It’s a revolution in the video-game industry! It’s a charity! It’s a discount!! It’s HUMBLE INDIE BUNDLE! (*trumpet fanfare*)
Now in its fifth incarnation, the Humble Indie Bundle emerges from the mist for two weeks to let you choose how much you’d like to pay for great games. That’s right. You set the price. What’s more: you can choose how much of that money goes to the humble bundle folks, directly to the developers, and to two nifty/nerdy non-profits.
The Games
Purchased individually, these games would cost about $110. All of them work on Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. Some of them are coming to Mac and/or Linux for the first time. Here are the system requirements if you’re not sure whether your computer can play them. (They’re not intensely demanding.) The bundle also includes the complete soundtrack of each game in FLAC and MP3. They are (in no particular order):
Amnesia – Survival Horror from the first-person perspective. Too scary for me (not tough to accomplish), but it got great reviews.
Psychonauts – A platformer about a boy at a summer camp for psychics. This glowing review cites “unique characters and entertaining dialogue”.
LIMBO – An artsy black-and-white side-scrolling platformer (like Super Mario Bros.) about a boy in a “tense and hostile world” looking for his sister. According to the HIB folks, “The protagonist is as fragile and hardy as you'd expect of a young kid, making for a novel and sometimes surprisingly intense adventure.” Here’s another favorable review.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP – Another artsy game, this point-and-click game is done in an old-school pixelated style (32-bit?). It includes puzzles and combat, but this review indicates it has an over-all contemplative mood.
Bastion – If you pay just one penny more than the average price for your bundle, they’ll include this bonus game. That’s currently $7.87. For everything. I have heard nothing but good things about this action-RPG. Especially noteworthy is the excellent narration. Here’s a review.
The Charities
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a group who “fight in courtrooms and Congress to protect privacy and free expression online and throughout the world”. Remember SOPA/PIPA? Yeah. We need folks like this.
The Child’s Play Charity provides games and other enrichment/entertainment materials for sick kids in hospitals around the world. They are awesome, and I plan to do Thursday’s whole post about them.
If you’d like to buy the Humble Indie Bundle, don’t wait too long. At 7pm EST on June 14th the deal goes back into the mist from whence it came. The company isn’t going anywhere, though. So if these games don’t excite you, just wait around until next time. You can sign up for their email list using the widget living top and center on their homepage and they’ll let you know when a new bundle is available.
Update: They're offering three extra bonus games! (...for folks who pay over the average amount, like with Bastion.) Folks who've already purchased the bundle have received them automatically.
Update: They're offering three extra bonus games! (...for folks who pay over the average amount, like with Bastion.) Folks who've already purchased the bundle have received them automatically.
I've played Braid. It was lovely, and depressing, but only if you dug deep. Otherwise, it was just lovely. I don't know much about Lone Survivor or Super Meat Boy. But, yay, extra bonus games!
No comments:
Post a Comment