Super Meat Boy

Sorry about not updating in a few days, guys, I've been really busy and just didn't have time.

Super Meat Boy is another difficult playformer. It has a fairly simple plot, which is something along the lines of "An evil fetus in a space suit kidnapped Meat Boy's girlfriend, who's called Bandage Girl! Beat difficult levels to save her!" There are a lot of levels; about 200. The soundtracks are actually pretty well-made, and though this isn't a graphics-intensive game, there are a few different backgrounds you'll see throughout the game. So, how about the puzzles themselves? Well, the entire game isn't just "execute these difficult maneuvers consecutively and get frustrated," because that would suck (Hi, last level of The Cotton Alley. What were the devs THINKING?). A lot of the game is figuring out the best possible strategies for each stage. There are different worlds which all have levels in them. If you beat a certain time requirement on a level, you unlock another, harder version of that level. There are also different secrets in each world, such as "warp zones," which warp you to areas referencing other video games (good luck with the IWBTG warp zone, it's up there with the difficult bits of IWBTG itself), bandages you can collect, and intentionally glitched levels that are stupidly difficult to beat. The game keeps track of your progress with a nice little death counter and a percentage that keeps track of how much of the game you've beaten. Remember the warp zones I mentioned earlier? Some of those have characters that you can unlock by beating them, and some bandages will be impossible to get without certain characters. This is a great game, and I recommend it.

Plants Vs. Zombies

Plants Vs. Zombies is a Popcap game where you defend a garden from a zombie apocalypse by using plants. This sounds a bit insane, but it's actually pretty fun. You unlock various plants that defend your garden in various ways, such as being literal peashooters, just acting as a wall, and catapulting watermelons. This game was announced on April Fool's Day of.. I think it was 2009, but I could be wrong, and everyone thought it was a joke. Blam. PopCap suddenly said "Oh, hey, it's real. Have fun." The game then went on to garner great reviews and cause people to have fun. Here's the trailer they launched, for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHAbHz8iYHc

The graphics of this game are cheerful, there are some very funny lines, the general plot is (to be a bit Firefly-esque) just crazy enough to work, and the game is now on sale for 3$ on Steam. Get it; the sale won't last long. The only con I have with this game is that after you beat it, there's not much replay value, but it's 3$- what can you lose?

Dead Space 2

Dead Space 2 is a survival horror shooter. You control the protagonist, a man called Isaac Clarke. You encounter a lot of monsters called Necromorphs, which are human bodies infested with some kind of alien. You can upgrade your weapons and suits at various places, and there are five different difficulty settings you can choose from. The hardest, Hardcore, will keep you occupied for a while. The graphics aren't the most amazing, but they're decent. After the events of the last game, Isaac's slowly losing his sanity due to guilt (if you've played the last game, what he feels guilty about should be fairly obvious). This makes the story much more interesting. The combat in the game is fantastic, and there are a ton of different ways or things with which to attack. This trailer, while not really showing gameplay, is still a pretty compelling work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtEEa4PU7ok.

Buy it. Have fun.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is a Valve game released with the Orange Box a few years ago. Unlike a lot of FPSes, (cough CoD cough) it's still being continually updated with free DLC. Not just bug fixes, either, maps, content, new weapons, and more. It's a class-based FPS that's one of my favorite games; I've played significantly more of it than almost any other game. There are a few modes: Capture the Flag, which everyone is familiar with, Control Point, where you need to get team members on specific areas to win, Payload, where you and your team members push a bomb through a map, and Arena, where once you die, you stay dead, and the team with alive members at the end wins. All of these are pretty intuitive and fun. There are nine different classes, which each have their own weapons, speed, character model, voice lines, and things they're designed to do. The demoman, for example, has weapons designed to set intricate traps and destroy the buildings of the engineer, who builds sentry guns and ammo-replenishing dispensers. The engineer is also weak to the spy, who disguises as an enemy team member, can disable the engineer's buildings, can turn invisible, and can kill anyone in one hit by stabbing them in the back. The spy, however, can easily be killed by the pyro, who burns everything with his flamethrower. The pyro's pretty bad against the Heavy, a big Russian guy with a lot of health and a very powerful minigun... and you get the idea. All the classes are designed to be good against other classes and bad against different ones, and you'll learn all that if you start the game. This game has been my favorite FPS for a long time, and it's going to stay that way for a long time. The intricate details, character personalities, cheerful cartoon graphics, and complexity all lead to this being a great game. If you don't own this game, get it. If you do own it, play it!

NetHack

NetHack is a twenty-year-old free roguelike that's still actively played and updated. It's as complex as it is fun. This time, I'm not even going to attempt to explain it, because this article (http://nullprogram.com/blog/2008/09/) does it much better than I could. Tvtropes also has a great article: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetHack

To play it, you'll need to telnet to nethack.alt.org. It's probably best to download a Telnet client, since the ones that come with Windows aren't very good. Putty works nicely for me.

I Wanna Be The Guy

I Wanna Be The Guy is renowned for being one of the most difficult games created. It's a platformer that was made with the sole intent of being stupidly hard. You control a protagonist called The Kid, who intends to defeat the evil Guy and become The Guy himself. Not only do you have to execute pixel-perfect maneuvers, but you have to memorize many traps that you really can't anticipate. One does not normally expect cherries in trees to fall *up* at you and kill you. The game features a lot of references to various old games such as Tetris, Kirby, Mega Man, Metroid, Street Fighter, Mario, and others. The traps are almost always incredibly unfair, and will leave you shaking your fist at your computer screen, possibly laughing. There are various routes to utilitize; you'll have to find and beat all the different bosses if you want to win. There are also bonus secret items, which do absolutely nothing but are fun to get. In fact, there are no items at all. All you have is a gun that you'll rarely use, your ability to double-jump, and your ability to burst into a strangely huge amount of gore at the slightest amount of pain. This game doesn't cost anything, but it's not free: you'll pay in RAGE. Have fun. Or not. http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/downloads.php

Eversion

So, I just finished a little freeware game called Eversion. This came out a couple years ago and I never bothered playing it until now. You control a flower protagonist called Zee Tee, who has the ability to switch between alternate realities by "everting." Z is jump. X is evert. You can only evert at certain areas, but the music changes during those areas and the colors on the screen change. It seems like a cheerful game at the start, but it gets darker quickly; the surroundings change from "cheerful" to "post-apocalyptic scenario full of monsters" pretty quickly. The music fits the mood quite well. You can collect gems by solving little puzzles; to get the true ending, you'll need to collect them all. The game took me about two hours, but I played it pretty slowly. That's pretty much the gist of it. TvTropes, as always, has a nice list of tropes pertaining to it: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SugarWiki/Eversion?from=Main.Eversion, and the download link is here: http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html

Have fun
dying