Ninjah is a colourful, fast paced platform game from Evildrbin. The general idea is to get from point A to B as quickly as possible with the help of your elastic ninja rope and your slow motion abilities (space). The slowdown mode is very helpful, since things tend to get tricky after a while. Move around using WASD-controls. Who can resist a grappling hook game? Not me.
Download it by clicking here (2.6 MB).
So, there's been a lot of posts about this game on other sites, but that doesn't stop me from joining in on the slapping. Rose & Camellia invites you to the elegant art of female conflict, where you slap your opponent, drawing a slapping trajectory with your mouse and attempting to evade and counter-attack incoming slaps. Enough said.
Click here to play it.
The Crypts of Despair. I love a good title. This is a dungeon crawl with back-to-basics graphics and controls. You can hack and slash your way down to level 30, but I have to warn you though, this game is fairly difficult. There's a quicksave system in this version (F5 to save, F6 to load), and if you're lucky, you'll come across a few slimes in certain depths. Watch your step.
Visit this page to download Crypt of Despair (1 MB). Look for the "download file" link.
Balloon Fight is, in non-harmful terms, classic multiplayer mayhem. I had no idea it was so "very similar" to arcade game Joust before I played it on XBLA a couple of weeks ago. I guess the concept of flying balloons is more comprehensible than riding some kind of ostrich with lances and stuff. Anyhooo... Balloon Fight was ported to the NES in the mid-eighties. It's clean and simple, but most of all, it's still fun.
Available now thru Virtual Console. You can also play it in your browser, here.
This is an old, token post. Not that the game itself is disappointing in any way (on the contrary), but simply because it's summer. Sporadic bursts of elusive Swedish sunlight makes video game blogging a hassle. So, I'm going to keep it to the point: Chalk is about drawing lines (using your mouse) across shapes to destroy them, or to reflect bullets back at your enemies. The right mouse button controls movement, while the left is used to draw lines. It's a very polished game from Joakim Sandberg, a swede who also made Noitu Love, et al.
In my opinion, this outing is far more original than his previous titles, and deserves all the attention. Highly recommended. Six levels.
Download Chalk (4 MB) by clicking here.
This game changed everything. While I enjoyed Doom as much as anyone else, I had a craving for something a little less gloomy, something in an urban setting. I never enjoyed the generic hell-inspired levels of games (I'm looking at you, Oblivion) since they're all the same: fleshy tunnels, scarred lava landscapes, red skies, and so on. Boring, right? But along came Duke Nukem (3D-Realms, 1996). It had me hooked from the minute I played the shareware. Classic is just another word for it.
Gnome's Lair recently posted something about a high-resolution pack, essentially a graphic update that replaces the 2D-sprites of the original game with fully 3D-rendered objects, and upgrades the textures and skins (the original version is considered to be a 2.5D game). Now you can play the most infamous FPS ever without cringing because of the 640x480 resolution or puking from the nausea induced by circling pixelated sprites. 
And then there was the Build engine. My God... The days wasted on that level editor amount to quite a few. Sectors, grids, tags and numbers - it wasn't very user-friendly. But then again, me and my friend Stefan got really good at it, so I guess it was worth it. To be honest, playing the updated version still makes me feel slightly sick, but nevertheless, Duke Nukem 3D is one hell of a game. You shouldn't miss out on this.
I mean, it's got aliens, strippers, rocketlaunchers, pool tables, arcades, pipe-bombs, and features some of the best one-liners in a game, ever. When Nintendo released a port for their Nintendo 64 it had, not surprisingly, undergone some censoring. For example, smut stores had been replaced by... gun stores. Way to go.
Click here to download the shareware version (5.6 MB), and install it somewhere.
Then download the high-res update (190 MB). Get it here, or by clicking here (direct).
Ah, interactive novels, solo adventures,
game books. Call it what you will. What I remember about those novels, is that they had just about a thousand ways to die, and one or maybe two ways to complete the adventure. The Adventures of Cagney (written and illustrated by Rey Ortega) is a new online escapade, and it stays true to the formula, as it should. There can be no fresh take on solo adventures. Trial and error is always key. Grimy death everywhere, when you least expect it. Enjoy!
Proceed to play the game, or do you want to play Barbarian instead? It's your choice.
I tried to watch Terrence Malick's The New World yesterday, but as it turns out, it's just The Thin Red Line all over again, but with Indians and what not. It got me thinking of the original Colonization, and what a great game it was. There shouldn't be any need for an introduction, but if you didn't know, Colonization was a turn-based, politically incorrect expansionist game, created by strategy genre stalwarts Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds, published in 1994 by Microprose. By chance, Independent Gaming mentioned an open source project similar to FreeCiv, called FreeCol. It plays well, so buckle up and get ready to wack some natives and steal some gold, all in the name of tobacco, Christianity and the Queen.
Disclaimer: I am not a racist. I resent all colonial and imperialistic behavior.
Click here to download FreeCol for Windows, and here to download it for the Mac.
I suddenly had flashbacks of playing this odd platformer, and I had to go through Nintendos entire NES catalog to remember the name. I knew I would recognize the title if I saw it, and I did: The Adventures of Rad Gravity. Published 1990 by Activision and developed by Interplay, it featured multiple locations and planets to visit, and had nice, crisp graphics. The story? Rad Gravity is sent on a galactic adventure to rid the cosmos of the evil computer Agathos. As I mentioned before, you move from planet to planet, from Turvia where the gravity is reversed to Volcania which is a (wait for it...) lava world. First stop: Cyberia, a seedy world full of crime and men with robot legs. Population: 200 idiots. Rad arrives to even the score. Sounds like fun? It's not. Playing it today, it's not nearly as interesting as I remember it. On the contrary, it's quite stupid. And the graphics? Ugly. Guess you can't trust the judgement of a 10-year old.
If you would bother, you can get the ROM here, or play it in your browser here.
I hesitated for a few weeks before finally trying Hakaiman. Screenshots look terrible, and a top-down stealth action game doesn't really excite me that much, in theory. Controls are a bit complex at first but logical once you get the hang of it, and the text is in Japanese, but that doesn't matter: Press X to change your weapon, Z to throw a grenade or reload your gun, hold Ctrl to strafe, and hit Shift to punch, interact or fire away. There are six levels in total. Nice clean graphics, destructible environments, and excessive violence. Don't let the screenshot put you off.
Get it (1 MB) by clicking here.
The picture says it all. And yeah, Bloxorz is pretty frustrating and challenging, but it's good. There are 33 stages to complete, so it should keep you busy for quite some time.
Click here to play Bloxorz.
