I think it's incredible that these games are developed for Android, Mac, PC, and Linux and available on all platforms with one purchase. I'm hoping for the day when this is the norm, when purchasing an app gives you access to all platforms. This is one thing sorely lacking on consoles that I fear will never catch up. If I'm buying Call of Duty on Xbox, I would love to play it when I go to the house of a friend that only has a Playstation. The innovation of the indie software movement will hopefully push the big players to play catch-up to modern days.
I was more than happy to pay a pretty decent amount of money to put my dollars towards encouraging this. Although I'll admit I was confused by the title thinking that this was in celebration of the launch of Android 5 Key Lime Pie...
Not all of these were developed as cross-platform from the start. AFAIK, Humble actually reaches out to game developers to help nudge along ports on other platforms for the bundles (to what extent exactly I'm unclear on).
There are more serious problems - like Torchlight not rendering characters heads at all - and no one seems to be interested to fix the problems - this kind of bug would be patched on launch day on windows IF it would happen - because how quality control didn't notice that equiping any item to character head makes it disappear is beyond me.
There are even worse problems. Some games crash a lot, especially soon after a sale(frequently the first linux release). Psychonauts crashed on some of the intro cutscenes, I ended up playing the windows version in wine.
Double Fine, at least, is treating their Linux customers well. The most recent Humble Bundle build of Psychonauts is from January 2013, and allegedly fixes a bunch of bugs that plagued the original Mac and Linux releases:
And games not launching at all, too. That's even worse. That happened several times for the few first Humble Bundles. Nowadays it is usually getting better.
Be it Wine or Adobe AIR, I think that blaming from the community is superficial and dumb. Let's focus on the actual issue -- game quality assurance. Does it install, does it work? If it uses Wine but I never notice because it all runs smoothly, then both me and the developer is a winner.
I agree, yet usage some of these technologies seem to be indicative of bad QA. Smoke, if you will.
Some time ago I purchased The Binding of Isaac which is an amazing game, but it suffered from slowdowns on my computer. I guessed that it was Flash and this was indeed the case. It’s ridiculous that a game of that style does not run properly on a modern computer. These and similar incidents have left me very wary of Wine wrappers and Flash.
Well that should be true more or less with Steam. With the exception of mobile, you'll only have to buy a game once to play it on your Windows, Linux or Mac PC, or on your Steambox console.
But I agree, and I also expect to see much nicer games when mobile hardware has gotten a bit more powerful, and most of it supports OpenGL ES 3.0, and developers can just make the same OpenGL ES 3.0 game across Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac.
That isn't entirely accurate. The Fire doesn't prevent you from installing arbitrary third party apps and app stores. It's just that it can't use the most important one: Google Play.
This is not entirely the Fire's fault. Play is no mere standalone app; it needs some hooks built into the OS itself. Installing it on the Fire is possible, but involves deeper magic than even the average developer can be expected to know.
You can blame Amazon for not including that support (and I do), but you can also blame Google for requiring it (and I do).
Strange... I was able to enable third-party sources and install APKs from the web with no issues on my Kindle Fire HD. I don't think that it would be impossible to install an appstore on one.
Since you can install a 3rd-party app store on Android simply using an APK (e.g. Amazon Appstore on non-Kindle devices), I don't see how Amazon could allow apps but not app stores.
> sorely lacking on consoles that I fear will never catch up
This is by design. Console software is made to be exclusive by default, what would be their selling point if the soft would run on anything else ? They have no interest whatsoever to define a unique standard for home consoles.
Totally agree. On that point, I'd strongly encourage everyone to make sure they check the boxes for every platform they want to play on, not just the main one. Hopefully this will let the developers know that we really appreciate the effort they've put in here. note -- you can update this after you've made the purchase.
I strongly recommend getting bundle and beating the average just for Dungeon Defenders alone. Aside from a few end-game progression issues, it's an incredible value, especially with the extremely, extremely large amount of DLC.
I honestly did not enjoy Dungeon Defenders that much. I bought the base game and the original Orcs Must Die during a Christmas sale on steam and I thought Orcs Must Die was a much better game. The two games seem similar and at first glance DD looks better because it has multiplayer and more rpg elements than OMD does. But I thought OMD had much better core gameplay. I thought the game was just more fun. I felt like the controls and camera viewpoints were better.
That said this is a great deal if you do end up liking the game because Trendy seems to be making most of their money by releasing dlc for dungeon defenders, and I think there is around $50 worth of dlc in the bundle. I have 25 dlcs listed for the game in my steam library, and I haven't spent any money on the game besides the purchase of the base game and the humble bundle.
I'm pretty sure every Humble Bundle I've ever bought has had a "Like what we're doing? Click here to increase your order amount!" link on the download page, so they've already covered that base. :)
If only it played for 5 minutes for me. I get some obscure message at startup (I think it has to do with the format of the textures). Tried support - didn't get anywhere.
It looks fun, but the crooked over the head camera makes me sick. I mean physically sick. It screws with my sense of symmetry, my side vision and my expectations for character movement all at the same time.
I doubt raising it as an issue would mean anything, sadly. People like me must be rarer than colour-blind linux users running xmonad.
Super Hexagon is a must have. It looks like a flash game but it demands a lot of skill if you want to finish the game. The music is awesome. It's extremely addictive! (it's from the guy who made VVVVVVVV)
Dungeon Defenders is perfect if you have friends to play with. It's like a tower defense mixed with a 3rd person shooter and a hacknslash.
Actually no,The Humble Indie Bundle is just one of many flavors of bundles that Humble Bundle has offered. This is, in fact, the fifth Android bundle. The first Android bundle was offered at the beginning of 2012.
Regardless of dates, your original point is still incorrect. The organization is called Humble Bundle. They offer multiple types of bundles. Humble Indie Bundle was the first, but Humble Bundle for Android is a separate offering of the Humble Bundle service.
Any good brief reviews of these games? Which ones are worth playing?
Also, I tend to have the most time for gaming while on the bus or the like, playing on my phone. Any of these particularly good or particularly bad in a mobile form factor?
Super Hexagon is certainly super. I've bought it like 5 times myself already (once for PC, thrice as a gift, once for my Galaxy Nexus) and have easily spent 10+ hours on it. It's incredibly well designed, works extremely well on mobile (a single game generally only lasts seconds) and it's very addicting.
Oh, it's hard for sure, but a very fair kind of hard. I actually finally beat the game myself about a week ago - I've now managed to do it a couple more times.
Progress in Super Hexagon comes in small but incredibly "I can't believe I did THAT!" satisfying doses, while defeat does not taste sour at all. It's the best very hard game I've ever played.
it seems like it's impossible at first. But you still have fun in the normal levels. Then you get better, and before your realize it you're beating the last level.
I have spent many hour-long train commutes entranced by Super Hexagon. The game is really really hard, but the fast-paced sessions and minimalistic controls are very well suited for the mobile form factor.
Am I the only one that bought it for Solar 2? Completely awesome game - fantastic for when you only have a few minutes. You start as an asteroid cruising the galaxy, smash into more asteroids and you grow into a planet, star, black hole. Along the way you have life spawning on your planet(s) fighting off other life forms, completing challenging and sometimes bizarre side quests. Death is no biggie, and its all about exploration. I love it.
I didn't buy HBA5 for Solar 2, but I can already tell it's going to be one of my favorites from this bundle, along with Beat Hazard Ultra (the PC version of which I had already played and enjoyed).
Simply flying around as an asteroid is alright, but the real fun starts once you've smashed into enough rocks to become a planet. Then you can collect a whole swarm of asteroid, orbiting around you. Colliding with asteroids now reduces your mass instead of growing you; you have to swallow the rocks in orbit to do so. Once you become a star, collecting whole planets (with their own orbiting asteroids) is even neater. Along the way, the inhabitants of planets will build little ships and planetary shields to defend themselves against rival systems... until you swallow their homeworld, anyways. I've yet to build a multi-stellar system before becoming a black hole and gobbling up my orbitals, but that's my next goal.
If nothing else, I'm glad HBA5 introduced me to this game I'd somehow overlooked.
I'm not much of a gamer but last time I came across a humble bundle I gave it a try to figure out what the buzz was about, but I was completely dissapointed in the variety of the games. All five games were of some guy (no girls) walking around a puzzle world. I've heard complaints that the big corporation games are all just 3d shooters but it seems that indie developers don't have much imagination either. Looking at this bundle it looks like there's a chance there's some variety so maybe I just got unlucky with my bundle.
Hmm. I've seen a few that were just straight up puzzle adventure games, or "some guy walking around a puzzle world." Though one of them, Braid, was one of the top most creative games of the past 10 years, I would say.
Then there were some action or action platformers.
Then there were some puzzle games like World of Goo or Osmos which are very much not "some guy walking around", but more abstract puzzle type games, and fairly creative.
There was Aquaria, where you had a female mermaid swimming around an action-adventure world.
There was "Gratuitous Space Battles", which is what it sounds like.
So, yeah, while the puzzle platformer is something that's fairly popular in the indie community, it's by no means all of the games. About the only things that there weren't were 3D shooters (which I think indies avoid because they're done to death by major studios with bigger budgets), and straight up abstract arcade games, which this one provides with Super Hexagon. What else do you think is missing, that an indie shop could do well and which isn't already crowded out by the big companies?
I bought for Super Hexagon, and gave all to money to the developer. I used to give a split to Humble, but since not getting a refund for games which didn't run on Linux (or were very poorly ported), I won't.
I'm tempted to buy this for the soundtracks alone. Of the last bundle, I stopped playing the games after a few hours, but the soundtracks are still on heavy rotation in my work headphones.
There was a discussion on reddit about this where one user emailed them asking about bitcoin and they said[1] that:
>The EFF has a great statement[2] on BitCoin that closely follows our feelings toward BitCoin
But someone from EFF said, allegedly, that they will reconsider accepting bitcoin because:
"It is possible that the legal and/or technical landscape has changed enough in the last couple of years for us to reassess our stance on taking BitCoin donations." [3]
When you commented on the HN parody, I though you were funny (why criticise a copycat for being accurate?). But it appears you're just dumping copypasta.
Don't, please. This isn't the place for it. Emailing the author will get results, spamming HN won't.
Because the games I like are usually designed with one device and OS in mind. Touch, joystick, mouse, and keyboard interaction all have their strengths and disadvantages -- games specifically made for them use those strengths. The same counts for the different OSes and their native SDKs.
Unless these games are completely different on each platform, I doubt they would impress me. Granted, it can be done – Super Monkey Ball is a great example – but obviously, it's extremely expensive to do so.
Most of the games in this bundle are probably the same across all platforms, but Anomaly: Warzone Earth, which was in two previous Humble Android Bundles, impressed me with its platform differences. The desktop and mobile versions are well-tuned to their platforms.
The desktop version gives you an avatar to walk around with using the arrow keys, while the mobile version lets you slide across the map to view the level. Because of this, on the desktop version you walk over powerups to pick them up, and on the mobile version you tap powerups. And an enemy unit that just makes your own troops attack you on the desktop version both saps health and disables attacks on the mobile version. The experiences of walking around with your troops and watching from above are significantly different, but both are fun.
There are other differences. The mobile version has completely different levels from the desktop version. They also have very different stories – all the stories share is the events before the game. As a smaller detail, on the desktop version, you reorder units in steps with the arrow keys, but on the mobile version, you can just drag them.
Basically, Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a great example of how to do an Android port right. I don’t know if there’s a game in this bundle that is as well-ported, but if there is, then this bundle is worth getting.
Games (at least the good ones) are designed with emotions in mind - in fact, the ideal game immerses the player to such an extent that control differences become immaterial.
Arcade games that recreate the classic joystick and buttons on touch devices are often less than immersive. Games made for accelerometer or gyroscope input don't make much sense on a desktop computer. Games like Tetris aren't fun to use with a mouse. Etc etc.
One definitely doesn’t need to be a “prisoner of the walled garden” to desire platform-specific control schemes. One could be annoyed by badly-ported control schemes even if one uses only Linux and Android devices, neither of which are walled gardens.
Thank you for that, as I doubt he'd listen to me. On a daily basis, I use FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, and Android. Just because I also use iOS and OS X doesn't make me blind, or 'a prisoner of the walled garden'.
> Just because I also use iOS and OS X doesn't make me blind
No, but dismissing games because they're multiplatform does. Just because you have open source friends, doesn't mean you're not racist.
(Maybe you meant that you'd play them on your Mac and if they were designed for Android, then you're not interested because good touch controls rarely translate to good mouse controls. That's perfectly reasonable: The lead platform is usually the best place to play and not all developers put the effort into making good ports. But if you actually cared, you would have asked if these games have good mouse controls instead of being dismissive.)
Super Hexagon was designed at first for iOS. And then it was ported to other device. So if you can enjoy it on iOS you can enjoy it on other devices as well since the controls don't change that much.
As for the other kind of portage. I'm trying Dungeon Defenders right now on a Nexus 7 to see how they managed it.
I was more than happy to pay a pretty decent amount of money to put my dollars towards encouraging this. Although I'll admit I was confused by the title thinking that this was in celebration of the launch of Android 5 Key Lime Pie...