What the hell is a Boshy anyway?

You know what this site has had enough of? Platformers that actively hate the the guts of the people playing them. Think back to I Want To Be The Guy, now we got I Want To The Boshy, something just as bizarre and frustrating. Come on, you know you want it, don't fight it.

"I don't really NEED it..."

IWTBTB has the same mechanics as IWTBTG (jumping, shooting, self destruct button (???)), with new stuff added, not the least of which is character selection and CUSTOM CHARACTER SUPPORT. It's all entirely cosmetic of course but still, CUSTOM CHARACTERS! You could make one of your cat or dog and no one could stop you!

Or you could go to darker, stranger places...

IWTBTB was created by Soulgryn back in 2010, and they also made a bunch of other games over the years and I'll probably get to them eventually. You can check out Soulgryn's website here, and download IWTBTB here

"Lets get naked and take a swim in the lake!"

Oh man its Adventure time! No not the cartoon with the stretchy dog, I'm talking about an actually adventure game. It's called Fable.

No, not this Fable

 In Fable you play as a dude named Quickthorpe, and you need to go find magic gems. Made back in 1996 and developed by a team called Simbiosis Interactive, Fable follows the old formula of adventure games, IE there's plenty of humor and numerous ways to die.

It's going

 Its hard to talk about adventure games without giving things away, but if you've played a point and click adventure game before you should know what to expect. If you're a fan of adventure games in general, like games with humor, or you're trying to learn weird and unexpected ways of getting out of sticky situations then Fable might be what you're looking for.

"An ice covered lake in an adventure game? I'm sure it'll be completely safe"

You can snag Fable here

Hey kids you should go to a museum and quit ALL VIDEO GAMES

"Hey, where'd the jerk who posts here go? I'd have better luck getting free games by mailing a wish list to the North Pole and praying at this rate". Yeah well I'm back now, so the four people who were waiting can chill out now. In fact, today I'll give you something so amazing that you'll never feel the need to pick up another video game again, free or not. That game is BUBSY 3D: Bubsy visits the James Turrell Retrospective. Yes. That Bubsy.

IGNORE ANY MEGA-MANIACAL CACKLING

A game so masterfully crafted, so artistic, so DEEP, I dont want to spoil it for you, to let you go in like a blank canvas so you can properly experience the DEEPness yourself the way it was meant to be seen and played. Let Bubsy guide you to the promised land as the burning question of "Are video games art" is finally answered:YES
I mean, would this face lie to you?

Obviously not

So go, enjoy BUBSY 3D: BVTJTR, and let it fill a void within you that you never knew was there until this very moment. Surely this is the height of video games, past present and future, so everyone can, AND SHOULD enjoy it.

a face that screams "Hello friend, nothing strange is going to happen whatsoever"

You can play this master piece right from the web page here

Now you can be terrible, OVER THE INTERNET!

Other blogs would bitch and moan about finals, school in general, work, and Christmas stuff as to explain why there's been long gaps between updates. I won't though, because being a lazy procrastinator is embedded deep into my soul and I AINT CHANGING FOR NOBODY.

The game for you guys today is an online version of a card game you may have already heard of called Cards Against Humanity, which is a game you win by being a terrible human being. Basically the rules are that the black cards if you a sentence with a blank space, and you use the white cards to fill the gap.

It can get worse

 The most horrific combination wins, and as there's no score metric, the person judging gets to decide what wins, so don't play with boring people with "good taste" or "social sensibilities". Or do exactly that so you can horrify them.

and yet worse

The online version of the game has multiple servers up, capable of hosting a large number of games and players at once so you never need to wait for your turn to play. It's still a work in progress so there are likely more improvements and cards coming in future updates.

"MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU FILTHY ANIMAL"

If any of that sounds good to you, then you can play the game online here, or just get the card game here

"But all you do is click..."

What I am about to show you might not even be considered a game by some of you, and I'm not so sure myself, but I've been seeing it so often that I've reached the "Why not" threshold, and now YOU get to "benefit" from it. You know whats tasty, and great in moderation? Cookies. You know what you're good at, what you've been doing this entire time without even really thinking about it? Clicking on stuff. What if you could combine those? (and throw moderation out the window because you'll wont be needing it where YOU'RE going) You'd get Cookie Clicker, and that's the...thing for today.

The cause of it all

The point of Cookie Clicker is to make cookies. You open it up in your browser and you make cookies by clicking on the giant cookie, but you can sell those cookies to buy things that give you more cookies over time, basically spending money to get money, if money were delicious and had no real dietary value (These aren't your fancy "nutri-cookies", its old fashioned chocolate chip, get ready to get pretend not real virtual fat).

"Why can't I stop?"

At first that's all there was to the game, but now there's achievements, upgrades, better art, cookie per second tracking, and game saves so you can stop to treat your crippling carpal tunnel before going back in to click the giant cookie some more to feed the endless cycle, eventually leaving you a hollow shell of who you used to be.

"Why couldn't I stop?"

FAIR WARNING: To some this game is pretty addicting, so I just want to tell you to not play this at your job or whatever if you work with computers, this is both the kind of thing you could have going in a browser in the background and the kind of thing some bosses would fire people for, and I don't want to be thought of as the guy who helped get people fired, I'm not gonna be a part of that, so this is me telling you not to do that.

Whoever thought up cookies and milk was a mad genius

If you're willing to risk developing a horrible case of OCD and ruining your mental stability to check this out for the sake of curiosity then you can check out Cookie Clicker here. You were warned.

YOU NO MESS WITH LO-WANG

I'm just gonna say (type) some words and see if anything resonates with you: Duke Nukem, dual wielding uzis, Big Trouble in Little China, offensive jokes, kung fu movie REVENGE, hearts you crush in your hand, suicide bombers that turn into angry ghosts, giant snake men, rocket launchers with nuclear warheads. Do I have your attention? Good. Today's game is called Shadow Warrior, and all that stuff above only scratches the surface.

You know you want it

Shadow Warrior is a first person shooter by 3-D Realms, of Duke Nukem fame, in which you play Lo-Wang, the titular SHADOW WARRIOR (but he's not nearly sneaky enough to be called a ninja though, he does carry a grenade launcher around after all). As a first person shooter you spend most of your time shooting up the place naturally, though you also have two separate melee options, lightning fast machine gun punches, and a sword so sharp it can cut through armor, and still cut a tomato.

Thats a fireball shooting head all right

Theres a lot to Shadow Warrior, not the least of which is the humor, which ranges from racist and misogynistic jokes, to jabs toward other video game franchises, direct insults toward American manufacturing, and even a nod to Monty Python if you can find it. Speaking of finding things, Shadow Warrior has plenty of secrets in each level for you to find, how much of which are listed at the end of every level to tell you how terrible at the game you are. Speaking of you being terrible at the game, there is also completion times recorded by the developers at 3-D realms also listed at the end of the levels, so you can see how abusrdedly fast the game can be beaten if you know where everything is and you know exactly what to do.

PAR TIME IS FOUR MINUTES THE RECORD IS ONE MINUTE EIGHT SECONDS GO GO GO

So if any of that sounds good to you, or maybe you like bad Asian flavored 80s action movies, fortune cookies, explosions, and punching bees, then Shadow Warrior might be for you.

He messed with Lo Wang

You can get Shadow Warrior off of steam here

Skeletons, whales, and cats

Time for video games! Also an important public service announcement, but first video games. Today I got something really short. Like, two minutes if you rush short. So much so I concidered not putting it up on here, but if I did the weird werewolf music video game I can do this one too. It's called Dear Esteban, and yes, it's basically a big riff off of Dear Esther.

Look at that cursive "Begin" button, so sophisticated

Made back in November as a part of "Fuck This Jam", which is about making games for genres you dislike, rather than smashing jars of jellied fruit preserves, the developers have said that they actually like Dear Esther, and that, in their own words: "We love Dear Esther. Dear Esteban was made in good fun & parody. Dear Esteban is not so much 'Fuck This'. It's more a love letter to Dear Esther from the weird kid who doesn't have a shot but you kind of feel bad for." So if you liked Dear Esther, or like weird surreal stuff, then Dear Esteban might be your thing, and even if it isn't its not like it will take up much of your time to try it.

Doesn't any melting clocks though

You can get Dear Esteban here, and with that said and done its time for our the really important part of this post, the public service announcement.

"Buy canned food and shotguns!"

December twenty first is rapidly approaching, are you prepared? If you already have a bunker stocked with food, water, a generator, and a computer filled with video games, then you're ready. If not you really need to get on that, because how else will you deal with the waves of flaming Mayan skeleton warriors looking to use your torso as a pin cushion and your skin as a decorative throw rug?

Seems appealing, but its Walmart so you know those boxes are filled the to brim with Chinese lead

I mean sure, some of you might be looking to preserve things like "art" and "literature", but that's boring. Have some common sense and snag a flash drive and fill it with games so future generations can know the joys of games of the video variety.

Look at this guy, why don't you have a place like this?

 I mean obviously not everyone is going to escape from the mutants, fallout, and angry skeletons but you should at least put some effort into it.

WELCOME TO THE JAM

Stupidly long gap between updates there, but that doesn’t matter. Today I’m here to show you something amazing, something you may just want to drop everything and play. Today, I’m here to tell you about “Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden”

Now, this game, this GEM, came out in early 2008, so you might have heard of it before, and that’s great, this post is now an excuse for you to pick it up and play it again! For everyone else, sit down and shut up, I’m about to bombard you with reasons to play this game while trying to be as spoiler free as possible, because you gotta go into this blind, you just gotta.

Get ready to slam

Somehow, a bunch of guys from an amateur game development board came together as the “Tales of Games” team when the planets were aligned or something and struck SOLID GOLD. Made as an unofficial sequel to Barkley Shut Up and Jam and Space Jam (Yes, that movie), you play as Charles Barkley, ex-NBA player in the ruins of Neo-New-York in the aftermath of the great B-Ball purge. This game is jammed to the brim with jokes about basketball, the internet, and video games. Between the enemies (B-BALL SPIDER), items (Tupperware armor), and status effects (Glaucoma) or the dating simulator (if you can find it) you will laugh out loud at least once when you play this, and not that laughing quietly to yourself bullshit people do when they use the acronym “LOL”, I mean actually laughing out loud.

Pictured: intense jamming in progress

Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden was made from the ground up to be both a parody of JRPGs, and a good game in its own right. For a parody game, the combat system, so named the B.A.B.B.Y system, is pretty good, keeping the battles from being boring by rewarding accuracy and timing and in some cases requiring multiple button presses. Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden is one of the most well known games made in Game Maker, and for good reason, people wouldn’t keep talking about it, and keep demanding a sequel and remixing other songs with the Space Jam theme song if it wasn’t great. This game is something you need to play, this game is something you need to keep on a flash drive so you can preserve it through the collapse of civilization. This game should make you look at yourself in the mirror and ask the big question: WHY ARENT YOU PLAYING THIS YET?

WELL? GET TO IT

You can get Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden over at http://www.talesofgames.com/barkley/

I want to be the free video game

What I have for you today is more than a game. it’s a computer program meant to break you, to shatter your mind and turn you into a hollow being fueled only by rage and anguish, flinging your own crap everywhere like a chimpanzee with syphilis. I MAY be exaggerating however. That game is “I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game”.

See that face? That face says "ADVENTURE!"

It’s a platforming game built from the ground up to be absurdity difficult while referencing old classic games such as Megaman and Castlevania. The “plot” of the game, such as it is, is that you, The Kid, are going to confront The Guy, so what you may become The Guy just like Grandfather The Guy before you. Of course it doesn’t really matter, the game is really about you running through this death trap gauntlet and fighting several bosses that are all taken from one (or more) game or another.

Screen one: can you see what will try to kill you in this picture? It only gets worse from here

There isn’t much to say beyond that. If you feel guilty about something and feel the need to suffer for it, or you’re a masochist, or maybe you just like hard platformers, then IWTBTG might just be what your looking for. There are a lot of indie platformers out there that were just slapped together, but IWTBTG isn’t one of them, this game had some serious effort put into it to make it better than some flash game. Between the one hit kills and the save points being few and far in-between you certainly wont beat it in one setting unless you’re a clairvoyant psychic (and even then I’d doubt it).

Try using that power for something useful, like winning the lottery

Between the actual game and all its nonsense, the multiple difficulties, and the boss rush mode, I’d say IWTBTG is worth the download. Its certainly one way to test your sanity, but I wouldn’t put it on the flash drive of games you’ll bring into your bomb shelter with you, because if you beat it then, who will you brag to? The mutants outside? They wont care.

Not pictured: a computer or other people to brag to

You can get IWTBTG over at http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/downloads.php So go play it.

Note the other game made in the style of lemmings, the creator isnt working on that anymore but it might be worth a look if you're curious.

It's like Zelda, but it's not

Got something short and sweet for you today. A game about princesses and the legends thereof. A game by the ever talented Konjak, Legend of Princess was a fan game he made as a sort of parody to the Legend of Zelda games.

However, it clearly doesn’t play in anyway similar to them, its far more action oriented. What puzzles it does have are of the block pushing, torch lighting variety, certainly not any brain teasers, so you wont be pulling your hair out over this game.

Pictured: complicated puzzle mechanics

Art wise the game manages to pull off the Not!-Zelda look pretty well, each enemy in the game looks similar to their Nintendo counterpart that you know what they’re referencing, as do the items. Even the music has that Zelda twist to it while being original In its own right, and its available for download separate from the game itself!

I'm not Link, I'm Lonk!

If you feel like an action game, or like Zelda games, then Legend of Princess might be worth a download. Its not a long game but if its what you’re looking for you should be all over it.

You can get Legend of Princess and the music from it over at
http://www.konjak.org/index.php?folder=4&file=11
Konjak has multiple games up for download on his website, I'll get to another of them next time!

From Covered Wagons to Station Wagons

You ever play Oregon Trail? If  “No”, then get the hell off your parent’s computer. If “Yes” then you might want to take a look at this right here

That 8-bit dog looks way too calm

A throw back to Oregon Trail, Organ Trail sends your party on a cross country trip towards safety. Of course its obviously not as simple as just jumping into the car and driving there, you need to get and ratio food, fuel, bullets, medical supplies and car parts to make it cross country. And that’s just the basic necessities.

No, you're car isn't as awesome as this, have fun with that Station Wagon

It gets worse. The zombies are an ever present threat, whether you’re driving, scavenging, or trying to hold up in a particularly paranoid survivor stronghold when you have an infected person in your party. Road blocking hordes of zombies replace rivers in Organ Trail, and just like in Oregon Trail you have a couple of options in how you approach the problem.

Pictured: The MANLY way

The game also has the classic Oregon Trail random events that go off as you drive along through the apocalypse, such as poor weather, thieves stealing your stuff, found food and injuries.

He should have

Being based off of Oregon Trail, you shouldn’t expect much in the way of HEART STOPPING ACTION. A lot of the game revolves around scavenging, trading, and husbanding resources so you can make it cross country, because it your car’s battery or tires give out and you don’t have any replacements your stranded and stuck with either scavenging for replacements or trading for them with people passing by.

It only seems easy before the zombies really start coming in

If you’re looking to kill some time, I’d say Organ Trail is worth looking into. If nothing else you can practice trading for food for when society collapses. It also recently did one of those kickstarter things to get an advanced edition working for touch phones, but that probably wont be free so this isn’t about that.



You can play Organ Trail right from your browser at http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html