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I’m not the one to normally do reviews or ads, but this is one well worth doing. Humble bundle is an initiative hosted by Wolfire studio, in which five other studios (2D Boy, Bit Blot, Cryptic Sea, Frictional Games and the recently joined Amanita Design) joined their award-winning indie games into a bundle with two charities (EFF and Child’s Play) that you can pay whatever you want, to be shared amongst them.
All games work on Linux and Mac (as well as Windows), are of excellent quality (I loved them) and separately would cost around 80 bucks. The average buy price for the bundle is around $8.50, but some people have paid $1000 already. Funny, though, that now they’re separating the average per platform, and Linux users pay, on average, $14 while Windows users pay $7, with Mac in between. A clear message to professional game studios out there, isn’t it?
About the games, they’re the type that are always fun to play and don’t try to be more than they should. There are no state-of-the-art 3D graphics, blood, bullets and zillions of details, but they’re solid, consistent and plain fun. I already had World of Goo (from 2D Boy) and loved it. All the rest I discovered with the bundle and I have to say that I was not expecting them to be that good. The only bad news is that you have only one more day to buy them, so hurry, get your bundle now while it’s still available.
The games
World of Goo: Maybe the most famous of all, it’s even available for Wii. It’s addictive and family friendly, has many tricks and very clever levels to play. It’s a very simple concept, balls stick to other balls and you have to reach the pipe to save them. But what they’ve done with that simple concept was a powerful and very clever combination of physical properties that give the game an extra challenge. What most impressed me was the way physics was embedded in the game. Things have weight and momentum, sticks break if the momentum is too great, some balls weight less than air and float, while others burn in contact with fire. A masterpiece.
Aquaria: I thought this would be the least interesting of all, but I was wrong. Very wrong. The graphics and music are very nice and the physics of the game is well built, but the way the game builds up is the best. It’s a mix of Ecco with Loom, where you’re a sea creature (mermaid?) and have to sing songs to get powers or to interact with the game. The more you play, the more you discover new things and the more powerful you become. Really clever and a bit more addictive than I was waiting for… 
Gish: You are a tar ball (not the Unix tar, though) and have to go through tunnels with dangers to find your tar girl (?). The story is stupid, but the game is fun. You can be slippery or sticky to interact with the maze and some elements that have simple physics, which add some fun. There are also some enemies to make it more difficult. Sometimes it’s a bit annoying, when it depends more on luck (if you get the timing of many things right in a row) than actually logic or skill. The save style is also not the best, I was on the fourth level and asked for a reset (to restart the fourth level again), but it reset the whole thing and sent me to the first level, which I’m not playing again. The music is great, though.
Lugaru HD: A 3D Lara Croft bloody kung-fu bunny style. The background story is more for necessity of having one than actually relevant. The idea is to go on skirmishing, cutting jugulars, sneaking and knocking down characters in the game as you go along. The 3D graphics are not particularly impressive and the camera is not innovative, but the game has some charm for those that like a fight for the sake of fights. Funny.
Penumbra: If you like being scared, this is your game. It’s rated 16+ and you can see very little while playing. But you can hear things growling, your own heart beating and the best part is when you see something that scares the hell out of you and you despair and give away your hide out. The graphics are good, simple but well cared for. The effects (blurs, fades, night vision, fear) are very well done and in sync with the game and story. The interface is pretty simple and impressively easy, making the game much more fun than the traditional FPS I’ve played so far. The best part is, you don’t fight, you hide and run. It remembers me Thief, where fighting is the last thing you want to do, but with the difference is that in Thief, you could, in this one, you’re a puss. If you fight, you’ll most likely die.
Samorost 2: It’s a flash game, that’s all I know. Flash is not particularly stable on any platform and Linux is especially unstable, so I couldn’t make it run in the first attempt. For me, and most gamers I know, a game has to work. This is why it’s so hard to play early open source games, because you’re looking for a few minutes of fun and not actually fiddling with your system. I have spent more time writing this paragraph than trying to play Samorost and I will only try it again if I upgrade my Linux (in hoping the Flash problem will go away by itself). Pity.
Well, that’s it. Go and get your humble bundle that it’s well worth, plus you help some other people in the process. Helping indie studios is very important for me. First, it levels the play-field and help them grow. Second, they tend to be much more platform independent, and decent games for Linux are scarce. Last, they tend to have the best ideas. Most game studios license one or two game engines and create dozens of similar games with that, in hope to get more value for their money. Also, they tend to stick with the current ideas that sell, instead of innovating.
By buying the bundle you are, at the very least, helping to have better games in the future.
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Why is it so hard for the game industry to get the online experience? I understand the media industry being utterly ignorant about how to make sense of the internet, but gaming is about pure fun, isn’t it? The new survey done in UK is more than proof of the obvious fact that people will use all resources of the internet to get what they want, whether it’s illegal or not.
After all, who defines what’s legal and what’s not? The UK government already said that it’s OK to invade one’s privacy for the matter of general security, even when everybody knows that any government has no clue on what’s security and what’s not. Not to mention the Orwellian attitudes of certain US companies seem not to raise any eyebrow from the local government or the general public…
That said, games are a different matter. Offline games still need have some kind of protection, but online games should rely on online commerce, and that can only be complete if the user has a full online experience. So, what do I mean by full online experience?
You don’t always have access to your own computer. Sometimes you have just a remote connection, sometimes only your mobile phone or a web browser. Sometimes you have an old laptop with no decent graphic card and those golden times when you have a brand new game machine with four graphic cards. 10 years ago, mobile phones were not as today, but even though my current mobile has a 3D graphic card in it, it’s closer to the lower end when compared to desktops or even laptops.
So, what’s the catch? Imagine a game that you can play exactly the same game irrespective of where you play it.
There are lots of new online games, so called ORPG (online RPG) or the bigger brothers (MMORPG, massively-multi-player ORPG), but all of them rely on a Windows machine with OpenGL2 and DirectX 10 to play it, even though not half of it really need that kind of realism to be fun.
Moreover, when you’re at the toilet and you want to keep playing your battles, you could easily get your mobile and use a stripped down version with little graphic elements but with the same basic principles. When you’re at your parent’s and the only thing you have is dial-up, you can connect via SSH and play the console version. At least to manage your stuff, talk to your friends or plan future battles.
The hard part in all this, I understand, is to manage different players playing with different levels of graphic detail. Scripts on online games are normally prohibited because it eases too much cheating, and that would be the way of battling via a SSH connection… Players with better graphic cards would have the advantage of seeing more of the battlefield than its friends with a mobile phone, or even using a much better mouse/joystick and a much bigger keyboard (short-cuts are *very* important in online gaming).
With the new mobiles and their motion sensor and GPS interfaces, that wouldn’t be a much bigger difference, as you could wave the mobile to have a quicker glance and even use voice-control for some features that is still lacking support in desktop but it’s surprisingly popular in mobile devices. All in all, having at least three platforms: high-end and low-end graphics plus a mobile version, would be a major breakthrough in online gaming. I just wonder why game makers are not even hinting in that direction…
The console version is pushing a bit, I know, I just love the console…
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