I’ve been a little iffy about indie bundles after Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) has changed their fundamental method of offering a bundle of 5ish excellent quality games from a variety of indie devs to offering a bundle of 1+ okayish games from a single dev. Sure, they have added games over time as an incentive to buy and it has worked for me, but I have actually been decreasing the amount I’ve been paying as sort of “voting with my money” by 75% ($20 -> $5). I like that I can contribute to charity and get games at a reasonable price for a starving grad student. Something I wish IndieRoyale (IR) would do. I skipped on the first round of IR because I didn’t recognize any of the games and/or I already owned the ones there.

I’m essentially relying on the bundle providers to choose the good games for me. I’m lazy or busy, depending on how you want to put it. I have a stack of indie games I’ve picked up over the past 2 years from these bundles. Some of them I look at for a few minutes before losing interest, wondering why I have it in the first place. Others I’ve played through to completion because they were worth way more than what I am capable of affording. I’ve only touched the tip of the stack so far, but I have been wanting to dip my fingers in each one for a while. I’ll write up my initial impressions and thoughts here, even revisit some of the older ones I’ve finished. First up: Scoregasm.

I picked up Scoregasm from the IR “difficult” indie bundle sale. I was scrolling through the comments on Joystiq to see what other players thought and I saw several references to Scoregasm and how it was like Geometry Wars (a shoot-em-up) but a little different. Now, me and Geometry Wars have a little bit of a history. When it used to be a free, downloadable PC game, me and the guys and one other gal from undergrad would be working in the computer lab late at night. We’d snag the game from the internets and load it up because it didn’t need to be installed. Yeah, we got our work done, but we made sure to have fun too.

Intrigued, I went ahead and bought the bundle just for Scoregasm. I’m reminded of an arcade-type game where you have a limited number of lives and the better you are at playing, the longer you get to play. It also has a bit of modernity to it in that a Game Over is more of a throwback to those arcade days than a True Game Over. Before beginning each round, you can choose your starting point, not necessarily at the very beginning and having to work your way back to where you were before. This is a nice touch for people, like me, who are keen on unlocking each of the maps but don’t want to start from the beginning each time.

The music also lends a nice ambiance to the game. I’m an electronica-type music person, but I never thought I’d be so hooked on the music. I say ambiance because the music doesn’t seem to have a frantic pace to it to match the swarms that you’re trying to kill, but it doesn’t put you to sleep either. For me, the music makes me want to keep playing. Another audio quirk of the game is just from the title. The “gasm” part of the name comes from, you guessed it, orgasm. On loading the game, you’re treated with a feminine “ooh!” and “aah!” which are the two prevalent voice effects. There are two others including a moan and “yes!” There is a delicate balance between being too much and not enough and I think they got it just right. It adds flavor, a little bit of interest, but not too much to be tacky and raise the ire of those with more delicate sensibilities.

The most important part is the gameplay itself. WASD keys to move around, spacebar or left mouse click to fire a close-range AoE, and cursor for aiming. When I first loaded up the game, bullets automatically shoot from your spacecraft, leaving your other fingers available for doing tricky maneuvers. But it’s not a laid back game. My first play through, I was already getting challenged by the third or fourth level. And those were just normal levels. Some of the levels require you to be very mobile while other levels you can just sit back and pound your AoE while moving your mouse in a circle. I was reminded of raiding and how positioning is essential. Same here. If you’re in the wrong spot, you’re going to have a hard time staying alive.

It’s frantic and fast-paced. Sometimes if you’re not paying attention to your spacecraft, you can explode just from the sheer number of objects on the screen. But this game makes it work. It’s meant to feel overwhelming, that’s why you have the close-range AoE. And the best feeling you can get from this game is surviving a difficult map, but just barely. Each map has environmental attributes to it so you may see the same swarms among multiple maps but the map you’re in will guarantee your experience will be different. This is the key point that makes it different from Geometry Wars. The creativity that’s put into the maps and the swarms to match the map behavior deserves applause.

One of the most important attributes of games is the fun factor. Scoregasm delivers well on that front. Each map lasts about one minute, but can go longer if you are dying often because the map resets to a certain milestone marker. This makes the game casual-friendly if you need a quick kill-everything-in-sight break. I haven’t tried the challenge modes yet, but I assume one round of a challenge mode is just that one map whereas playing on the regular map will try to get you to keep going through the next maps until you hit game over.

It’s too early to say how much of a must-have game this will be when I need to kill some time, but for now it certainly has me hooked.