Monday, April 23, 2012

Indie Spring Bundle and Review of Slydris

http://www.indieroyale.com/bundle/the-spring-bundle

The Spring Bundle is up but only for 2 more days as of this posting date and time.

This pack is actually quite good value for your money.  Mostly, I wanted to post about Slydris, as it's the only one I've had time to play but it already feels very worth the asking price for the bundle.  I can't vouch for the appropriateness of any of the other games in the pack as I've yet to play them myself and by the time I review them the bundle will more then likely be over.


Slydris, as you might have guessed from the name, is a tetris style block game.  It's tetris roots are obveous, solid rows of blocks clear themselves off the field, you make chains to get more points, if the blocks reach the top row you will lose, and between each move gravity takes over causing all the blocks to fall.  That's where the similarities stop however.  The block types are only horizontal bars, and you have no control over the new ones falling into the playfield.

Instead, you can grab and slide any block on the field horizontally.  After you slide a block and let go of it, gravity takes over and the blocks fall down.  The idea of course is to slide blocks to cause rows to be filled all the way across, and thus cleared.  It's a very simple mechanic and sounds boring on paper, but once you start playing you'll realize there is a great depth and even quite a bit of strategy to the game.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Microsoft Flight - Free to Play Flight Sim, now on Steam

Microsoft Flight Simulator has become simply Microsoft Flight, and is now a Free to Play game. Missions, collectibles, and exp.  It sounds like Pilotwings(SNES) all over again.  Even more perplexing, it's still mostly a Single Player Game despite having gone Internet free to play.

They recently released a Steam version of the game, so now you can try it out through Steam instead of downloading off the official site.  Benefits of that are you can use Steam's downloading service to grab the game(which is usually faster then the normal download speed).

It's probably going to be a while before I can review it proper, it being so big and all.  So I thought I'd share the news with you all now, instead of waiting to publish a full review later.  Please note that this info is based on my research into the game, as I haven't fully played it myself enough to properly speak as a player.