Humble Indie Bundle 3 – Worth Every Penny

This week the Humble Indie Bundle 3 came to a close. Having raised over a whopping 2Million dollars in just two weeks. Included was 7 indie games and an opportunity to play Minecraft until August 14, 2011.The idea behind the Humble Indie Bundles is that you, the purchaser pays what you feel the titles are worth. So if you felt like all you could spare was $0.01 that’s fine. These games are released without DRM protection and customers were given a link where they can download the games as often as they like to any number of machines.

With 7 games on offer and the ability to download them through Steam via Steam code just made this one of the greatest deals I’ve ever seen. The bundle itself is probably worth at least $60 and here they are letting us have it for a fraction of the cost.Crayon Physics Deluxe (Kloonigames) is a cute little game where the player must get the Red Ball to the Yellow Star. This is done by drawing on the landscape with a magic crayon. Everything drawn by the player is affected by physics. Learning how to make bridges, ramps, pulleys, pivot-points and counter-weights are all part of the experience.I enjoy the similar concepts behind VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh) and And Yet It Moves (Broken Rules) but I haven’t put much time into them. VVVVVV is a platformer where you only have the ability to move left, right or to reverse the direction of gravity. In And Yet It Moves the player can move left, right, jump or rotate the world 180 or 90 degrees in each direction around themselves.

Cogs (Lazy 8 Studios) is a great game with heaps of puzzles to keep you busy while you kill time, some of them get really complicated and had me dumbfounded. Using cogs, pipes with steam and wooden blocks the player needs to make the objective happen. Some of these puzzles take place on three dimensional objects. The main basis for these are sliding block puzzles.

I’ve been having great fun with Atom Zombie Smasher (Blendo Games), there is great fun and stress in dealing with zombie hordes. Organising helicopter rescues, mercenery placements and of course, big city destroying bombs when it all gets too much.

To be honest, I couldn’t really figure out Hammerfight (Kranx Productions), I was some sort of flying machine with a ball and chain attached, moving the mouse moved my ship and caused the ball to swing. I just ended up swinging around in circles and hoping for the best to defeat enemies. Wikipedia tells me that I need to rely on centripetal force to give the object kinetic energy to destroy enemies, but I think zombies are more my thing.

Steel Storm is a top down arcade style shooter with the player in control of a hovercraft. Kill alien type things, collect power ups and complete mission objectives.

The developers have put a lot of work into these games and I’m glad they decided to donate these games to the Humble cause. It just fills me with pride to be a gamer and see this kindness from people who really don’t have to. The first Humble Bundle raised $1,270,000 in total, the second Bundle made $1.8 million after just ten days of sales.

What I really like about the system they have in place is that you don’t need to register or use any specific downloading programs. Many online shoppers can’t be bothered creating an account to give someone money and I’m usually one of them.

Also the Humble Bundle supports two charities. Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When you buy, you have the choice to split the funds between; The Developers, the Host site and the Charities.

It’s good to see the average purchase price paid was $5.82, to drive that up the organisers decided to throw in the Humble Indie Bundle #2 for anyone who paid above the average. This caused it to creep up slowly.

I personally can’t wait to see what they have for us next. I encourage you to go take a look at http://www.humblebundle.com/ and sign up to be notified when the next one comes along.

Maybe if you’re a good bunch of boys and girls they’ll throw in Bundle 3 with Bundle 4.

I’ve paid more for games that have given me less.