Games You Should Know About... Even More Cheapass Games

Wow, I'm surprised that my previous post got over 260 views in one day (on Geek Streak).  I guess you guys must really like getting free games.  Since they were in such high demand, I'll give you the other two games that Cheapass Games put out.  While the previous two games were sort of original (though Strange Adventures in Infinite Space was somewhat inspired by Star Control), these next two are clones of old games with a few twists.

For instance, Plasmaworm, which was the first game Digital Eel created, is just a newer interpretation of the classic game Snake -- you know, the game where you lead this snake around a playing field, trying to eat little dots on the screen that would make your snake longer.  That part hasn't changed, but they did add other things to the mix, such as walls and zones that either increase or decrease your speed.  Your "snake" looks more like some strange organism that you could only see with a microscope and the "food" are little symbols that may look familiar to some (I did see the logo for Kill Doctor Lucky, among others).  You can even create your own custom levels and challenge yourself or your friends (just remember the name you gave the level when you saved it, as that is the password you need to enter in the main menu).  It may not seem like much, at first, but exploring the new features does add some replay value to it.

The extra features on Plasmaworm really does give this game

a longer shelf life than its predecessor.

The next game, Big Box of Blox, is Digital Eel's take on the Genesis game Columns.  While the "match three or more" mechanic isn't exactly the same (you can't match three diagonally in this game, but you can eliminate other matching blocks that are connected to the matching set), the game works, for the most part, identically to Sega's puzzle "classic."  The thing that sets this game apart from the original is the different game modes.  Each game mode has its own theme and extra rules.  For instance, there's one game mode that looks like a Lovecraftian nightmare, complete with squamous blocks.  In this mode, there's question blocks (no, not like in Super Mario Bros.) that, when matched up, turn into slot machine wheels which cause some certain effect, such as eliminating all blocks in a certain row, column, or diagonal, depending on the results.  Other modes slowly raise the bottom of the playing field, making it progressively harder, or have "imprisoned" blocks which have to be matched up twice: once with other prison blocks, and again with the kind of block that was locked in there (they're not all the same blocks behind those bars).  If you like Columns or other cascading puzzle games, such as Tetris, you may enjoy Big Box of Blox.



Well, that's all the computer games that Cheapass Games published.  If you want to download these games, use the link here for Plasmaworm (only available for PC -- sorry, Mac users) and here for Big Box of Blox.

Enjoy the free games and I'll see you next week.

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.

Time Travel Board Games (Part 2)

Greetings, people of the future.  I have come from the past (about a week ago) to review another time travel board game.  If you recall, I reviewed Chrononauts a week... I mean, two weeks ago.  Today, I take a look at an old product from Cheapass Games that deals with the struggle of getting the credit for inventing time travel.

If you don't know who Cheapass Games are, it is a company that was started by James Ernst in 1995 after quitting his freelance job at Wizards of the Coast.  He had an idea to create cheap boardgames by only packaging the necessary materials unique to each game.  His reasoning was that most tabletop gamers already have plenty of dice, tokens, fake money, and player pawn pieces from the games they already own.  It was kind of a meat-and-potatoes company that became big in the late '90s and into the early 2000s.  They made many award winning games -- some you may be familiar with.  Some of their creations were even picked up by other companies and turned into full blown, high quality board games, such as Kill Doctor Lucky.  Many of them, however, have become obscure and hard to find.  This is the story of such a game.

That game is U.S. Patent No. 1, a time travel adventure where the players race and battle each other through time to stake their claim in time travel technology.  You see, each player takes the role of an inventor who created a time machine.  In order to be hailed as the inventor of time travel, they must go to the patent office.  But there's a funny thing about patenting time travel: Unless you're the very first person in line at the patent office when it opens on day one, someone else is going to beat you to it.  Therefore, you must travel through time, doing research, upgrading your time machine, and making a bit of money with your uncanny "knowledge from the future" and have a fully functional time machine when your number is called at the patent office, all the way back in 1790.  Be the first one to do so and you win.

Of course, it takes more than just going back to 1790 and just saying, "Okay, I'm here.  Gimme a patent."  In order to have a fully operational time machine, you have to have a complete array of functional upgrades installed onto it.  There are four categories of upgrades you need to get.  In the chassis category, you pick a vehicle -- it could be an airplane, a bicycle, a "horseless carriage," or the bargain basement canoe option -- that allows you move faster through the timestream (sorry, no DeLorean DMC-12 here).  Weapons are used for putting the hurt on your fellow time travelers by disabling, or destroying, one of their upgrades.  Shields help prevent other time travelers from doing the same to you.  Finally, power generators allow you to keep your other upgrades working -- no power, no functioning upgrades.

This game, like other Cheapass Games, isn't the best looking,

but it delivers on the fun for a reasonable price.

 I played this for the first time (even though I've had the game for a decade) with fellow Streakers Kspaz and Ginger last week -- or is that a week from now?  Either way, it was real easy to teach them the game and we got a couple of playthroughs out of the night (Kspaz won, both times).  I asked what they thought of the game and they had no complaints.  We had a fun time sabotaging each others' machines and trying to permanently etch our names into a mutable history.

If you're interested in playing this game, I have only two words for you: good luck.  This game has been out of print for years and is really hard to find.  Your best bet may be to try and track a copy down on ebay (I did see one up for auction, recently, but it'll be gone by the time you get there).  I know, it's pretty crappy of me to entice people to a game that is practically unavailable.  But, hey, this is about time travel board games.  Why don't you just go back to 2001 and pick up a copy?  I mean, if we can avert disasters and rewrite history to suit our needs, then snagging some old board game should be a cakewalk, in comparison (oh, wait, we can't do those things, yet).

And so ends my look into board games for the time traveler.  Sadly, there really aren't that many games out there that explore this famous science fiction trope.  Sure, there's a couple of old rpgs out there, such as TimeMaster and, of course, Doctor Who.  There was also a series of Choose Your Own Adventure style books, called Time Machine, which are hard to find, as well.  It really is a shame, since time travel really is a fascinating concept that would work well with gaming.  Perhaps someone from the future will come to our time and introduce new games that allow us to break through the fourth dimension.

But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

(Images courtesy of BoardGameGeek.com)

Games You Should Know About... XBOX Live Indie Games 2: Electric Boogaloo

If you read this blog, every Wednesday, on a regular basis (and that's a big if), you might recall that I was supposed to do a follow up for my look at time travel board games.  Well, I did write the article, but there's one small hitch: I had to do it in the future -- next week, to be precise.  Don't ask me why, it's extremely convoluted.  Just know that I couldn't go back (or forward?) to change it.  Everyone without a time machine will just have to wait another week.  (Okay, the truth is that I tried to get my friends to play this game with me, but everyone was too busy with their own things.  It kept getting postponed -- lame.  Since I can't, in good conscience, review a game that I've never played, I didn't write it.)

Instead, we're gonna dive back into that morass of XBOX Live indie games.  As you may know, many XBOX Live indie games are nothing short of garbage.  There's a ton of them that look like some badly drawn flash game from 2001 (would you pay money to play any kind of flash game?  No!).  Then there's those special titles that have about as much gameplay as a block of wood.  Hell, most indie games have both of those problems.

That's where I come in.  I'm here to show you some great indie games you can find.  Best of all, they're cheap as hell.  How cheap?  Well, I've got three games for you to peruse, each of them only costs $1, so "I don't have an XBOX 360" is the only excuse I want to hear for not picking these up.

First off, there's Zombie Estate, which was released last year.  With all the dual-stick shooters available for the indie games service, this one stands out with its retro graphics and gameplay.  The sprites for the characters and zombies is very retro and the game has the feel of classic games such as Robotron 2084 and Smash TV (deja vu).  You're constantly evading hordes of undead: zombies, skeletons, ghosts... all while blasting your enemies back to the grave and collecting cash, ammo, and health pickups.  Between each wave, you go to the store to buy new weapons to obliterate more zombies.  There's plenty of four-player action, wacky characters to choose from, and scores of corpses to shoot.  For only a buck, you can subject yourself to some 8-bit Zombie Armageddon.



Next up is Retrofit: Overload, another indie game that came out a year ago.  This one clones the legendary arcade game Galaga, but unlike some of the lazy arcade rip-offs, actually adds some exciting features without compromising the classic gameplay (Galaga is one of my favorite arcade games).  This game features power-ups (such as shields and extra firepower), frenetic alien blasting action, and colorful graphics and sound.  There really isn't much else to say about this game other than you really should be playing it.



Speaking of reinventing old school video games, the recently released Retrocade: Datastream Y2K600 is an interesting twist on the old school game Frogger.  You patrol your computer network, traveling between rows of data streams, avoiding flowing blocks of data, to clear out corrupted segments. There's some story about the government and rebel hackers attacking each others' computer systems, but that's not really necessary to play the game.  While the game is very simplistic, both in gameplay and graphics, it's extremely challenging and fun.  I was really surprised by all the different game modes which add to the replay value.  There's even a mode that replicates the original highway hopping, log jumping game.  It's hard to describe how simple, yet fun this game really is.  Download the demo if you want to know what the big deal is, then throw down a dollar and pick it up.



There are plenty more great XBOX Live indie games out there.  You just need to do some digging through all the cheesy avatar games and massage controller apps (eww!).  When you're tired of playing all the AAA titles that cost $60, come down to the cheap side of gaming and you may find a game you should know about...

Next week, I'll get back to part two of Time Travel Board Games... maybe.

Intellivision was Designed by Aliens!

Fresno, CA -- The Intellivision game console was one of the big electronic products of the early 1980s in a market that was dominated by the Atari 2600, one of the most beloved video game systems of all time.  The fact that Intellivision had superior graphics and sound in comparison to the Atari made it a strong competitor in electronic home entertainment.  Mattel Electronics gave the Intellivision a strong start in its first year with 175,000 units sold and 35 games in its library.  But an inside source says the video game system was not the invention of human ingenuity.