game. It would be an ordinary match-3, were it not for the fact that it’s played in full 3D IN SPAAAAAACE. Rotating this big shiny cube of cubes, you drop additional cubes onto the surface. Three or more of the same color? They explode and shrink it down. Clear it all to win, then do it again.

Fortix 2 (Trailer, too!) is – despite claims of creativity – a modern update of the old arcade-puzzle game Qix. Enemies bounce around the screen trying to harm you, while you expand out of your safe territory bit by bit, claiming new space. If you claim space that happens to be inhabited by enemies at the time, they’re destroyed and you get points! It’s simple stuff, but there’s a reason why Qix was always considered a classic. Probably worth your attention.

Bunch Of Heroes (Trailer three!) is just what it looks like. A co-op ‘twin-stick’ arena shooter with a lot of zombies and the occasional alien. Not a bad game by any means, but workmanlike and in a genre that is hugely over-saturated at the moment. Still a solid way to spend some time with a couple of friends, though.

The Big-Saver Bundle – Minimum $7

Two more games get added to the pack if you pay a couple dollars extra, as well as another three albums.

Roboblitz (Very Old Gameplay Trailer) – An interesting history behind this one. Not only was it one of the first indie releases to ever use the Unreal 3 engine, but it was also a masterpiece of procedural coding, crammed down into under 100mb – engine, graphics, levels, cutscenes and all. Why? Because when Xbox Live Arcade first launched, the file-size limits were absurdly constraining, so it required either corner-cutting or programming wizardry to get around the restrictions. It’s a pretty solid third-person action/puzzle game, too.

Greed Corp (Yep, You Guessed It) – This game will end friendships. Don’t let the glossy presentation fool you – this is a board-game in the style of Risk, but on a smaller, much more brutal scale. While you can play it against the AI, any victory will feel hollow. Against other players, it’s like playing chicken with armies. Every turn that you spend building up forces and mining resources will gradually eat away at the map, with weakened hexes falling into the mist, forcing you ever closer to a confrontation. Good stuff, especially with another few players.

The Epic Gala Bundle – Minimum $11

Sounds like a lot – 6 more games and one more album for $4 extra. This pack includes all the games from the previous Indie Gala bundle including the entertainingly mindless Zombie Shooter series, and the rather more intelligent Hacker Evolution series, so refer back to our little roundup of what that sale offered to make your decision. There’s some fun games in there, that’s for sure.

It looks like the current trend of indie bundling isn’t going to end anytime soon, despite the grumbling of apathetic gamers worldwide. The numbers say that business is good, and until the bottom falls out of this market, I expect to see plenty more packs like this in the near future. All games are for Windows PCs, and are activated on Steam.

[Indie Gala]

Four men, a sack-full of Boom, a spaceship full of mutant alien beasties and a high-energy chiptune track to keep you moving. What’s not to like? Pineapple Smash Crew – the first game by one-man outfit ‘Rich Make Game!’ (with help from chiptune musician Syphus) – has been one to keep an eye on since it’s debut at the Eurogamer Expo last year, where folks played and enjoyed it a lot. Now it’s out and available to buy from Steam, Desura and other stores – so, the big question: How does it hold up to long-term scrutiny?

PSC is a game with a lot of immediate charm. The chunky brick-headed spacemen that you lead around have a characterfully low-fi bouncy run animation, the explosions are pixellated and move just right through the tunnels of the spaceships you’re clearing out, and the enemies behave exactly as you’d expect them to at first glance, with spiders scuttling, bugs leaping and zombies shambling. The music is addictive Amiga-era chiptune energy incarnate, and there’s even a strong sense of humor with a lot of silly British wordplay and casual banter between your squad. It makes a fantastic first impression.

Pineapple Smash Crew is – as you’ve probably gathered from the trailer above – a bit of a no-brainer. Reminiscent of some classic PC games like Cannon Fodder and Syndicate, you lead a squad of four little soldiers around with the WASD keys and mouse, the squad acting as a singular entity, their formation only changing as you switch which guy takes the lead. The controls are as simple as you can get beyond that. Left mouse button makes them fire their little laser guns at the cursor, right mouse button throws the current squad-leaders grenade (the crux of the gameplay), and either the mousewheel or Q and E keys cycle who takes point. Simple enough.

Firey Deathplosions! Always best to stand around a corner from these.

The grenades are the star of the show. Every time you smash a crate or kill an enemy, there’s a good chance it’ll drop a random grenade. Your squad can hold four in total (one each), and they’re the key to everything. Basic grenades might just bounce and explode, but rocket grenades can be launched a second time from where they land, shooting into targets. Turret grenades can shoot enemies from a safe position, shield grenades can push back foes, and health grenades magically un-explode your squad. They bounce and roll and feel just right, and the chunky flames spread through tunnels in just the right way. Your basic laser guns might feel underpowered, but the sheer number of explosive tools you have more than makes up for it.

Your goal is equally straightforward. Make your way through a series of infested and randomly generated spacecraft, shooting stuff, completing simple objectives along the way and collecting notes that’ll lead you to the location of the Mothership, a rare and supposedly treasure-filled craft that would set the Crew up for life if they were to capture it. The core experience here is excellent – the basic gameplay cycle of entering a room, expertly dispatching enemies with a variety of creative one-shot grenade-based weapons and moving on is finely tuned and compelling. It just doesn’t have quite enough meat on it’s bones to support it for as long as the game lasts.

The big red beam of the wall-piercing, room-clearing Laser Grenade.

The central ’30 second’ gameplay cycle is rock solid. The first 30-50 minutes or so of the game are interesting and varied, dropping new enemies and mission types on you. And then it runs out of steam, and just kind of coasts from there to the finish several hours later. One key problem is the lack of variety – once you’ve seen the first three or four levels, you’ve seen all three of the possible mission objectives (Kill Everything, Search Boxes or Push Barrels Onto Squares), and almost all the enemies. Beyond the slow introduction of new grenade types, there’s just not much else to see, and as the difficulty level barely seemed to increase (I finished the game having not lost a single man), it just became very repetitive by the last hour or so, made worse by every mission ending with the exact same ‘big saucer with some guns on’ boss.

In the end, the game comes to a close not with a bang, but a whimper. The final level is identical to all so far, just a different color. The final boss is the same UFO-thing but with maybe another (easily destroyed) gun or two attached and the end sequence is a half-hearted ‘congratulations’ screen that unceremoniously drops you back to the main menu with nothing but some updated character skins in the background to indicate your victory. Not even a high-score board to cheerily tap out your name on. There’s no sense of escalation, and no sense of victory. It just ends, and you feel like you’ve been for a dozen spins on the worlds shortest rollercoaster, just wishing it had gone a little higher before each drop.

The one and only boss. It comes back with more guns on, but that's about it.

There’s enormous potential here for expansion – PSC isn’t a bad game, just one that runs out of content too quickly. More modes, more map tilesets, more enemies and more missions would all bulk the game up significantly and extend replay value massively. More difficulty modes, or perhaps a more finely tuned learning curve wouldn’t be too hard to implement either. I can’t help but imagine a multiplayer mode working a lot like a freeform Bomberman, too. PSC starts out bombastic and – taken in small doses – is plenty of fun. It’s just that any extended play session is going to feel like going through the motions, as once you’ve conquered one room of a ‘Hard’ difficulty ship, you’ve beaten them all.

Pineapple Smash Crew is out now for Windows PCs, and is available from Steam, Desura and Gamersgate for $10 or equivalent.

[Pineapple Smash Crew]

The Japanese indie scene is finally making it’s presence known to the English-speaking world. Hot on the tail of Fortune Summoners, Nyu Media (who released Satazius late last year, with additional backing from Capcom) are gearing up to release a full trilogy of gothic-themed vertically scrolling shmups to all standard digital distribution platforms – Steam included, presumably – for $10. Keep an eye open for Tennen-Sozai’s eXceed collection in the coming weeks. Gameplay footage and some thoughts after the break.

Update: A playable demo of eXceed2nd is available now, with a demo of eXceed3rd ‘coming soon’.

Getting top billing in this trilogy is the most recent of the three games – eXceed3rd, with the weighty subtitle of Jade Penetrate/Black Package.

Having already played this one, I can fairly safely say that if you like your vertically scrolling shooters, this one is probably worth the $10 asking price by itself. It’s a very solid, fast-moving game with good music and some clever/pretty bullet patterns to weave through. It’s simple, unpretentious stuff – there’s a little bit of story behind it (which I can’t understand in the Japanese version anyhow) – but the core gameplay is just a matter of shoot, dodge, shoot. Fair enough.

Somewhat older, (hailing back to 2007) is the second game in the series. eXceed2nd – Vampire REX.

Less polished – you can really see the improvement of the developers over the years – but still definitely worth playing. Keen gamers will notice that this one takes it’s core gameplay mechanic from Treasure’s classic Ikaruga, where enemies fire white-blue or black-red bullets, and you can flip your attunement to allow you to eat one or the other color at any given time, fueling your attacks, while the other shade of shots remains immediately deadly. It adds a strong puzzle element to the gameplay, especially when solid walls of alternating color bullets come into play.

Last (and undeniably least, hence it having a much lower individual price tag) is the original eXceed: Gun Bullet Children.

By no means looking as sharp as it’s sequels, this looks to be a fairly solid Touhou-inspired shooter – pretty slow and casual compared to many games in the genre, and might be good place for newcomers to get up to speed with the genre before taking a shot at the faster, more aggressive games that came later.

For genre fans wanting something more substantial to get their teeth into after Satazius, this looks like a no-brainer once it releases later this month. No specific day is given, but Nyu Media claim that it’s due February 2012. Keep an ear to the ground, and an eye on DIYGamer for a review (or three) closer to release.

[The eXceed Collection]

Some good news for those of you who consider yourselves fans of both Minecraft and Call of Duty (or any other FPS multiplayer game really) as it looks like Brick-Force is opening up just a little bit later this month for those of you who have signed up for the closed beta. If you haven’t yet done so, you can still get in on the action, although I’m not 100% sure if you’ll get in on February 28th.

For those of you who didn’t catch our earlier announcement here is a refresher on Brick-Force:

Brick-Force is the world’s first cross-platform free-to-play sandbox fun-shooter. It will be released in spring 2012. Build and share maps on your smartphone, your tablet, your browser and social networks – you can play anywhere and anytime.

The game is designed to be a hybrid between the base/block building of Minecraft but with the competitive multiplayer edge of games like Call of Duty.

So head on passed the link and sign up for the beta. If nothing else the game looks very polished.

Oh and I’ve also included the newer second trailer for those of you who want some visual representation.

[Brick-Force]

Trailer

Of course, the biggest game jam out there is the Global Game Jam. Recently, the 2012 and the Global Game Jam came to an end. It’s another record-breaker, with 244 jam sites and a whopping 2295 game projects.

Like many jams, the Global Game Jam revolves around a specific theme. This year’s theme was the most-likely confused snake that’s biting its own tail: Ouroboros. The snake symbolizes death and rebirth and the cycle of life, and so many submissions tried to incorporate that into their games.

Others, went in the more literal direction and featured cyclical level structures. The witty and amusing Carl Jung in: Constrictive Unconscious features the young Jung (genius pun) running from the head of a giant snake in a dream.

It’s a remarkable contest and there’s so much to see among the submissions. A personal favorite of mine so far is MirrorMoon, a first person puzzler that has you exploring a strange red planet. It’s a wonderful game that has you figure out its mechanics with virtually no guidance or support, save for a tranquil soundtrack.

There’s a lot to check out in the Global Game Jam and in the coming days DIYGamer will provide a look at the submissions and find the ones you should check out. Although – and this isn’t just lip service- any game that someone put together in a sleep deprived weekend is worth checking out. If you’ve already seen the Global Game Jam, let us know what games you liked in the comments below.

[Global Game Jam]

Along with Overgrowth and Cortex Command, Unknown Worlds’ FPS/RTS hybrid Natural Selection 2 is one of those indie mega-projects that seems to be in a perpetual state of development. Today marks a rather special day in the development of NS2, as the latest development build – codenamed ‘Gorilla’ – has been released to preordering players, and is accompanied by a genuinely impressive gameplay-footage trailer. Hit the break for some hot marine-on-alien action.

100% actual gameplay footage, and in addition to showing off the proprietary engine the game runs on, it sums up what the game is about pretty well. It’s an online competitive game; two teams – space marines and the Zerg-esque alien Kharaa – fight for control over a map. One player on each team plays a commander role, interacting with the game as if it were an RTS – building bases (via AI-controlled construction units), upgrading, distributing resources and giving orders – while all the other players take the role of the troops on the front lines, upgrading to new classes and species as new options are researched.

Each team has a unique control mechanic – the marines have to maintain the power grid of whatever region they’re trying to capture, and their facilities become inoperative if the aliens manage to knock out the power junction boxes in a given zone, conveniently plunging everything into darkness too. The aliens spread more organically, their squidgy green biomatter-field gradually spreading across the map, accelerated by the placement of certain structures. This mess can be burnt away by marines with flamethrowers, though, and alien-controlled outlying areas can literally be cut off from the hive through literally ‘surgical’ strikes.

Striking concept art reminding us why you should NEVER taunt an Onos

It’s impressive stuff, and the game is looking very polished now. Full V1.0 release is set for sometime this summer, although players can get in on the action early. Interestingly, those who preordered Wolfire’s Overgrowth back in the earlier days of it’s development recieved Steam activation keys for NS2, effectively giving them the game as a free bonus. Nifty. Oh, and NS veterans from the HL1 mod days? The trailer above doesn’t lie – the feared alien superunit, the Onos is back, and downright terrifying.

[Natural Selection 2]

Analogue is an anomaly – a glitch in the system. A ‘visual novel’ almost without visuals, or an adventure game without an inventory or an avatar. Putting you in the far-future shoes of a lone researcher sent to the fringes of known space to investigate the circumstances behind a recently-rediscovered Korean colony-ship’s disappearance hundreds of years ago, you’re tasked with interviewing the on-board AI’s and cross-referencing the crew’s logs to unravel the mystery. It’s a fascinating concept, but does it work as well in application as it does on paper?

The first thing you see in Analogue - a cold, hard terminal interface.

Following on from the critical success of Digital: A Love Story, Analogue is the latest bit of interactive fiction by Christine Love – writer, blogger and general wordsmith – and her most ambitious project yet. It’s also her first commercial release, as far as I’m aware, retailing for a reasonable $15, although that figure might put off casual browsers not familiar with her past work. Teaming up with an artist and a musician, there’s a solid soundtrack here and some characterful (if a little trad-anime) artwork to help set the scene. But this is primarily a written tale – an interactive novella with a few branches and twists, and the story and writing are what keep Analogue afloat and your attention held.

As mentioned, your goal in the game is simple – find out why the colony ship Mugunghwa went missing, find out how the crew died, and return to Earth with as much information as possible. You achieve this goal by conversing with two resident AI constructs on-board the ship, archivist Hyun-ae and Security head Mute. The problem is that – due to a plot MacGuffin – the direct conversational interface is malfunctioning. The two AI’s can say whatever they want, but you can only present them with the various documents they unearth for you, and answer their questions in digital yes/no format.

Meet Mute - the diminutive but firey ship security AI - speaking her mind.

This isn’t the full extent of the gameplay, but it’s the bulk of it. You will occasionally be called to access the system terminal operating beneath the AI’s, running diagnostics on the ship and using typed commands to manually manipulate and decrypt files, but it’s simple enough stuff, even if you didn’t grow up through the DOS era of home-computer gaming. There’s one point where a little mental agility and fairly fast typing may be required, too, but this is otherwise a pressure-free environment. A gentle read, even if the subject matter leans towards the dark side for a lot of the time.

For the most part, you’ll just be reading, studying and trying to understand. The crew left extensive logs, diaries and e-mail correspondences between each other, and it becomes rapidly obvious that something had gone terribly wrong aboard the Mugunghwa long before the mysterious event that claimed the lives of all aboard the craft. At the point where currently relevant logs begin (everything before is lost to the ravages of time), it’s apparent that civilization aboard the vessel had devolved into something quite abhorrently patriarchal – and quite accurately historical – and the characters are written with surprising openness and honesty, broaching subjects up-front and clearly. This is fiction with a message.

Librarian AI Hyun-ae is the first 'living' character you'll encounter in Analogue

While I’ll not say too much about the story itself as it unfolds for fear of spoilers, I will say that Analogue is a tragedy second, and a story about women first – written by one, with the only two visible cast members being female themselves, offering their interpretations of the various male-dominated archive documents, unearthing new avenues of investigation. A bibliography is included to provide a full set of references to the particularly regressive era of Korean history that the inhabitants of the ship seem to be re-living, so it’s a well researched and chilling look at how cruel ‘civilized’ cultures can be, if they lose sight of the ideals of equality and understanding.

While the trials, tribulations and tragedies of the two key political families aboard the ship make up the bulk of the reading in Analogue, the dialogues with the two AI’s – Hyun-ae and Mute – will make up the core of the interaction. As events unfold, you find yourself having to lean in support of one or the other, and your chosen partner’s choice of documents uncovered will paint your perspective of the events aboard the ship, and the conclusions you’ll reach in the end. How you react to their own thoughts on the situation will also steer you towards one of four regular endings as your investigation comes to a close, although a fifth and definitive ending is available to those who think outside of the box and abuse their foreknowledge of both paths.

Family trees are among the documents needed to piece together the history of the ship

Analogue isn’t a very long experience. It’s maybe three or four hours long for a first completion, assuming that you read everything presented and investigate all avenues. Further playthroughs – aiming to achieve the other four endings and unlock all the remaining crew logs, aiming for a ’100%’ completion rate – might take one or two hours each, depending on how much text you skip through, assuming that you’re not going to re-read everything you’ve seen before. A voracious reader will chew through everything offered here in an afternoon, but I’m still mulling over the lessons learnt and stories told, so there’s some definite lasting impact to be found here.

It’s tricky to recommend Analogue wholeheartedly as a game, or as a novel. While the writing is good, there’s surprisingly little central narrative outside the many diaries and documents you study, and not much subtlety in your interactions with the two AI’s. The endings also come in a little too quickly, perhaps, with some abrupt decisions having to be made, leaving me wishing that I could say or do more. That said, I found it a fascinating read, and an entertaining story. Educational, too – the historical notes provided have led me to a few uncomfortable discoveries. While I can’t tell you to rush out and buy Analogue now, I can highly recommend that everyone play it’s predecessor, Digital. If you enjoy that, then you’ll get a buzz out of Analogue – easily enough to be worth $15 and a few good hours of your time.

Analogue is available now for Windows, Mac OS X and and Linux PCs.

[Analogue: A Hate Story]

Flash developer Chris Jeffrey has recently put together an appealing snippet of footage from his latest title, Platcore, for us to feast on. It’s a 2D, single-screen action game, very much a graduate of the dodge-or-die school of platforming – hence, if you’ve twitchy fingers and you’re really not sure where to put them, wait a while and your prayers might just be answered along with this game’s release. As the developer himself explains:

You play as a Platbot which is a testing robot for Platcore, and Platcore will be using you to test out their newest products, which come in the form of things which aren’t exactly your friend (Lasers, turrets, even bigger lasers, and evil things!). You play in a test chamber and your sole aim is to stay alive and survive the testing procedures, remember though, your robot is dispensable so there are MANY robots to play as if yours gets destroyed.

The game will let you customize avatars from a huge selection of parts with the additional option to turn your finest testers into permanent trophies. On top of this, achievements abound and the frantic background beats are said to coordinate with each test lab’s offensive operations.

Platcore is certainly looking rather nifty from the gameplay shown in the trailer below and could be well placed to satisfy that urge for death-defying action that resides in all of us. There’s no release date as yet, but once Jeffrey has secured a sponsor for the game it should be with us in no time at all.

[Chris Jeff Games,Platcore]

Trailer

Dead Pixels is widely considered to be one of the best Xbox Live Indie Games available on the channel these days. With it’s sidescrolling, brawler like mentality fitting in nicely with the zombie/horror genre we’ve all come to know and love over the past decade. Not too mention the lovely retro graphics. Really, it’s a sidescrolling fans dream come true.

In any case, the game has been officially updated today with a bunch of new content:

• Last stand mode added.
• The Solution mode added.
• Some weapons have had stat changes.
• Hardest difficulty added.
• Melee now does more damage as it’s leveled up.
• You now have the ability to move the hud closer to the screen edges in the options.
• Some bug fixes here, and there.
• The intermission is now turned on by default.

New new modes, a new difficulty level and a bunch of bug fixes. Looks like the guys at CSR Studios have been fairly busy!

I don’t have the game myself, but if you guys do feel free to check it out and then tell us what you think in the comments below.

[CSR Studios]