Two other games to keep you busy

I don't know if anyone else has posted these, or if you all already know about them. But Ima post them anyways.

Spelunky

I Wanna Be The Guy

Click on the game names to go to their respective websites. They're both free and insanely fun.

 

Damn. And I thought Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising was a needlessly long and pretentious title.

 

Well, here are my personal appraisals of both games.

Spelunky is a difficult game. But it's fun. There's a short monologue-esque speech at the beginning of each game you play that is randomly generated. This random speech provides the background story for why you are spelunking. But it's pretty much an aesthetic thing, and changes none of the gameplay.

The game itself is divided into several stages. Each stage is composed of a few levels. All of them are randomly generated from scratch (items, locations, traps, monsters, shopkeepers, starting points, terrain, etc.), but are built upon certain gameplay themes that are randomly selected at the beginning (pit of snakes theme, undead theme, pirahna theme, etc.). Every stage has a distinct aesthetic style.

Your job is to descend as far as possible, collecting money and buying/finding items to make your life easier, from shovels to jetpacks, and other novelties such as masks which function to, say, prevent a certain monster from attacking (and a somewhat frightening one, at that).

There are also many in-game randomly generated miniquests, whether it's sacrificing someone on an altar or rescuing a princess.

The shops sell useful items, but the shopkeepers are smart and unforgiving. Steal one of their items, no other shop will service you again. And those old shopkeepers themselves are perhaps the most overpowered NPCs in existence.

I kid you not when I say that this my third most favorite game, right after chess and Arcanum. Then again, I haven't played too many to begin with, so my ranking might be a bit off.

I Wanna Be The Guy is hard. I repeat, it's HARD. If you want to know how hard it is, go YouTube it. Sadistic death traps (murderous homing apples that fall upwards), completely unpredictable events (walking on bare ground when suddenly it collapses), and the sheer difficulty of maneuvering yourself midair through tens of bullets in one jumps await the player.

I won't say this is my favorite game. But it is by far the most addicting and hated game I've played.