Oh boy! As we keep cracking along down the alphabet we find some real humdingers filed under “B”.

One thing I forgot to mention in the first TAR post is that the download links will point you to the final competition version of the games – bear in mind there may also be further updated downloads! For the most recent links be sure to check the TIGForum threads.

Anyhow, this installment should be a good one, so let’s not hang around any longer. Here they come…

Bang Bang Roguelution by Sos
Holy macaroni, it’s a thinly veiled clone of Dance Dance Revolution complete with hordes of retro sprites! Get ready to mash your keyboard like there’s no tomorrow and maybe, just maybe, you can bag yourself a highscore. Includes 23 blippy tunes to savour the madness with. Steer clear of this one if you are prone to seizures, but otherwise get in there and have a laugh! 71%

BirdyWorld by Logan Ames
Billed as a “collaborative Zelda“, this has to be one of the competition’s star entries. Explore a world that has been created by other players (that includes the monsters and dungeons, too) and expand the world yourself as you go! A cool concept indeed. It’s let down by the lack of any sound or music, but the gameplay is horribly addictive despite the lack of clear objectives… 83%

Bitworld by Ivan Safrin
Imaginative use of 2.5D makes this another strong challenger for an Assemblee victory. It’s a Roguelike dungeon romp where you take either a knight, wizzard (sic) or archer into ye olde dwarven fortress in order to defeat the stompy red demon of doom which has invaded the place. Very, very smoothly done. Switching between axiseses is fun! 86%

Bleerg …
I couldn’t get this to work, so I’ll return to it later in TAR when I’ve had chance to find out why it hates me

Boulder Dodge by EzekielKnight
A single-screen time attack where you must keep the counter running for as long as possible while picking up gems and multipliers to increase your score. And, weirdly enough, there are these boulder thingies which you have to… erm… give me a minute… dodge, that was it, dodge! Or they’ll bash you on the head and make you lose, and stuff. Nothing special – good, simple fun for a few minutes. 59%

With the TIGSource Assemblee entrants out in the open, I thought I’d blurt out a few words – or in some cases perhaps more than just a few – on each of the contenders, no matter how NSFW they may be. This could be an epic undertaking. 73 mini-reviews in under two weeks? Oh, crud. Bloody impossible, that’s what this is…

Quick note: click on the or icons for an appropriate download link, or  to visit the relevant thread on the TIGForums. Anything not safe for work is marked with a .

6nine by JMickle
Oh, good. A game packed with male reproductive organs. How original! This game isn’t just made of cocks – it is cock. Almost non-existant gameplay. In truth, a waste of perfectly good bandwidth. 15%

30 Bomb of Awesome Frags by C. A. Sinclair
“I seize my material!” Quite fun. Bonus points for nonsensical storyline. Short but tough gameplay in a style you could liken to  Meritous – navigate through a dungeon and kill enemies by charging your attacks to release bombs. 74%

87 Spiderbats go to the Inn by Sos
Points awarded for technical skill – this is a proper Atari 2600 game! Nice, but unfortunately the game itself is rather basic. Stop the dreaded spiderbats from invading your inn by killing 87 of them before you lose all your lives or too many get past you. 58%

Backworld by Juha Kangas & Anders Ekermo
An impressive game with an interesting gameplay mechanic. Guide the rabbit to the end of each screen in a grayscale world. To do so you will need to paint holes into the “backworld” to erase obstacles, reveal platforms or even reverse gravity. Good stuff. 84%

Expect more TAR over the weekend!

You probably know by now that  Qwak is one of my all-time favourite retro platform games and is definitely a hidden gem of the internet. I try to spread the word about it as much as possible without becoming Mr. Spam of Spam Lane, Spammington – so here’s another shameless plug!

Jamie Woodhouse has followed in the trend set by World of Goo and Crayon Physics and decided to run a “Pay What You Want” special sale offer for Qwak. Whatever you decide to pay you’re going to get a lot of fun for your money! Don’t hang about, though… the deal ends on January the 22nd.

Normally you’d be paying £12.99 – still an excellent bargain – but for now you can purchase the PC or Mac version of Qwak for whatever you think it’s worth through  this ordering page. Marvellous!

Since the IGF 2010 finalists were announced only the other day, the internet has been working it’s magic to produce a couple of related early bits and bobs that are worth perusing. Here are just a couple.

Many people who submitted their game for the competition this year have posted the feedback they received from the judges on the TIGForums, and some of it is pretty gasp-inducing. For an event that’s become so prestigous in recent years, to see that games might be accepted or cast aside based on a one-sentence critique is really quite an eye-opener. The gory details are right here – you might have to dig in a few pages, but it’s all a stimulating read.

Of course, there’s always another side to the coin – if you are curious to know a little more about how judging for the IGF really works then I’ve got just the article for you. Entitled “Demystifying the IGF Judging Process”, Jens Bergensten (of Harvest: Massive Encounter fame) offers a considerably detailed insight into the proceedings and includes a couple of alternative opinions from Alex May (Eufloria / Dyson) and Michael Rose (editor of IndieGames.com), all of whom are judges in this year’s contest.

There aren’t a lot of MMOs that I’m following at the moment (apart from an occasional glance at Aion and feverish anticipation of Guild Wars 2) – but this caught my eye.

It seems that today is the day when the Dominion expansion for EVE is released, laying the groundwork for a most ambitious vision of player-controlled territories that include both the vast reaches of space and the planets that lay within. What I find interesting is how CCP plan to merge their future title Dust 514 – a first-person shooter / MMO hybrid game for consoles – into an existing online universe in such a way that actions taken in either game will affect the shared environment.

While the reality of this grand design is still a long way away, Dominion’s feature list should keep new and old players alike busy – it boasts a complete overhaul of the way players can control and influence star systems, gorgeous procedurally-generated graphics for planet surfaces, further improvement to the New Player Experience (that’s the in-game tutorial to you and me), and epic mission arcs for pirate factions. Should any of this tickle your fancy, check out the expansion’s homepage.

I snatched up Madballs in… Babo: Invasion [link] yesterday in Steam’s holiday sale and had a ton of fun in the multiplayer. I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember exactly which game it reminded me of, then it struck me like a swarm of rockets – the ol’ classic BaboViolent [link], of course! It’d been ages since I played it after someone recommended it to me several years ago. I think I spent about a week in there before I went back to whatever it was I had been getting up to previously, so it didn’t really stick in my mind…

Which, in a round about way, brought me to thinking: “Hey, I wonder how many of today’s Modern Warfare 2 players would know about the real online games of the past decade that sparked everything off?” Probably not a whole lot. So I reckon it’d be nice to go back and cover some of the best oldschool 2D multiplayer games – some that time caught up with, and others that are still going strong.

As a series of posts I won’t say they’ll be done overnight – I want to at least try and be concise with the content for each game, and knowing how lazy / easily distracted / generally slow I am, it could take a while. Still, I’ll try to keep prodding myself in the direction of getting them done.

If you think you have some interesting information, historical or otherwise, about any of these games, I’d love to hear it, so feel free to post a comment here or contact me with your thoughts. Watch this space!

Followers of my random outbursts on Twitter might be aware that I’ve been playing the Median XL [link] mod for Diablo II lately. Personally I blame my reacquaintance with the action RPG king on the growing hype around the release of Torchlight [link] later this month, but that’s another story that I’ll save for another post.

As I was saying – tinkering with Median XL hasn’t turned out to be a five minute wonder like most of my gaming habits, so it’s probably only right to put into words (and pictures) what has kept my interest so far…

If you have a peruse at Median‘s homepage, you’ll soon see that the change list is ever so slightly HUGE. It changes all of the classes by giving them brand new skills. It adds new monsters that use sneaky AI and uberquests for tough-nut characters. It adds new gems, new runes, and “mystic orbs” you can use to create crafted items with the exact bonuses you want. There’s just a lot more action, right from the get-go… and for an action RPG, I’d say that’s a good thing

Superb news! Possibly the best “ethical” abandonware site that ever was has been put back into action. A group of determined individuals seem to be working their socks off to reincarnate Home of the Underdogs after several years of stagnation! I wish them the best of luck… it’s not the smallest of tasks to attempt.

Take a wander through some of yesteryear’s best games at www.hotud.org. And don’t forget to tell your friends!