The Quest for Value Escalates!

The indie bundles just don't stop!

Gear Grinder has been added to the Indie Gala 3. This is another driving game, but with more focus on the "destruction derby" aspect--that is, blowing up everything else on the road. Your vehicle gets all sorts of guns and stuff. Sadly it is not redeemable on Steam, but it's still worth a try.






But wait! There's more! Some website called "Groupees" released the Be Mine 2 bundle today, with five more games for me to try out. I snapped this one up right away once I saw Beat Hazard was in it. I heard about that one a while back and I really wanted to try it. And I watched the promo video for the bundle, and the clips of the other games looked like fun too.

Beat Hazard is like Geometry Wars crossed with Audiosurf. It's a "two-stick shooter", which means you move your ship around with the left analog stick and shoot with the right analog stick, and you blast all the enemies that show up. The twist is that it plays music of your choosing during gameplay. And depending on how the song goes, the action speeds up or slows down, or your shots get beefed up, or more enemies appear. It's pretty sweet.

The Baconing is...some sort of action game. Maybe a beat-em-up? I'm really not sure. But it has "bacon" in the title, so how bad could it be, right? 

Plain Sight has something to do with robots that need energy and you jump around a globe looking for energy and try to steal energy from other players, or something? Some sort of multiplayer thing. I dunno.

Madballs in...Babo: Invasion appears to be a third-person shooter game where you're a little ball and you roll around shooting things. Based on the trailer footage, it looks like it's got some good action. It has online multiplayer too, both co-op and competitive. I'm interested in how this one plays out.

Sol Survivor is a tower defense game. From the look of it, it seems pretty standard. Its big gimmick appears to be that it's a multiplayer thing. I guess that's neat, although I dunno how much multiplayer I'm likely to play.




 
I already spent 2 hours glued to Beat Hazard. Yeah, it's real sweet. I don't have a lot to say about it, though, except that good music is good and good music games are good and I enjoy rocking out while blasting alien spaceships.

Anyway, it seems my Quest for Value is rapidly ballooning. There are a lot of bundles out there! So many opportunities for value, and yet my Steam library will overflow with unplayed games if I try to grab them all. It's a conundrum for the ages. And of course, #FirstWorldProblems.

There's another bundle running now too--the Indie Fort. But in a shocking twist of events, I am not buying this one! Two reasons.

1. First, I looked at the games in it, and they're just not that interesting. Kenshi looks horrible--I can tell just by looking that I'm not going to like it. Cardinal Quest looks meh. Devil Whiskey is like a first-person dungeon crawler, which I am really not that into. Steel Storm I already own. Black Market doesn't excite me. The only game I'm mildly interested in is Wanderlust, which looks like a decent co-op action-RPG, but if I'm only going to play one game, that's not very good value, and it's not as if I have anyone to play co-op with. Now, I might just buy it for the value of a cheap bundle, except...
2. ...it's $6 minimum. What sort of value is that supposed to be? I'll pay $5, tops, and that's pushing it for games I've never heard of and know little to nothing about. If I'm going to buy games sight unseen, I expect a lower price than that.
3. Besides, does it even come with Steam keys?

So I added some games to my quest today, but I'm not going completely out of control. Yet.

• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• Astro Tripper
• The Baconing
• Beat Hazard
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Gear Grinder
  
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Madballs in...Babo: Invasion
• Plain Sight
• Sol Survivor
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector

 6/17 complete.