Why did it have to be snakes

Grab your whip and temple defiling hat, we’re off to adventure, treasure, and painful frequent death. But first, some music!

Continuing the theme of exploring dark and horrible places is Spelunky, a roguelike released back in 2008 where you delve into a deep cave full of traps, snakes, bats, and other various horrible things out to ruin your day in the search for cold hard cash in the form of gold, gems, and golden skulls. Spelunky was considered so good that it got a XBLA release with updated graphics, multiplayer, and coop, but obviously this post isn’t about that. With sixteen randomly generated levels and numerous items to find and buy from mundane firearms to climbing gloves to ancient relics that allow you to find gems hidden in the ground, the game is deeper than its pixilated appearance would suggest. Its ALSO has the best start menu ever.

Way better than "New Game"  "Menu" and "Quit" buttons

As typical to roguelikes, you will die often, be it from the traps or your own carelessness (or both). However, you don’t need to really commit to a single play through, the game is short enough that even if you die on the last level, while you might end up tearing your hair out because of frustration, but you wont lament the time you spent getting that far. The game has been beaten from start to finish in under three minutes in the case of speed runners, and the game itself sends ghosts at you if you wait around in one level for too long.

Using a shotgun on a ghost? Did Ghostbusters teach you nothing?

Between the “level feelings” which change up the levels by making the darker, or full of a specific enemy type, the boss monsters, the challenges (self imposed or otherwise), the short cuts you have to earn, and the secrets, Spelunky has plenty of offer. The game also has a modding community and player made levels to dive into if you find any that interest you. For a game released more than three years ago, Spelunky has a community that’s still going strong. I’d say its definitely worth a download.

Nothing's perfect, however

 You can get Spelunky from here

Prison Commander

Today, we’re going to step back through the misty curtain of time (or take a delorean) back to the year 1987, the time of Predator and Spaceballs to check out a game that sold forty thousand copies in its first year and was ported to eight different platforms. For its time that was kind of a big deal. That game is DUNGEON MASTER.

"You drew the short straw, so you have to carry the candlestick"

Dungeon Master is a grid based action RPG that takes place in a horrible death pit of a dungeon, full of traps and evil creatures out to kill you. At the start of the game you choose four characters from the twenty four available, all with their own stats and starting equipment, and different ranks in fighter, ninja, priest, and wizard. With your dream team chosen, you have to arrange them in the two by two formation that the game works with, since if your characters get attacked by something, the side they are getting attacked from determines which two characters are getting hurt.

Of course there's only one guy your party REALLY needs

Not only do you need to worry about the usual dungeon crawling terrors such as the undead and spiders, but you also need to keep in mind the last time your characters ate or drank, as each character has a hunger and thirst bar and if you get stuck or waste time, starvation and dehydration can become a real problem, thankfully food can be found in the dungeon, and you can use a water skin that you can refill at fountains.

See this guy? Wasn't prepared

The effort that went into making this game playable is dedicated to say the least, and it was worth it, given that the game is playable on Windows, Mac, Pocket PC, Linux, and MacOSX because of it. Even better, Paul R. Stevens (the guy who did all the work) didn’t just make it so you could play Dungeon Master, he did Chaos Strikes Back as well, the expansion to Dungeon Master. Chaos Strikes Back has 24 new characters to choose from, some of which are hidden! It was possible to import characters to Chaos Strikes Back from Dungeon Master in the original game, though I am not entirely sure if that’s possible with this recoded version of the game. Even so, those games are still considered to this day the best among all of the clones that were made in its wake. So go, form your party, descend into the depths and go punch mummies in the face

C'mon, bring it!

You can get Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back here

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/

Rip your own head off then kick the other guy in half

So we’re getting into the heat of summer, making it especially difficult to get the important stuff done on the really hot days. That doesn’t mean you should stop though, so even its like a hundred degrees and you cant go outside to properly practice martial arts by punching boulders in half, you still need to practice, how else will you learn to properly defend yourself generic vagrants in unarmed combat?.

"I need to learn how to punch REALLY fast"

What I have for you today will help you do just that, its an odd fighting called Toribash, a game where horrible crash test dummy looking people beat the crap out of each other. You know you want this, that you need this in your life.

What makes Toribash special is that it’s a nontraditional fighting game where you put together your own moves one muscle movement at a time, also utilizing gravity and physics so you have to keep your characters balance in mind otherwise your crash test dummy will fall over and then get kicked about the face and neck. Its kind of weird at the start but once you get used to it you can pull off some really crazy stuff.

Maybe not this crazy, but you can get pretty close

Toribash has both single player AND multiplayer, along with a community that’s still going despite the game being released years ago. If you like beating things up and ripping or kicking body parts off of things but don’t want any jail time, or maybe if you just like fighting games Toribash might be for you.

Practicing with video games and watching movies will only bring you so far

Those post apocalyptic banditos will know not to mess with you once you start punching through people and doing crazy jump kicks!

You can get Troibash at http://toribash.com/

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.

Its like NASCAR but you turn both left AND right

Do you want to go fast but don’t want to play a sci-fi FPS? I can help you with that. Today I’ve got a racing game for you that has some crazy god damn tracks in it. That game is Trackmania: Nations Forever.

Pedal to the metal

Featuring both a multiplayer mode (with the neat bonus of displaying what country the other racers are from, so you can lament and rage whenever you are beaten by someone from a country you particularly hate) and a solo mode, the game offers a completely absurd amount of courses to race around in that get progressively more insane.

And that’s before you even get into the potential of player designed courses. That’s when things get really crazy. When you shift past the “38 loops in a row” type courses that exist in every game that has a level editor, theres some good stuff in there. Like the “hold forward” maps where the course as been made in such a way where you don’t need to worry about turning and you can just watch the show of your car making absurd jumps and loops.

The game can easily be enjoyed in solo mode if you like racing games, but like with anything, its better with friends. Its possible to set up your own dedicated server for your friends to pile into and play together, preferably while yelling angrily at each other over who’s the best, like real friends should.

YOU THINK YOU'RE FAST? FUCK YOU I'M THE FASTEST! Lets do this again next week

However, since a good part of the game relies on multiplayer/user created maps, its not a good idea to install it on that computer you have in your underground survival bunker, unless you plan on having enough computers and people in there for a full on Lan Party. If you DON’T have a survival bunker you can use the game to learn the driving skills you will need the in wastelands.

VIDEO GAMES DONT FAIL ME NOW

If you think Trackmania is for you, than you can grab it here

http://trackmaniaforever.com/

or on Steam if you feel like it

http://store.steampowered.com/app/11020/?snr=1_7_suggest__13

You wish you could punch robots

Continuing the Konjak conflagration today we’ve got a bunch of good stuff, I really should have put it all in one big post rather than try to break it up, oh well. Up first is an action beat em up called Noitu Love.

With 8-bit sounds all over the place

Noitu Love is jam packed with side scrolling fighting, from the start of the game you’re punching the crap out of robots until they explode. Not only that, it has some crazy boss fights as well. Featuring several levels, and a weird plot (involving monkeys?), if you like action and want some free fun, you should give Noitu Love a look. It was good enough that Konjak made a sequel that wasn’t free.

Up next is a puzzle game called Tripwire. A fairly simple puzzle game with thirty levels, where the goal is to draw a line through all of the shapes in the grid, going through them in groups of three. If you like puzzles or brain teasers then its worth a download, if only for a quick time waster.

Cant be any harder than this

Up next we got another side scroller arcade style game called Chalk. In Chalk you use chalk (WHO WOULD’VE THOUGHT?) to remove obstacles and destroy enemies. Also featuring multiple levels, a ranking system, and boss fights, Chalk should have atleast a couple of hours of game play for you if you can get into it. Not sure? Have a video of the first level.

Aside from those games, and Legend of Princess, Konjak’s site does have multiple unfinished and abandoned projects to pick through. Such as Iconoclasts and Ivory Springs (which is an earlier version of Iconoclasts), and Mina of the Pirates (Konjak’s first big project). Theres also the music from the games available as separate downloads on the site as well, if you’re into that.

Picture: a maker of video games

Konjak has his own style when it comes to making games, and if you come to like it you should like all of his projects, to some extent.

All of these games are available at http://www.konjak.org/
So go nuts.