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Loot dungeons, pay your village's debt in The Nightmare Cooperative
Surviving in monster-filled dungeons is stressful enough, but in Nightmare Cooperative for PC, Mac and Linux, perseverance is about more than just your own survival. You see, your village's leaders aren't exactly savvy with budgets. They've built monuments for previous Cooperative members, but there are hefty interest rates involved. You'll need to join the Cooperative and go find some gold to keep the village funded, since they're unfortunately also in charge of protecting everyone you care about. Nightmare Cooperative's tile-based dungeons are filled with beasts, potions and ever-important bars of gold, but all movement is shared between your party. If you'd like your archer to move up and to the right, that's fine, but your warrior will follow the same route, assuming there isn't an obstacle in the way. You can't always spend a dozen turns regrouping your team either, as fresh enemies will spawn after a set number of turns. Clearing a room is a balance of gathering as much treasure as possible and getting out before a party member is slain. Or guided into a pool of acid. You might also stumble across previous Cooperative members in your journey, who can be recruited to fight alongside you. Nightmare Cooperative is currently on sale for $8.99 on Steam, but you can buy a DRM-free copy directly from Lucky Frame for $9.99. [Image: Lucky Frame]
Indie game Gentlemen! was bought 144 times, pirated over 50,000
Gentlemen! by Lucky Frame is a popular indie title for Android tablets, iPad, PC and Mac that has players swap gravity, chuck knives, and send homing pigeons at one another in local multiplayer deathmatches. It has garnered critical praise and the Android version has been downloaded more than 50,000 times - unfortunately, as of four days ago, only 144 of those downloads were legitimate, while the rest were pirated. Yann Seznec, director of Lucky Frame, shared the disparaging data via a Gamasutra blog, where he tried to decipher why things went south. The largest group of pirates, Seznec found, came from Russia and China, where "... most of these pirates probably exist in a commercial ecosystem where the Google Play store does not even exist, and it doesn't occur to them to buy any games from there at all." Seznec also pointed out that the game had some unlikely competition - South Korean singer Psy's hit, "Gentleman" - that made the game difficult to discover thanks to a flood of apps which hoped to capitalize on the song's viral success. The whole story is a bit heartbreaking, and Seznec wrote that for the moment, he doesn't have much of a conclusion to make, but that he and his team have a lot to learn going forward.
Daily iPhone App: Wave Trip flies through a musical world
Wave Trip is the newest title from developer Lucky Frame, probably best known for the underrated rhythm-meets-tower defense game Bad Hotel. In the same way that Bad Hotel is a tower defense game, Wave Trip is sort of a Jetpack Joyride-style platformer, in that you're navigating around the screen trying to collect coins of a sort. You can hold down a finger on the right side of the screen to move a little ship up or down, and then holding down a finger on the left side gives you a temporary shield, which you can use to knock away obstacles as you go. Hitting obstacles or collecting coins makes a musical noise when you do it, and that's how each level's "song" is constructed, with you earning multiplied points for interacting the right way with each type of object. Unfortunately, while Wave Trip's songs are plenty rhythmic and interesting, I personally didn't think they were all that great or catchy. Plus, the game can be very hard, especially if you're trying to nail down a really high score (the game tells you the global best at the beginning of each level, which is usually a tough bar to try and top). Still, as a sort of experimental music platformer, Wave Trip is a wild little ride, and the ability to both create your own levels and play others' means there's no shortage of content. The game's available as a universal app now for $1.99.
