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    Similar to the Humble Indie Bundle, Groupees offers bundles of indie games for a lower price than if purchased separately.

    Bundle Boggle: Groupees' Be Mine 14 (Part 1)

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    Mento

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    Edited By Mento  Moderator

    Feels like it's been long enough since I've done one of these. Not an analysis of potentially abysmal yet delightfully cheap Indie games, as May Madness still lingers in the collective memories of... well, pretty much just myself, but a lengthy look at a bundle's worth of goodies to see if my faith in the value of the whole was well-placed. Prior Bundle Boggles have had me take apart a game bundle by its many tiers and, in the case of Groupees, the various games added to the bundle as bonuses for helping it achieve specific milestones in sales.

    Of course, what with all this ethics palaver surrounding professional video game critics (not that I'm one of those, but bear with me here, I'm doing a bit) and their susceptibility to conflicts of interest and accepting free shit, I'm happy to say that delving into their newest bundle -- the fourteenth of their flagship Be Mine series, for which they usually roll out the big guns -- will net approximately zero benefits, as the bundle has already unlocked all its reward tiers and Groupees don't give a shit about what I have to say. Also I'll probably be insulting most of it, and by "probably" I mean "almost certainly". How's that for transparency?

    Honestly, the best Bundle Boggles are those where the included games at least look interesting, and I'll certainly give that much to them. For now, I'm going to take this slow and simply look at the three original $1 tier games, the cheapest buy-in price. Part 2, which should come either later today or sometime early on Friday (I want to get it done before the PAX Prime streams start in earnest), will look at the four slightly more intriguing games that make up the $5 tier. After PAX Prime ends, we'll see where we are with the bonus freebies. Of course, by the end of PAX, the bundle sale will be over regardless.

    Still, it's an excuse to look at some Indie games, and that's always fun. As always, if you have any opinions on the featured games or general feedback please feel free to comment below.

    Space Balls, Magic Balls, and Just Plain Balls

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    Meltdown is a fairly enjoyable though largely no-frills shooter that is sort of a cross between Diablo and Bastion. And maybe throw a little bit of Mass Effect and XCOM in there too. It sounds like an eclectic mix of genres, but really it's a third-person shooter with some RPG elements given an unusual-for-the-format isometric perspective and a few clever mechanics that would be more innovative had they not been poached from elsewhere. But hey, a large part of game design is taking something that works and transplanting it into a new venue. Were the art world like the video game world, it'd be like taking Michaelangelo's David and giving it shades, a beer and an Hawaiian shirt. Still art, just a little different. (Disclaimer: I am not an art critic.)

    Meltdown's little space marine guy goes through a series of short action stages filled with robots and power-ups and crates and all the good shooter stuff, and some of these are built around "instances" that are represented on the mission briefing screen as icons. A skull icon means that at some point the player will meet a few "guardian" boss bots that they must eliminate in order to continue. A pair of crossed swords indicates that there will be at least one arena, inside which the player will run around taking down waves of spawning enemies. This variation is usually enough to keep things interesting, though the stages themselves sure don't seem to change much, being an interchangeable series of boxes and old vehicles (?) sitting on some spacey space platform in space. Along the way, you'll be grabbing cash and microchips to buy and upgrade (respectively) weapons and equipment -- turns out you can upgrade everything with chips in the future, even headbands. There are lives, for some reason, and grabbing these will provide a few extra continues if you happen to get your ass kicked mid-asskickery. Finally, you can level up by defeating enemies and earning fat percentage bonuses at the end of each stage based on how well you performed, and the amount of cash and XP you earn via these bonuses often makes it a tempting prospect to revisit earlier stages in your current powered up form to rake in some extra spending money/skill points for the trials to come.

    Baseball caps give you more money drops. It's unknown whether turning the cap around enhances or diminishes this bonus.
    Baseball caps give you more money drops. It's unknown whether turning the cap around enhances or diminishes this bonus.

    I mentioned some XCOM and Mass Effect similarities, perhaps a little spuriously, and I suppose people might be wondering where they come in if this is some kind of frantic action RPG with guns. The XCOM comparison derives from how the shorter missions allow for a bit of strategic retooling if things aren't going the way that they're supposed to, and there's a tactical side to the game that, alas, it has yet to fully exploit. Early during its tutorial section, the game sets up several situations where one could use the cover to their advantage, or might skilfully dodge roll over mines and other dangers, and it suggests that a particularly resourceful player might use these mines and walls to perhaps kite enemies to strategically advantageous spots. Of course, the mental wherewithal to pull something like this off when there's several enemies running in from all directions might take a bit of practice to acquire, but given the number of robotic enemies that employ explosives (or are themselves explosives that are trying to kamikaze you) that could be tricked into damaging each other there's definite room to make the game a bit smarter than your average bear shooter. The Mass Effect parallel is a little more clever, and demonstrates what I often consider to be the point of my series that discusses game mechanics: if a game introduces a clever mechanic and no-one else tries using it, it'll vanish from the game designer hivemind and an inferior, less-evolved feature will continue to supplant it, so jump in there and give it some love if you're making a game in the same vein. Meltdown has one chief feature for how its guns work: a heat sink that allows all guns to fire endlessly until they become so overheated that they are literally too hot to handle, at which point the gun is "reloaded" by having this heat sink ejected and replaced. I'm sure this appears in other games too (Meltdown seems to borrow a lot from Borderlands as well, having "ammo regeneration" as a possible bonus stat despite it not making much sense) but it's such an interesting take on the usual reload paradigm that tasks the player to think about how frequently they're firing rather than how many bullets they have left in the clip. The game will also automatically reload whenever the heat sink overheats or if there's a quiet moment, so the player can maintain their concentration elsewhere.

    Never go anywhere without a tactical scarf. It's no tactical turtleneck (
    Never go anywhere without a tactical scarf. It's no tactical turtleneck ("the tactleneck") but it's still vital.

    Meltdown is one of those cases where it's "mostly" finished, as in you can get a fully-featured experience as it currently sits, but is constantly in development with new elements and tweaks being added all the time. It's the positive variant of Early Access, where the developers thought enough of their audience to give them an entirely workable and all-but-complete prototype to enjoy while they continue to work on the finer details in the background. For as straightforward as the game is it's quite a bit of fun, though there's still some obvious rough patches (like the sheer pointlessness of the cover system beyond the first few stages, how the buggy scrollbars will make it very difficult to access the first and last items on a list and a smattering of typos) that have yet to be ironed out and a few more innovations (like the aforementioned strategic potential and some more varied level design) to be added before it can become something truly worth seeking out. Still, I found what's already here to be a lot more fun than Bastion at least, if somewhat lacking comparatively in the presentation stakes. Take that as you will. (It has some really dumb dubstep too if that's your thing! Like Broforce, it's certainly not a game that minds being stupid.)

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    With every action comes a reaction, and with every positive variant of Early Access we must occasionally come across a negative one. Which is to say, a barely functional piece of garbage. Legacy, as this ignominious and far too overwrought preface might suggest, is one of those Early Access games that is either so far away from its prospective end goal to be unrecognizable and unplayable in its current state, or is simply on a hiding to nothing. Given how this particular Alpha (or Pre-Alpha, even) is referred to as v0.98, I suspect it's probably the latter.

    Legacy is an action RPG with a sort of Ocarina of Time/Tomb Raider action-adventure puzzle bent, from what little I played before quitting. The player, as well as fighting skeletons and finding treasure, must jump across gaps, push blocks and find keys to proceed in a creepy dungeon filled with... I dunno. Poop gas. That's usually something you find in dungeons, right? Or is that just sewer dungeons? The issue with Legacy, or the first issue in a catalog of the things, is that these jumping puzzles aren't fun. They certainly aren't fun when the game's in an early Alpha state and the keys frequently refuse to co-operate, but they also aren't fun when you're required to hit three separate buttons (the run and forward keys) before the jumping occurs. And then making the jumps require some very precise last-second timing. And making this the tutorial. Works better than an "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here" sign for repelling trespassers, I suppose.

    These friggin' jumps, man, I swear. At least the game's kind enough to tell you which three keys you ought to be pressing.
    These friggin' jumps, man, I swear. At least the game's kind enough to tell you which three keys you ought to be pressing.

    Perhaps worse than the platforming is the fighting. Apparently a graduate of the Die By the Sword school of "swing your weapon around and hope for the best, because the nuanced counter- and parry-heavy combat system the developers were aspiring towards have not quite manifested into being" of combat design, Legacy's swashbuckling duels leave a lot to be desired. I could start talking about how the game looks like a Unity tutorial that someone placed in the "Don't" folder, or how the eight second loop of creepy dungeon music lost its terrifying effect around -- let's just estimate a round figure, here -- the first loop, but at this point it's like kicking a puppy. This game is not good, in so many words.

    It's also not complete. These systems may well receive a lot more careful consideration and development time as the game gradually approaches its finished state. Or it's possible that the last 0.02 before reaching that vaunted v1.0 has been marked down as a few minors tweaks to give your bowlcut-sporting, sword-waving, Quest 64-refugee hero a better flowing cape or something. I'm not enthusiastic about the end product here, guys, and this is yet another reminder as if we still needed one to caveat emptor when it comes to these bundles.

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    Of course, the biggest crime here is that Little Big Adventure 2 (and its forebear) are still languishing in Steam purgatory (and not the usual one), despite being bona fide PC classics. Well, perhaps that's pushing it, but Twinsen's adventures are novel open-world real-time action-adventure games and very worthy titles for their innovations and idiosyncrasies, if perhaps a little too much "of its time" to be appreciated fully today. The tank controls and primitive polygonal graphics certainly take some getting used to almost two decades after the fact.

    As with the first game, in Little Big Adventure 2 the player is essentially chasing leads across the world (and eventually a second world) and moving from one area to the next, talking to NPCs and solving puzzles to enable further exploration and occasionally fighting monsters with a floating telekinetic ball which can also be used to hit switches and other out of the way items. Between Adeline and Delphine, the French put together a lot of distinctive adventure games back in the 90s. Of course, Adeline also made that insane Time Commando thing the GB crew played on UPF once, so perhaps there is such a thing as being too distinctive.

    Yeah, yeah, I know. 17 years ago, though! We're talking the same year as Final Fantasy VII and Tomb Raider II.
    Yeah, yeah, I know. 17 years ago, though! We're talking the same year as Final Fantasy VII and Tomb Raider II.

    To keep things moving, there's a few interesting things to learn about how LBA 2 operates. The first is that the player has to decide Twinsen's "behavior" for each situation. He has a normal setting, which allows him to search for items and talk to people, a sporty setting that allows him to run and jump for sections that require it (or if you just need to get somewhere fast), an aggressive mode for fighting and a discreet mode for sneaking around for situations where combat isn't an option, or at least not the preferable option. Rather than holding a button down to go into a sneak or fighting mode, the player simply brings up a menu (or hits the correct function key) to assign one of these behaviors to Twinsen. It's odd, in the same way that assigning Peach her mood swings in Super Princess Peach was odd (though nowhere near as laughably sexist), but it's an elegant way of not having to memorize a bunch of different keys for the various actions Twinsen can perform at any given moment: each behavior has an inherent action built-in, like jumping for sporty or punching for aggressive, and these are all activated by the "action" key, which is the space bar by default. You probably don't need to run and jump all the time, and holding buttons down to do so would be annoying, so simply switching to sporty when athleticism is necessary (rarely when investigating or solving puzzles or even fighting, where you'll need a slower pace to line stuff up easier) is a far better solution. The behavior also affects the ball's trajectory when thrown, so the player has four different angles to work with when it's time to use it to solve puzzles or hit distant enemies. The second thing to know is that there are the multiple different species, each with their own quirks. The four main ones that make up the majority of Twinsun's population are the human-like Quetch, the elephantine Grobo, the kangaroo-esque Rabibunnies and the suitably-spherical Spheros. The third and most important thing about the game is that Twinsen always swings his arms around like an idiot whenever he finds a quest item and it always makes me smile.

    Did I mention how badass this game is? At least it will be once I'm in my dress and throwing this tennis ball at fools.
    Did I mention how badass this game is? At least it will be once I'm in my dress and throwing this tennis ball at fools.

    I love these games, but then I also had the benefit of playing them relatively close to release. Even so, for as badly as certain aspects of this game have aged, you still don't see too many adventure games with this much weirdness and clever design out there. It's the rare sort of adventure game with action sequences that are actually fun and fit into the game's world congruously, like Secret of Monkey Island's swordfighting, rather than being some one-off arcade-style sequence which badly jars with the thoughtful dialogue and inventory puzzles that make up the rest of the experience. It's all one in the same in LBA 2 (and LBA for that matter), whether you're flinging balls around a dungeon or running around town to find medicine for your sick dragon (who also happens to be a pretty sick dragon, bro).

    Oh yeah, this game's also called Twinsen's Odyssey, in case you've been wondering what the hell "Little Big Adventure" is for the past four paragraphs and figured it had something to do with Sackboy.

    Anyway, that's enough Indie investigations for a little while. Stick around for Part 2 where I'll look at Betrayer (this one's the big one), The Mysterious Cities of Gold: Secret Paths, Whispering Willows and Consortium. See ya then!

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    Wampa1

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    @mento: Grabbed this myself, I'm shocked by how much fun Meltdown is in co-op, Consortium kind of got torn apart on release for not being the huge weird socially connected game it was advertised as.

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    bobafettjm

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    When I got this bundle I ended up downloading Mysterious Cities of Gold and Meltdown. I have only played Mysterious Cities of Gold so far, but I thought Meltdown looked pretty good.

    I wasn't sure about Legacy, I thought it looked pretty iffy, but now after reading about it I probably won't bother installing it for a long long time.

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