More zombies, more fun. BlendoGames, the creators of the previously very favorably reviewed Gravity Bone, have just released a new full game. You can get Atom Zombie Smasher right now from their websites. There’s even a demo if you’re not totally convinced yet.

Atom Zombie Smasher is not easily defined. It has some tower defense elements, it has a lot of real-time strategy and to complete it, there is some role-playing. Your mission is to evacuate as many people from a city that is run over by zombies. You’ve got a helicopter to get them out and a number of weapons and tactics to keep the zombies away.

Sounds simple, but mix it with tons of style and you get an explosive game that is above all addictive.

If that isn’t enough, Blendo Games is fully supporting the modding community. Currently you can mod pretty much any parameter in the game and upload your creations to the central repository.

I love how Blendo Games always manages to go in completely different directions, but they still take their very distinctive style with them. The result is a very different and entertaining look at existing genres.

Atom Zombie Smasher is only $15, so what are you waiting for?

Are you ready for a serious time drain?

Game enthusiasts and developers are taking the Grand Theft Auto games’ world and expanding it beyond your wildest dreams. Come and join the fun.

Back To The Future: Hill Valley, an add-on modification for GTA Vice City and San Andreas introduced me to the incredibly extensive world of GTA modding. You install the BTTF mod over your existing GTA installation and the game turns it into something quite different. You get access to all the time machines available in the movies and to some of the movies time zones and scenery. It’s very polished and great fun if you liked the Back To The Future world.

Looking beyond that mod, there are countless of others available. They range from new and improved vehicles, additional missions and entire makeovers of the game.

One of the greatest additions is probably “Design Your Own Mission” (DYOM) for GTA San Andreas. It lets you create custom missions from inside the game. No programming knowledge required. According to the central DYOM repository there are currently 10230 missions available. Read that again, ten thousand two hundred thirty missions. That’s a few lifetimes of playing.

In my previous post, I already mentioned I wanted to become a little more creative with my gaming. The Back To The Future mod had been sitting in my todo list for a very long time. So during the holidays I finally tried it out. I was impressed with the quality and the possibilities. Further investigating the GTA mod scene, I discovered a black hole that will swallow you whole and any free time you might have with it.

I don’t think Rockstar actively supports the mod scene. Which might explain why the current GTA IV mods all seem to be fairly small. While I understand the reasons why they might not want to invest time in this, I think this is a missed opportunity.

A lot of great material to get me started. If you like, you can share your favorite GTA mods in the comments.

Ever since my brief Shattered Galaxy stint I’ve been loving the whole custom spaceship battling game. You get an empty hull and lots of options of how to fill it. The trick is the select a good combination of defensive and offensive weaponry. If you like this kind of puzzling, you’ll love the two games in this post.

First of, there’s Gratuitous Space Battles. Although this game might look like an action game, there’s absolutely no action gaming involved whatsoever. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. The game is about setting up a space fleet. You have virtually unlimited choices, which kind of makes it hard to get into at first. When you’ve tinkered with your fleet for a few hours you send them to battle.

This is where your involvement ends. It’s all on autopilot from here on. You can watch the battle to get a feel of how your options influence your ships efficiency. You don’t get to change anything though. So if you don’t like how it turns out, you have to restart.

The game is available on Steam if you want.

If you’d like a little action added to the mix and you don’t like paying for games. Orbital Decay is your game. It has less options, but there’s still a bunch. And you have one cannon (the main one) you can control. You can choose to go for a mostly auto-piloted game or you can start shooting away yourself. Or both. The choice is yours.

You’ll need a little time to find a strategy that fits you, so I suggest you start on easy. It might be a little too easy, but the normal difficulty level will probably kick your ass the first few times you try it.

BTW I’m joining the Steam treasure hunt, so if you have a Steam account, feel free to friend me.

I currently don’t own an Android device and I haven’t seen a good adventure game for my Nintendo DS since Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (let me know if you know more!), so I went looking for iPod Touch compatible adventure games.

I found quite a few.

If you like text adventure games, there is absolutely no excuse not to have iphonefrotz. It’s free, and it supports enough games to last you a few lifetimes. It’s the most relaxed way to play text adventure games yet. I love it.

But lets get back to point and click games. This iPhone/iPod touch adventure game list is the most complete I found. It’s a bit spread out over the topic, but you’ll get a bunch of great ideas. It appears many developers are cashing in on their older games. For instance, Simon The Sorcerer is also available. Judging from some of the screenshots, I’m not sure if all developers took as much time to refine the interface as the Monkey Island creators did.

Revolution seems to be one big exception. Judging from the information I found, their latest Broken Sword director’s cut looks like it will be worth your money. It contains the old storyline and adds an entirely new parallel one. I’ll certainly be looking into buying this one when I complete both Monkey Island games currently on my iPod.

But what about original content? I find it pretty hard to get an idea of what’s out there. 1112 looks very interesting. And there are some more, but I’ll have to get back to you on that when I find the time to evaluate them a bit further.

I’d love to hear your input. Have you found an exceptional portable adventure?

I mentioned the eight Casual Gameplay Competition a month ago. Now I wasn’t able to enter the competition, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the results. Isn’t the internet great?

Each competition has a certain theme, the previous one was on interactive fiction and this time it was all about “sandbox”. So you’re going to see a lot of sand in the 17 entries. But others took the theme a little less literal.

The quality in the games I’ve played (I still have to play a few) is mixed, going from an original idea that wasn’t executed that well to beautifully executed games that rival some of the better stuff out there.

In any case, you can’t argue with 17 free games.

Sometimes you guys surprise me. Again I hear discussion on turning off comments on blogs, but I love your comments. I want to receive more! Especially if they lead me to sites like VRtifacts. A site on everything that Virtual Reality was. All the promises it once held, but that never came to fruition. It’s the story of yet one more bubble, explained by some one with a lot of artifacts.

A while ago I wrote about Virtual Reality and asked the question what happened. I even felt like a comeback was due, with all the 3D monitors and motion input devices, I think today this is even more true than it was back then.

Recently reader Virtuate mentioned VRtifacts and its treasure tome of VR tidbits. If you’re into digital history and oldskool nostalgia you owe it to yourself to subscribe to the site.

And Tone (VRtifact’s creator) even uploads a tutorial from time to time. This will make sure you can relive those fond memories.

In my final post in the casual game series, I present Fault Line. The basic mechanic is that of an action game. You move your avatar through a 2D side scrolling world. Jump from one platform to the other. The final goal: reaching the “end” marker. There’s no story or reason given why you might want to reach the end, other than that you can. But it won’t be easy.

Because there’s a twist.

This is where the puzzle part of the game enters the scene. Using some kind of fancy weapon, it is possible to slice parts away from the screen. You can’t do this trick just anywhere. There are several “connection” points where you can start or end a slice. Combined with lots of lasers, moving platforms and various other death traps, the end result is a puzzle game that will keep you very entertained for a good time.

Play Fault Line (via JayIsGames)

I’m a sucker for a good puzzle. And among the puzzles, those that use the simplest mechanic to create the most complicated puzzle are my favorites. Grid is such a game. While its name is probably the least original and worst marketing move one in history, the game itself is the complete opposite.

A simple mechanic: rotate pipes, form a network. But there’s a twist: only blocks that are powered up which are connected to the main network can be rotated. Sounds easy, but through 35 puzzles you’ll learn that the puzzles it creates are seriously twisted.

Play Grid but beware the “just one more” effect.

(via JayIsGames)

Yes, Amorphous+ is JayIsGames’ game of the year for 2008. Yes, I’m terribly late to the party. But yes, this game is still worth a mention. You are the guy with the sword, standing in the middle, without cover and waves and waves of badies keep attacking you.

That’s all there is to this game. The controls are as simple as the premise. Yet, the game stays fresh, even after many many plays. It’s this generation’s Asteroids. The enemies are varied, the achievements are plenty. And you, you’ll keep coming back for one more session of slaying.

Play Amorphous+

During the next few weeks, I’m going to do another stint of casual games that caught my attention. There are always too many of them and I keep creating a backlog. So the next 5 weeks, I’m going to feature some of the best of what’s out there.

Today, it is Fantastic Contraption‘s turn to entire the spotlight.

Fantastic Contraption is a physics game in which you’re goal is to build a machine that transports a marked block to a certain location. Although it’s a little more limited, it did remind me of that great puzzle game of yore, called the Incredible Machine. You’re never quite sure if the solution your creating is what the programmers intended or if you’re exploited some kind of bug. Just great, limitless puzzling.

Fantastic Contraption