Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Games You Should Know About... More Cheapass Games

It's already been mentioned on Geek Streak, but Elisabeth Sladen, who played the incomparable Sarah Jane Smith on Doctor Who, lost her battle with cancer yesterday.  She was a lovely person and she played one of the most beloved companions to the Doctor.  All of Doctor Who's fandom will sorely miss her.

Last week, I showed you guys a Cheapass Game about time travel.  Unfortunately, the game is almost impossible to find.  So, I figure I do all of you a solid and direct you to some Cheapass Games for the computer that you can download and play for free.  You see, Cheapass Games decided to distribute video games from a developer called Digital Eel in the early 2000s.  Under the Cheapass Games label, Digital Eel made four games for PC and Mac.  After a few years, they were made available as freeware.  Today, I'll tell you about two of them.

The first game, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, is a game of space exploration, alien diplomacy, and starship battle.  You play a down on your luck space pilot.  An unscrupulous crime boss gives you a starship with minimal armaments, a crew, and a few years to explore a region of space that is forbidden to humans.  You travel between star systems, collecting artifacts and creatures of alien origin and bring them back to your benefactor.  During your search, you'll encounter alien races, mercenaries, saboteurs, dangerous black holes, destructive supernovas, and time consuming nebulae.  You only have a few years to acquire what you can and return to the crime boss to get paid.  Travel between systems can take hundreds of days, so you need to plan your course and upgrade your ship.

The game can take 8-20 minutes to play and the map of space changes with each game, so it's a good for a quick game when you need to kill time.  There is a sequel, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, which has a little more content, but also costs $25, so I just stick with the original.



If you're more in the mood for fast paced shooting, then check out Dr. Blob's Organism.  As a scientist, you have to combat one-celled organisms that try to spread and escape from their petri dish.  The controls are simple, as you have to turn the petri dish to shoot the spreading cytoplasm and destroy the nucleus of these malignant cells.  This game does give your fingers a workout as you're rapidly shooting slime to keep it from touching the sides of the dish, but there are power-ups, such as two-way or three-way shot, that help you out.  It's pretty straightforward, but good for some finger burning action.



Again, both of these games are free to download for PC and Mac, so click on the link here for Strange Adventures in Infinite Space or here for Dr. Blob's Organism, and enjoy some quick, fun, and free gaming.

Go ahead, play them.  Next week, I'll bring you some more Cheapass computer games.

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