What can I say? Lapis has a great idea over there, but he's not reviewing all too many games so I figured I'd be a good sport, give him some credit, and then completely rip his idea and turn it into my own. The only difference is that I don't really like games with plots -- I like free throwaway games that you get, play for a bit, and then forget but never actually delete.
If you have any suggestions for off-the-wall or underground games that you think I should review, feel free to PM me.Grid Wars 2 – Download
Anyone who has ever played Microsoft’s Geometry Wars will instantly recognize that Grid Wars is a perfectly good rip-off of that very game.
Forget plot, forget characters; like all great shooters on this list, this has neither. You sit in the middle of what looks like poorly illustrated time-space grid – enemies spawn all around you while you kill them with a simple cannon and a few last-ditch effort bombs.
At first, all you have to do to survive is shoot in one direction and strafe in another. But just when you think the game is too easy, when you’re ready to delete it and move on, several dozen enemies spawn in one location and begin bounding towards you, then it happens again, and pretty soon the enemies are regularly spawning all around you while you have to dodge and weave to stay alive – some bounce aimlessly around, but others home in on you or split into more enemies when shot. Meanwhile, destructible enemy spawn points appear and mercilessly spit enemies out; and elsewhere red ‘black holes’ spawn and begin sucking you in towards their center.
It’s a game based on simplicity and ever-increasing difficulty – a mix that never fails to please. So do yourself a favor and download this game before Microsoft sues the person providing the download.
1213 –Download : Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3
Continuing the theme of old-school style games, 1213 takes us back to the essence of mystery platformers…just at a much slower pace.
Using an engine originally intended for point and click adventures, Ben Croshaw takes you on an adventure that has you worrying less about what you’re going to do next and more about what’s happening to you and why. Why are you locked inside a jail? What has happened to all of the other prisoners? And who is this mysterious man that seems obsessed with your progress?
As you escape, you slowly uncover the answers to these questions, and perhaps a bit more than you wanted to know.
It’s rare to find a fun mystery game and even rarer to find one with a compelling storyline. Don’t skip this one.
Warning Forever - Download
Warning Forever takes games like
1942 and basically says "Screw this, I don't need mindless killing to pass the time, I just want to go straight to the boss battles and kick that big floating thing in its big floating balls."
There you have it, the entire game is a series of increasingly difficult boss battles. It's like attacking that giant ball from Katamari Damacy: the bosses grow bigger each level with more weapons to dodge -- but at least they have crazy Japanese names that are somewhat fun to pronounce between that blaring "WARNING" sound each time you rise a level.
What about weapons you say? You like Soldat with it's 10 different varieties? Well in this game you get one -- and you f*cking like it. The gun is actually pretty powerful and has a secondary fire mode that lets you swivel the gun around and change how much spread it has.
But all this fun really just gets in the way of you dying -- which is what you'll be spending most of your time doing. That's fine, though, because it doesn't matter how often you die...in reality, you're fighting that damn clock in the corner that you'll curse at time and again as it runs down to zero and you pound on your keyboard wondering why you suddenly blew up as you were about to win.
Have fun.
Rumble Box - Download
Rumble Box is
slightly reminiscent of old school fighting games like
Final Fight in which you face an endless stream of enemies. But that's where the similarity ends.
Instead of killing baddie after baddie to save the damsel in distress, you're actually only fighting so that you can pile up enough dismembered body parts to form a pile big enough for you to climb on and escape the arena that you're trapped in -- it really doesn't get any better than this.
To help you kill the enemies, you are given a few good moves: a punch here, a flying kick there -- but the real fun comes into play when you grab an opponent, swing him around as a living weapon, and finally throw him into a corner to blow up any unlucky enemies who may have the misfortune to be standing there...all in one single move.
To spice the game up further are a few challenging bonus levels that you can access in between each round where you'll either try to kill as many opponents as you can in a certain amount of time or spend 60 seconds evading a stream of bombs falling all around you.
For providing pure carnage and a unique twist to the fighting genre, Rumble Box is worth checking out.
Curator Defense - Download
If any game were to receive an award for the absolute worst plot ever created, this game would take the cake. You're a curator at a fine arts museum, but certain people don't appreciate the type of art you display so they've created robotic works of art that float into your museum and try to take over. Meanwhile, your job is to blow them up.
Craptastic plot aside, this is actually an addicting strategy game. You only have 15 seconds to build your defenses before the first wave begins streaming through your doors and only 5 seconds between each other wave. You'll have to route those dastardly art pieces through your museum with velvet ropes (that attack!) so that they take the longest path to your storehouse while constantly passing by any weapons you have laid down.
Your arsenal includes four different types of guns, each more expensive than the last and with different damage, range, and special abilities. Meanwhile, you'll have to try to slow the pieces down by using wet floor signs and The "Other" Venus statues.
Whoever came up with the idea for this game was obviously stoned off of his ass at the time, and I love him for it. This game is absolutely ridiculous, but that shouldn't stop you from playing it.
Mini Strategy Guide -- Use whatever you can to prolong the path of the invading art pieces, but absolutely do not
block their onslaught or they'll just plow right through anything you've built.Torus Trooper – Download
Taking the best of games like “
Raiden" and “Spin Around Until You Throw Up,” Torus Trooper is a non-stop shooter moving at several thousand kilometers per hour.
While early levels limit your speed, you will eventually find that the enemies are streaming past you and it quickly becomes impossible to evade their bullets. To make matters worse for your neon spacefarer, the entire map is constantly spinning around your head forcing you to navigate corkscrews while trying to evade a boss’s own spiraling bombs.
The best part about this game is that, until the later levels, it’s surprisingly difficult to die as long as you continually strafe in one direction – which makes you feel like a towering champion over the game’s enemies.
Anybody can rock the socks off of this game and have a ton of fun, just as long as you aren’t susceptible to vertigo.
BallDroppings – Download
Every other game I’ve put up here has had you facing an endless stream of enemies, so I figured I’d give you a break for the day and let you play this little gem. In this game, you don’t have to constantly blow up enemies for two very good reasons: you don’t have any weapons and the only enemy is an unstable game environment.
The entire point of BallDroppings is to bounce little balls around with lines that you create. The balls make a noise depending on their speed when they hit, and you get a little disorganized symphony.
What makes this game worth playing, then? First, it’s damn interesting. I don’t know why I seem attracted to bouncing musical balls around, but once I start playing I wouldn’t be able to stop if it weren’t for the frequent crashes. Second, the name. If the pervert in you giggles every time you hear it, then this game was made for you. In fact, being able to tell people that you’ve been playing with your balls all day is half the fun.
Even if you're a hardcore gamer who likes those fast-paced shooters, give this one a try.
For more controls while playing, look
here.
ZombiePox – Download
Imagine, for a moment, that your city has been overrun by zombies and only a few other people and you have managed to survive – but the zombies are still slowly creeping towards you. What should you do? Naturally, you’d throw brains at them.
That’s the premise of ZombiePox. Zombies are roaming around the graveyard turning innocent people into zombies and the only way to stop them is by throwing pulsating brains at them to restore them back to life.
But there’s a catch – you can become a zombie too. If a zombie touches you, you will begin your hunt for brains, turning any hapless victim you touch into zombie as well. The only cure, of course, is to eat a brain that you have previously dropped – but you’ll have to manage getting to it while your controls are reversed.
The zombies will pick up speed each level, so you’ll need to be on your toes to protect those moronic civilians who can’t seem to recognize that a green human is not a healthy human. Luckily, you have one special weapon at your disposal – dynamite brains. These brains burst into three more whenever a zombie touches it, so he and his friends can all dine on the tasty, pink treat at the same time.
I’m as much a fan of zombie killers as the next person, but this game isn’t your normal “shoot them in the face until they die” kind of game. Try it out, and you’ll soon be quoting “BBRRRRAAAAAIIIINNNSSS” and “NYOM NYOM!” every time you sit down to eat a meal.
rRootage – Download
rRootage is a bit of a mix between Warning Forever and Ikaruga: classic-style boss battles with special game modes that all kick ass
Each mode has the usual attack as well as a varying special attack:
- Normal mode is exactly what you’d expect – your special is just a bomb that clears enemy bullets and does nothing else.
- Psy mode is a tad unique in that you gain energy by just barely grazing enemy bullets, which you can then use to become invulnerable for a few seconds.
- Ika mode (the best) is just like Ikaruga – the enemy will spit out two different types of bullets and you can change your ship’s polarity to absorb those bullets and shoot them back at the enemy.
- Finally, GW mode gives you a special reflector that’s a bit like Ika mode, but only lasts for a short time.
To top it all off, rRootage lets you start from any level that you want, and each level has five bosses. You can go from the relatively easy beginner levels (which are still challenging) all the way to the ultimate What The Hell Was I Thinking! levels with so many bullets flying around at once that your computer will severely slow down – but you still won’t be able to beat more than one boss. And you can do this all the first time you open up the game.
Keep in mind that I wasn’t joking about how slow your computer will become when you play the more difficult levels -- the game creators have actually had to include a special low-resolution batch file to help you play them at full speed…use it.
Now try playing those levels and see how good of a player you think you are.
Ocular Ink – Download
Ocular Ink is one of the least sensible games you will ever find: You are a rolling eyeball that uses a magical paintbrush to toss appendix mines into attacking kidneys, marauding hands, evil mushrooms, and, of course, a samur-eye and several eye-clops.
As crazy as this game sounds, it’s crazy fun.
You’ll start off with only one attack – draw a line with your paintbrush and whatever is at one end is violently thrown to whatever is at the other, often with bloody results. As you defeat major enemies, you will gradually learn more and more devastating attacks such as a massive explosion that you can trigger just by scribbling on the ground and a spinning vortex that you create by drawing a spiral.
Of course, you’ll have to watch out because the same ink that you use to attack also acts as your shield, so when you run out of juice you’re both defenseless and vulnerable – the only remedy is to collect enough money to buy more ink capacity.
This game is plain awesome – even more so because of the dry humor and movie allusions scattered throughout. Try it out and you won’t be disappointed.
μcade – Download
Mu-cade is part
Centipede, part
Snake, and all Shooter. The single, simple purpose of this game is to spin around and shoot enemy ships off of a giant table in the sky while managing to keep yourself on.
Keeping yourself on the table, however, isn’t always as easy as it seems. Every time you kill an enemy you gain a few more pieces on the back of your ship – stretching you more and more on the table until you begin to get tangled up in both your own tail and the enemies’ – and the enemies won’t hesitate to push and shoot you in every direction you don’t want to go.
Perhaps the most fun you’ll have with this game is when you realize how many curse words you really know as you struggle free from one giant enemy only to be pushed off the edge by many small ones working together – especially when they barely nudge one piece over the edge and you watch as your own tail pulls the rest of the ship into the abyss.
Luckily, the game designers gave you a Get Out of Jail Free card: you have the ability to jettison your tail and fly forward to escape your doom while being granted a temporarily upgraded weapon to show the enemy what revenge really is. The payoff, however, is that you’re suddenly one small ship in a sea of giants, and they’ll have a much easier time pushing your lightweight ship around – so you’d better put that upgraded weapon to use before it fizzles out.
This elegant little choice – whether to use your tail or lose it – as well as plain old shooting fun is what makes Mu-cade a game worth playing over and over again.
Attack of the Killer Swarm – Download 
If you ever wanted to take control of a giant swarm of insects in order to launch innocent civilians into the air, this is the game for you.
All you do is move the swarm around to propel hapless people into the heavens and watch their return trip to see how fast you can get them to fall. All while listening to soothing classical music. This is the life.
On A Rainy Day – Download
And if you ever wanted to become a tree of hands that hold umbrellas all day…you’re one messed up person.
All you have to do to succeed is to grab extra hands and umbrellas to end the torrential downpour on those sad little paper boats. Except that you never actually succeed because they just keep coming.
Oddly enough, this game makes me wish that I could snap extra hands onto my own so that I might be a thirty-handed ninja machine…or just have the ability to cup thirty breasts at the same time. Decisions, decisions…
Liquid War – Download
As a different approach to RTS games, all of your units are actually colored pixels and you don’t so much order them around as you pull them with a magnet. So maybe this isn’t really a RTS game, but it’s damn fun.
You begin any level with a big pile of pixels and your sole objective is to guide them around the map in order to surround and conquer your enemy – turning his pixels into yours. It seems easy enough, but it actually takes quite a bit of planning in order to out-maneuver your enemy -- and even when you succeed, you quickly find that the pixels you pulled away from one area to fight in another have freed up enemy “troops” which can now surround and convert everything you thought you gained.
Of course, what game named Liquid War wouldn’t be complete without it’s own soundtrack – namely ocean waves, gurgling drains, and flushing toilets.
Frustration has never been so fun…or made you want to run to the bathroom so often.
Narbacular Drop – Download
By now you’ve probably seen Stalky’s
Portal thread. Well, this game is portal’s predecessor.
You become the beautiful princess No-Knees who has been given the power to create portals in order to escape from the prison she finds herself in. But it’s not all that easy – what follows are a series of increasingly difficult puzzles that you have to solve in order to progress. Will the portal you’ve just created drop you in the correct place, or will you fall into a pit of boiling lava because you’ve missed by a few feet?
Really, that’s all there is to this game. It’s short, but sweet, and in need of a little work to make it perfect – which is where Portal steps in to improve upon the general idea.
Don’t forget – in the later levels, gravity is your friend.
Gearbolt Rage: Infinite Pain – Download
Gearbolt Rage harkens back to those old school games that are nothing more than 8 bit killing sprees.
This game is straightforward and simple: you’re in a big square arena and waves of enemies are continually flooding towards you with only one thing on their minds – your death. They have their arsenal of attack dogs, flamethrowers, and the deadly blue “hellburst”. You, on the other hand, are given one standard pistol as your backup and a veritable Terminator 2: Judgment Day stockpile of weaponry.
You’ll have your own unique flamethrower, a kind of rail gun, a grenade launcher, a multiple-missile launcher, a shotgun, and several other powerful weapons. However, don’t be deceived by the power of your weapons; they aren’t there to save your life, they’re just there to prolong it for a few minutes.
In this game, you’ll have to stay on your toes. The strafe button (shift) is your all-mighty friend, while the flame-spewing, biohazard-suit-wearing yellow enemies of death are not. This isn’t a game of dodge-the-bullets, it’s more a game of OH-GOD-I’M-AT-LEVEL-20-AND-I-CAN’T-TELL-WHERE-I-AM-IN-THIS-MASS-OF-ENEMIES.
See how long you can last and always remember to laugh at the utter carnage that piles up on the floor after several levels.
(
Via Wraithlike.)
Jump ‘n Bump – Download
You’re a bunny. Your mission: jump on other bunnies to gorily kill them. Rinse. Repeat.
I could go into a long description of how you need to use strategy and tact to win, but that would be an outright lie. Whatever strategy you’ll try to use will be utterly useless because you’ll be wasting time trying not to die while your enemies will be busily racking up points. This game is all about stomping and gore, nothing else.
Best of all, you’ll forever look at bunnies as furry killing machines.
Extra Information:
To start the game, you’ll have to use your arrow keys, the mouse, the number pad, and the wasd keys to move however many bunnies you want playing to the other side of the log. Then move whatever bunny you want personal control of off the screen on the right. Finally, use the numbers one through four to activate AI on each bunny.
For versions of this game for different operating systems (the original DOS version, Linux, XBox, PS2), the source code, an older network version of this game, and a level selector, go here.
You can also get more levels here. There should be a readme included with the game that explains how to actually use the levels.
Finally, don’t forget about the commands and cheat codes in the readme, they’ll add a whole new level of play.Hold Off Red – Download
Hold Off Red is a basic shooter with a cute premise: you’re a heart being attacked by waves and waves of woes. Naturally, you have to shoot those woes down in order to survive, but they
will eventually overcome you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
There are several types of woes: the basic red ones who just sort of float slowly towards you, the fast blue ones that come at you and try to break your combos, the purple ones who have somehow figured out how to shoot back, and then the lumbering giant woes that take forever to kill.
Luckily, you have two weapons at your disposal: your usual pea shooter that barely does any damage, and your choice of a special that can shoot every enemy on screen, suck the health and energy out of one enemy and give it to you, temporarily stun everyone on screen, or any other variety of feats. You only begin with one special, but you quickly gain others as you rack up the points each time you play the game.
As well as weapons, Hold Off Red gives you a bit of an RPG element to the game. As you gain points, you also gain levels where you can upgrade the damage you do, your total health, and the amount of energy you have to use on your main gun (and the energy you use each time you shoot increases as you increase the amount of damage you do).
So there you have it, an RPG, defend-the-castle type game that gives you new features every time you play. And you get a cute little heart to boot.
Within A Deep Forest – Download
Within A Deep Forest is one of those rare games that creates an entirely new twist on an old genre. The old here is platform and puzzle games, the twist is that your character is a bouncing ball that can’t even defend itself. And the game is ****ing awesome.
So let’s start with the basics: the entire game is essentially one giant level that you’ll be bouncing around in, recognizing areas over and over again, and it is completely accessible to you from the start – you just have to earn the upgrades that will allow you to move to new parts of the old areas that you thought you’d fully explored.
Gameplay is simple. Besides the ones that control your direction, there are only two: one that makes you bounce, and one that does just the opposite. But don’t be fooled into thinking that such a simple control scheme means that this game is simple, it isn’t. You’ll be cursing your way through the entire thing as you try to bounce that ball across lava and lasers while making simple mistakes over and over – which is why you’ll also be praising the game and the fact that you can revive yourself at any time from the last waypoint that you just crossed, and there are waypoints about once a screen.
As you progress, you’ll gain more and more powerful upgrades. Some just make you bounce more – both a blessing and a curse as you’ll be able to reach higher areas at the cost of stability and control. And other upgrades give you special abilities, which are also both blessings and curses.
And the entire game can be beaten in less than twenty minutes – if you know what you’re doing. But you don’t. Expect to be hooked on this game for at least several hours as you play for the love of it, get frustrated and walk away, and then just keep coming back to it time and time again.
Mono – Download
This game sucks ass. Not because it isn’t fun, but because it’s the most frustrating bullet-fest I’ve ever played. And it’s pretty, too, so I can’t even hate it for that.
The real problem with this game is that it gets so hectic at times that you simply can’t avoid your enemies or their bullets – those damn colored dots always seem to come from the side closest to you, their bullets always come straight for you, and they’re always around so you can’t go anywhere without getting hit. And half the time you can’t even figure out where the hell you are.
Perhaps the only reason that I play it over and over again is because somewhere in my head there’s a voice saying “
This time you’ll win.
This time you’ll hold onto your weapon upgrades and
this time you’ll raise holy hell against those blue, green, and red dots.” But you know what? I never will.
And to think that all I’m supposed to do is kill enough enemies to change the background color…
F*cking tough games.
The Cleaner – Download
The Cleaner answers the one haunting question that’s been on your mind for years. Yes, the oh-so-common, “What would you do if a bunch of transdimensional evil beings attacked your magic-centered civilization and killed your woman?” Well, the answer is simple: f*ck them up so they never mess with you again.
This game is a sort of side-scrolling action/RPG. Basically, if you took Soldat, made it single player, gave the soldaten infinite jets, upgradeable health, armor, speed, ammo, and weapons, and a little black cape, you’d have this game.
Perhaps the best aspect that this game flaunts is the ability to upgrade your weapons whenever you want (provided you’ve earned enough points), and then downgrade them to get your points back if you want to use them on another weapon. This game totally takes away that feeling of pain and frustration in RPGs when you realize that you’ve just spent several hours upgrading some “Knife of Lightning Death” when all you really needed to upgrade was a “Swift Kick in the Balls.” In The Cleaner, you can move the upgrades between both whenever you want, so you aren’t stuck with an attack that doesn’t help you at all at a time when you could really use the help.
As an added bonus, you’re also given Star Wars-esque force powers. If you see an object lying around that you want to use, you can just click and pull to throw it around as you please or smash some unsuspecting enemy’s face in.
This game really does a bang up job of melding different genres and adding some cliché back story while managing to be fun
because of such a medley of elements.
Jumper Redux – Download
This is quite possibly the most reflex-intensive platformer ever created. There’s some story about how you were built to be the most advanced fighter ever, but managed to be forgotten instead and now you must escape your deadly surroundings – why the scientists who built you created such a dangerous obstacle course around you, I don’t know, but I am curious how they got to work each day.
All joking aside, this game will make you suffer. If you’re one of those kids that likes to yell and throw things around when frustrated, don’t download this game. Chances are that you’ll find yourself playing the same level at least 20-30 times and have only managed to get halfway across.
This game is so painfully difficult because you’re moving incredibly fast with extremely sensitive controls while the game’s creator has made sure you don’t get into any kind of a groove that might help you. There are times when you’ll have to aim to fall through holes in electric barriers that are only a little wider than your character, and then do it again and again in one continuous fall while trying to jump in midair just above one barrier (and I stress “just above:” if you’re even the slightest bit off on your timing – whether it’s a millisecond to early or too late, or even if you’ve accidentally moved to the side too much -- you’ll end up hitting something else and dying) only to maneuver into more miniature holes.
To give you an idea of how hard this game is: I have died 334 times. I’m only on the 17th level.
Have fun cramping up your fingers for the next few hours.
Kumoon – Download
Let’s face it, at the end of the day, who
doesn’t want to be a chick with a bazooka? Anyone? Anyone?
Right, well, in case that happens to be your secret little fantasy and you just aren’t admitting it, this is the game for you.
The whole point of this game is to use your weapons to knock over a bunch of boxes – but using those weapons subtracts points and if at the end of the level you have negative points, you lose. Thus, the only way to win is to bounce your shots off of walls before hitting the boxes in order to multiply the amount of points you’ll get for doing so.
This is much more difficult than it sounds.
Of course, you get the standard pistol, shotgun, and grenade launcher to pleasure your sense of destruction, but the real draw to this game is the cute, yellow chick that you’re playing as. There’s nothing more satisfying on this earth than taking a symbol of all that’s good and happy in the world and giving it deadly weapons.
Unfortunately, there is one major flaw with this game that I’m going to point out to you right from the start: It’s impossible to lose because the programmers forgot that you still get points when you use one box to push another over. In the interests of fair play, you probably shouldn’t do this unless you get really frustrated.
Happy ricocheting.
(
Via Keron Cyst)
Legend of Shadow – DownloadActing as an independent update to
Legend of Kage, Legend of Shadow is what any kid who grew up in the 80’s still enjoys – senseless bashing for the sake of saving the princess.
Unfortunately, this game isn’t anywhere near as easy as its predecessor. You’ll soon find out that flying through the air while trying to kill enemies and deflect shuriken is easier said than done (especially when you hit the levels with booby traps). But it’s not anything you can’t get the hang of, especially when you have power-ups to help you out.
Of course, what old-school game would be complete without boss battles at the end of each stage? You begin with a painfully simple boss that takes only a few hits to kill, move to a stronger one that doesn’t give you much space to move around, and then get to the “For the love of god, what kind of a ninja has lasers?” boss.
Suffice it to say, the learning curve on this game is steeper than a vertical wall, but that shouldn’t keep you from playing it.
