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I don’t think there’s really a theme to these games, but it was an interesting collection.
Battle vs Chess - This took me about as long to get running as I eventually spent playing it (You need to set in to WinXP3 compatibility mode and also disable your 3D graphics card). Then I discovered that for all the fancy skins and animations, it's just chess and chess-themed puzzles. I don't particularly like chess--I'm not practiced enough to be good at it, and not excited enough about it to practice.
Cast of the Seven Godsends - Holy crap, it's Ghosts 'n Goblins! Okay, there's a slightly different story about seven gods granting you their powers so you can save your infant son / prevent the raising of a demon; and the jump physics are significantly better; but that's the majority of the differences. There are elemental armors you can wear and an assortment of weapons you can pick up, and each combination gives you a different attack style. You get three lives and unlimited continues, which you'll need because you can take three hits at most (and lose your power-ups from doing so). There's no save feature: Like a classic NES game, you start at the beginning each time.
Monstrum - So...it’s first-person horror exploration with an emphasis on stealth. I got a brief tutorial and looked around what appeared to be a cruise ship, and then a flaming demon came out of nowhere and ate me. Documentation informs me that this has procedurally generated levels, permadeath, and AI driven predators and is intended to be insanely hard. While I think this would be an interesting demo for an Oculus Rift (which it supports), I don't think I'm going to play any more of it.
CrossCode - Action rpg, more Zelda-like than most. You're playing Lea, an amnesiac mute heroine in a future semi-real MMO (the people and places are a real moon, but you're riding a robot-avatar). Among the gimmicks are your ability to shoot bouncing balls to attack or solve puzzles (in addition to a fast-combo melee attack) and that there's no jump button: you automatically jump on anything low enough to jump on. (But in turn, that means there's no edge gravity. It takes getting used to.) It's unfinished, but totally playable as if it were an MMO--once you get through the introductory sequence and the Noob Dungeon, there are a lot of "kill 10 monsters" and "gather 6 materials" quests. Apparently future upgrades to the game will add more customization and special moves, and their blog indicates new areas are in the process of being built. I played a few hours, now I'll put it on my "to revisit after update" list.
Super 3-D Noah's Ark I knew most of the history of this going in, I'd just never tried it before: It's a "Christian" clone of Wolfenstein 3D using the same engine (but where you "feed fruit" to the animals on the ark so they "go to sleep"), and apparently was never officially sanctioned by Nintendo regardless. It was fun to play for a few minutes for the absurdity value--and the random biblical trivia that gave me a health refill for answering correctly--but it's also just a relatively primitive FPS and that's not my bag.
Lichdom: Battlemage - Very interesting concept and decent execution (on my gaming laptop, at least) for a game that I'm not particularly interested in playing a lot of. It's an FPS where you play as a mage, empowered by magic gauntlets to cast various elemental spells and create shields. The controls are decent (and fairly standard) and the scenery is very pretty, if a tad repetitive. The difficulty slider means that I actually found it playable with my crappy FPS skills. The story revolves around the wizard who empowered both your character (the Dragon) and the character you didn't choose (the Gryphon) as you attempt to exact revenge against an evil necromancer Duke for kidnapping your sister/killing your wife. And ghostly apparitions reveal that there's more to his motivations than he's revealed. If I wanted to play an FPS, I'd play this one.
The 3D Realms Anthology is actually a collection of games, a few of which I remember from back when they came out (most notably Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure). I suspect this deserves its own entry.
This bundle also included GemCraft - Chasing Shadows, which I reviewed under a separate header because I played so damn much of it. (Killer Bundle 6 also included Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China and Horizon Shift, which didn't interest me.)
Overall: This bundle paid for itself several times over via Gemcraft, and certainly provided a plethora of entertainment otherwise as well, even if a lot of the games fell into the category of “this is a decent game, just not my thing.” A solid use of $2.
Battle vs Chess - This took me about as long to get running as I eventually spent playing it (You need to set in to WinXP3 compatibility mode and also disable your 3D graphics card). Then I discovered that for all the fancy skins and animations, it's just chess and chess-themed puzzles. I don't particularly like chess--I'm not practiced enough to be good at it, and not excited enough about it to practice.
Cast of the Seven Godsends - Holy crap, it's Ghosts 'n Goblins! Okay, there's a slightly different story about seven gods granting you their powers so you can save your infant son / prevent the raising of a demon; and the jump physics are significantly better; but that's the majority of the differences. There are elemental armors you can wear and an assortment of weapons you can pick up, and each combination gives you a different attack style. You get three lives and unlimited continues, which you'll need because you can take three hits at most (and lose your power-ups from doing so). There's no save feature: Like a classic NES game, you start at the beginning each time.
Monstrum - So...it’s first-person horror exploration with an emphasis on stealth. I got a brief tutorial and looked around what appeared to be a cruise ship, and then a flaming demon came out of nowhere and ate me. Documentation informs me that this has procedurally generated levels, permadeath, and AI driven predators and is intended to be insanely hard. While I think this would be an interesting demo for an Oculus Rift (which it supports), I don't think I'm going to play any more of it.
CrossCode - Action rpg, more Zelda-like than most. You're playing Lea, an amnesiac mute heroine in a future semi-real MMO (the people and places are a real moon, but you're riding a robot-avatar). Among the gimmicks are your ability to shoot bouncing balls to attack or solve puzzles (in addition to a fast-combo melee attack) and that there's no jump button: you automatically jump on anything low enough to jump on. (But in turn, that means there's no edge gravity. It takes getting used to.) It's unfinished, but totally playable as if it were an MMO--once you get through the introductory sequence and the Noob Dungeon, there are a lot of "kill 10 monsters" and "gather 6 materials" quests. Apparently future upgrades to the game will add more customization and special moves, and their blog indicates new areas are in the process of being built. I played a few hours, now I'll put it on my "to revisit after update" list.
Super 3-D Noah's Ark I knew most of the history of this going in, I'd just never tried it before: It's a "Christian" clone of Wolfenstein 3D using the same engine (but where you "feed fruit" to the animals on the ark so they "go to sleep"), and apparently was never officially sanctioned by Nintendo regardless. It was fun to play for a few minutes for the absurdity value--and the random biblical trivia that gave me a health refill for answering correctly--but it's also just a relatively primitive FPS and that's not my bag.
Lichdom: Battlemage - Very interesting concept and decent execution (on my gaming laptop, at least) for a game that I'm not particularly interested in playing a lot of. It's an FPS where you play as a mage, empowered by magic gauntlets to cast various elemental spells and create shields. The controls are decent (and fairly standard) and the scenery is very pretty, if a tad repetitive. The difficulty slider means that I actually found it playable with my crappy FPS skills. The story revolves around the wizard who empowered both your character (the Dragon) and the character you didn't choose (the Gryphon) as you attempt to exact revenge against an evil necromancer Duke for kidnapping your sister/killing your wife. And ghostly apparitions reveal that there's more to his motivations than he's revealed. If I wanted to play an FPS, I'd play this one.
The 3D Realms Anthology is actually a collection of games, a few of which I remember from back when they came out (most notably Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure). I suspect this deserves its own entry.
This bundle also included GemCraft - Chasing Shadows, which I reviewed under a separate header because I played so damn much of it. (Killer Bundle 6 also included Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China and Horizon Shift, which didn't interest me.)
Overall: This bundle paid for itself several times over via Gemcraft, and certainly provided a plethora of entertainment otherwise as well, even if a lot of the games fell into the category of “this is a decent game, just not my thing.” A solid use of $2.
