Space Giraffe
This is probably the most well known game in the bundle, being that it was also an XBLA release in the early years on the service. It's got a mixed reputation, due to it being too busy and colorful, but I like it quite a bit. It's a Jeff Minter game, and even though the instruction screen proclaims that it's not Tempest...it's basically Tempest, but with a different ruleset.
DRM
The initials of this confusingly named title (there's no Digital Rights Management nonsense on any of the games packed in here) actually stands for Death Ray Manta. It makes a good companion to Space Giraffe in that it's obviously inspired by Minter's works, with the colorful graphics, catchy techno music and lots of halfway baffling gibberish tossed about. Unfortunately it runs really slow on my computer so I can't say anything more than that.
Armalyte
Apparently this is an update of an old Commodore 64 shooter, which I was unfamiliar with. It's a side-scroller shooter like Gradius, but honestly, not nearly as good. Title screen music is nice and SID-y though.
Dark Scavenger
This game reminds me a lot of Infocom's Beyond Zork, which was a text adventure crossed with a simple RPG. However, it modernizes the interface by adding graphics and ditching the text parser in favor of menu-selection. It's creatively quaint, or quaintly creative. The art style is interesting, though the writing is a little on the dry side.
There's a bunch of other games included in the bundle, including the space combat simulator The Wreckless, and A Bagful of Wrong, which in itself is a selection of nine MORE games. So while the games included aren't as famous as some of the other indie bundles out there, it's still a great deal for a few bucks.
Anyway, if you purchase, make sure to vote for my very-much-work-in-progress Christopher Columbus is an Idiot for the Indie Dev Grant. And thanks to Indie Gamers for their coverage last week, too!
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