Astro Tripper and Plain Sight

I thought Astro Tripper was supposed to be a horizonally-scrolling shooter, but actually I was wrong--you move freely around an arena trying to kill all the enemies as they spawn.

This game is too hard. Your ship is a One Hit Point Wonder--if you take any damage at all, you explode instantly, and you have to restart the whole level from the beginning. Worse, you can actually get a game over--die three times and you lose all your progress. This is very unforgiving and very frustrating.

I managed to beat the first level, but I can't get past the second level after about an hour of frustrating deaths. And I'm still in the training area.

Even on easy mode, the learning curve is too steep. The game expects you to be perfect.

Well, hrmm.

Moving on to Plain Sight, which I tried out today. Apparently there is no single-player mode in this game. It's either multiplayer or "training". And the multiplayer lobby is...

...dead. There's nobody here. So I actually just can't play this game.

Which isn't a huge loss, since it didn't look like something I'd like anyway. I tried the tutorial and it seemed...meh. I got enough value out of the other games in this bundle that I don't feel bad about cutting my losses and skipping this one. *shrug*

• Alien Shooter
  
• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda
• Astro Tripper
• The Baconing
• Ballistic
  
• Beat Hazard
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Depths of Peril
  
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Gear Grinder
  
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Inferno+
• Madballs in...Babo: Invasion
• Plain Sight
• Slydris
• Sol Survivor
• Tobe's Vertical Adventure
  
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector
• Unstoppable Gorg

 15/25.

The Quest For Value: Indie Royale April Fools Bundle

Oh man, I haven't finished my last Quest For Value and there's another bundle out. No matter! The quest continues. It's the Indie Royale April Fools Bundle, available at http://www.indieroyale.com.

I'll run this concurrently with my other Quest For Value. Each game gets at least an hour of play...for value. Because I love value.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower defense game. Hey, I already own this one! I got it from the Potato Sack back when Portal 2 came out. It's a pretty good tower defense game, as tower defense games go. I've already logged 9 hours in it and written a full review of the game. As such, I will exempt this from my Quest for Value, since I have clearly gotten Value out of it already. Ideally I can trade away the Steam key for another game and get extra value that way!

Hack, Slash, Loot is a turn-based dungeon-crawler with retro graphics. From the description given, it sounds like a Roguelike. Okay, I've played those before. The Binding of Isaac and Dungeons of Dredmor were both about as awesome as they come. If this is another game of that caliber, I will be pleased. If it's more of an RPG with random encounters and whatnot, eh, that's okay too. Well, I dunno, we'll have to see.

Alien Zombie Megadeath has a pretty loaded title there. They're not just aliens, they're alien zombies. And it's not just death, it's megadeath. Sounds like the title of a cheesy B-movie that you might see on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Well, apparently it's a platformer shoot-em-up. A lot of variance in that genre. Maybe it's something like Contra or Sunset Riders? Who knows.

Explodemon touts itself as a throwback to SNES-era platformers with added physics-based puzzle elements and lots of bangs and booms. I don't really know what to expect here either. Platform games vary a lot in quality. Hopefully this is a good one. Sad that it's not on Steam, but what can you do.

Astro Tripper appears to be a horizontally-scrolling shoot-em-up. Sure, that's always a classic genre. You've got your guns, your bad guys who shoot at you, your boss monsters or whatever. They're pretty much all the same, more or less, and from what I can tell this doesn't look like it's going to stray far from the formula. Not necessarily a bad thing, since the formula is fine (I liked Jamestown), but hopefully it doesn't feel like I've already played it for ten hours after only five minutes.



Let's review my progress so far.

• Alien Zombie Megadeath
• Astro Tripper
• Defense Grid: The Awakening
• Explodemon
• FlatOut
• Future Wars
• Greed: Black Border
• Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes
• Hack, Slash, Loot
• Trapped Dead
• Twin Sector

That's four down, seven to go. I must have MORE VALUE! Om nom nom nom