Freebie Alerts In Under 10 Words

No.1: (In a series of indeterminate length.) Monsterkill

Castle-defence game where you swipe shapes to kill monsters.

Doodle Dinosaurs Halloween Edition: The other side of the coin

Some games have an immediate advantage when it comes to being featured in magazines and websites, assuming that their developers aren’t idiots. We all like to look at pretty things, and sometimes a game that wouldn’t merit a second glance if it was badly drawn can climb several rungs up the Ladder Of Pleasurable Experiences just by being easy on the eye.

This is a temporary freebie, so get up on your toes.

Hello, Doodle Dinosaurs Halloween Edition!

Games We Would Have Written

…About Properly If Their Developers Hadn’t Provided Such Piss-Poor Excuses For Screenshots, But Which Are Very Good And You Should Download Anyway While They’re Free (ie Now) So The Stupid Idiots Don’t Make Any Money, Alongside A Picture Of Something Completely Unrelated That’s Less Likely To Hideously Disfigure Our Nice Website Than Their Crap-Ugly Marketing Shots.

#3: Flying Chicken

Ooh, look – it’s Haha Interactive’s marketing team having a meeting!

Skullpogo: Bouncing back

Here’s a cutie. Skullpogo is a perfect example of an iPod game – it’s short, shallow and sweet, it’s designed to take advantage of the characteristics of the format, and it’s endlessly replayable. And just for a little while, it’s going free.

You’re a skeleton on a pogo stick, and your job is to bounce on zombies, monsters and farmyard animals. Like, duh. There are five stages, each of which you have to complete before your time runs out (obviously), and you get combos for bouncing on lots of enemies one after the other without touching the ground or your combo timer expiring, which can happen if you’re using a springy stick and you try to bounce from a very high flying enemy to one walking along the ground.

(At any point in the game you can switch to a high, medium or low bounce height. Higher gives you more height – honest! – and therefore more time to accurately target enemies, but low is faster and offers better scoring opportunities if there are lots of ground baddies.)

There are a handful of powerups which you can use to maximise your scoring (of course), although tragically also including a control-reversing one (grnk). Speaking of controls, there are three options – tilt, directional buttons or swiping – all of which work well. The graphics are very pretty pixel art, and there’s funky music.

Limiting the game to five stages is the stroke of genius here. It keeps any individual game short, but there’s so much opportunity within each stage to get better scores, so many achievements to, um, achieve, and the core gameplay so pleasing in and of itself, that you’ll boot it up again and again to while away a few idle minutes. There are even three slightly different modes to provide a degree of variety.

All in all, Skullpogo is an absolutely lovely little game, and right now all it’s asking you to do is click on its name. That’s not too much effort for you, is it?

Games We Would Have Written

…About Properly If Their Developers Hadn’t Provided Such Piss-Poor Excuses For Screenshots, But Which Are Very Good And You Should Download Anyway While They’re Free (ie Now) So The Stupid Idiots Don’t Make Any Money, Alongside A Picture Of Something Completely Unrelated That’s Less Likely To Hideously Disfigure Our Nice Website Than Their Crap-Ugly Marketing Shots.

#2: Portal Rush

Yikes! A G-g-g-ghost!

News update: Boondock Saints

If you enjoyed our thrilling world-exclusive review of wildly-offensive-Irish-stereotype twin-stick movie-licence shooter Boondock Saints a few days ago, you might like to know that the game has now been released, and is at a discount launch price of [£1.19] until tomorrow, when it’ll rise to £1.79.

"Argh! Me potato-eatin' hand!"

That’s all, so it is.

Virtual Concorde

Fancy making a few savings on some top-quality games, but can’t because you have the sheer despicable temerity to live outside the USA? Fear not, gentle and impoverished viewer. Podgamer has some spare tickets for a quick Virtual Concorde flight across the Atlantic, where you can pick up some EA favourites that for some reason they don’t want to sell you as cheaply as your American cousins.

Follow the simple instructions at the link above to get yourself a US App Store account and some US iTunes credit, and then click the jump for the list of games you can get this weekend for [59p] each, saving up to £6 (in total) compared to buying them at their current inflated UK Store prices.

Chu Chu Rocket: Cheeping out

Yeah, okay, so mice don’t ordinarily cheep. But the little squeaky noises they make in Chu Chu Rocket are pretty close, and more to the point they’re pretty appropriate for what Sega have done with this [£2.99] iThing release of their decade-old cat-and-mouse classic.

File under 'legacy content'.

Originally a 1999 freebie given away to Dreamcast owners in an ill-fated attempt to make them use the console’s weedy dial-up modem for online battles (which met with a distinctly limp response), CCR really came into its own in the guise of handheld game, when it morphed into a fantastic puzzler on the Gameboy Advance a year later. If anything Chu Chu Rocket is a game that’s even more perfectly suited to the iOS machines than it was to Nintendo’s mini-monster, so the mystery is why this new version is so much worse than the GBA one.

This dog is free from fleas

…is the only sense in which the word “free” is legitimately applicable in Namco’s new App Store blurb for Pac-Man Championship Edition (“NOW FREE: CHALLENGE MODE! NOW FREE: ALL 30 courses and 120 missions!”), as in “this game is now free from in-app purchases”.

What’s actually happened is that Namco have effectively made the game more expensive, by putting everything from the expansion pack into the normal edition and charging the previous full price of both of them ([£2.99]) for the new unified app. Previously you had the choice of just buying the base edition – which contained enough content for many players – and adding the expansion pack later, whereas now you have to buy it all straight away.

(Actually, if you previously bought the base edition and didn’t buy the DLC, this update WILL give you it for nothing – Scrupulous Fairness Ed)

But Pac-Man CE is great, and will inevitably be reduced in price at some point in the near future, and the updated version has a new virtual-analogue joypad option and incorporates GameCentre achievements and leaderboards, so we’re giving it another mention anyway. Call us old softies.

Bunnies now just plain stupid

Did you like the sound of Silly Bunnies when we covered it a couple of weeks ago, but had just spent your last 59p on heroin? It’s your lucky day, as it’s currently going free. Silly Bunnies, that is, not heroin.

You’d have to be a pretty retarded rabbit not to pick it up sharpish, is what we say. And again, just so we’re clear – Silly Bunnies, not heroin.