Free Steam game like Ikari Warriors, S.A.R, Heavy Barrel etc

[Crayfish]

Alien Swarm.

Looks really cool, reminds me alot of SNK's S.A.R, has unique classes, equipment and weapons. Its available from 19th July (tomorow) for free on Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/

[Observer]

Interesting, very, very interesting! I was looking forward Razor2: Hidden Skies (a brazilian vertical STG inspired by Radiant Silvergun, Gradius V, Ikaruga and the likes using an orchestral soundtrack done by an interesting, also brazilian, composer) for tomorrow but guess now I'll just have to get this as well, especially 'cause of the free tag. Who knows if later on they end up charging for it...

Some people are calling this a top-down arcade shoot 'em up... It does remind me of what Starcraft could be if it was a co-op thing instead of a real-time strategy.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Alien Swarm originated as a UT2004 mod. Is the Source version they've been developing about to be released, or is it going to be just plain old Alien Swarm released separately?
P.S. So the Source port is finally out. Now I wish better of my video cards wasn't out of order...

[Ed Oscuro]

oh sweet it's got achievements

INSTALLING NOW

(Yeah I remember when this was a UT2K4 mod...also remember when you had to pay for the standalone, and you didn't get Achievements. Crazy times)

Edit: Bah, Steam treats free game customers like thieves. Got it to show in the menu (four tries) but it won't download. The game logo reminds me of the old Taito one...or a pair of pants.

[Khan]

Downloading now, thanks for the heads up

woah 2gb..pretty big for a free game nice.

[kengou]

Never tried the original UT mod. Just tried out this source version, and it feels EXACTLY like left 4 dead, except top-down and with aliens instead of zombies. It's not bad as a free game.

[Ed Oscuro]

lol if by exactly the same you mean not being able to clear swarm off your face...and electro armor usage baffled some of my teammates.

But like L4D it's a good idea to roll past teammates if they're firing (in L4D that's crouching).

The chainsaw is evil. I blew up one of those big things (that spawn yellow grenades) with it...not really recommended lol

Also, one of the Achievements gives you a special hat in Team Fortress 2, haha.

Need some more people on the friends list! Everybody add Ed Oscuro (EDIT: actual Steam name now!) fer great justice.

Is somebody here going by the name Snake?

[Khan]

this game reminds me of killing floor in a way, being able to level up and weld doors and I gotta admit for a free game its pretty damn good! im hoping we can get some custom campaigns going.

[Ed Oscuro]

Right now the Friends-only thing is a pain in the ass, there's never anybody on and you'll be likely to annoy the few people on the Friends list if you aren't a pro at it. They need to fix this.

[Octopod]

What are you talking about friends only? You can join a public game. This game is awesome.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, I was wrong, it's just how the menu is oriented, the notifications about friends playing, and the lack of any real single player ("skirmish" = useless) that had me confused. I just kind of mentally filtered out the "search public games" option for whatever reason. I re-discovered it before coming back to this thread and felt a bit foolish if that's any consolation.

I also tried setting up a public game of my own and it crashed yay!!!11

[Octopod]

I tried to add you on Steam and it said unable to find.

[Aguraki]

thx I've just downloaded it and tried the training mission.
pretty neat game

[Leader Bee]

Nobody has managed to mention it's similarity to Team 17's Alien Breed yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFqtJLZ7 ... re=related

Theres also Alien Breed: Impact on steam

[Ed Oscuro]

I tried to add you on Steam and it said unable to find.

Just look up Ed Oscuro, it should bring me up. Maybe you can try "edoscuro" (Steam Community profile name thingy, though my nick on the title is "Ed Oscuro" still).

Nobody has managed to mention it's similarity to Team 17's Alien Breed yet?

The difference is, to begin with, more than two enemies onscreen at a time. (The few snips of that video I watched: long sections of straight hallway with nothing in them, some aliens stumbling around before getting zapped far away from the main player). Alien Breed looks sad, honestly, while Alien Swarm is awesome. Also, some dick commenting on the video accused everybody of bashing the game of being just know-nothing 360 era kiddiez...ha! There were some good products in the '90s, but I'm glad it's over. Really, old games like this make gaming in the '90s more about being a mindless zombie during your free time on your multiple-thousand-dollar PC. OMG SPRITEZ11!

[Leader Bee]

The link I posted was from the first level, from what I remember ( And it's been a long time since I played my amiga) it gets much more intense; You've also got to give some slack to the game for the lack of on screen sprites, you are talking about the Amiga here (using floppy disks) and not a modern multimillion polygon rendering beast with graphics accelerators (which didnt even exist in the time of the Amiga)

Also, some dick commenting on the video accused everybody of bashing the game of being just know-nothing 360 era kiddiez...ha!

What does that have to do with anything? Form your own opinions instead of using an Ad hominem fallacy.

By the way, are you the Ed Oscuro from the Castlevania Dungeon? Whatever happened to that place?

[Ed Oscuro]

The link I posted was from the first level, from what I remember ( And it's been a long time since I played my amiga) it gets much more intense; You've also got to give some slack to the game for the lack of on screen sprites, you are talking about the Amiga here (using floppy disks) and not a modern multimillion polygon rendering beast with graphics accelerators (which didnt even exist in the time of the Amiga)

Sorry, I don't really give slack (what does this mean?) to games that are shit. NO QUARTER

After all, I played a lot of stuff like this back in the day, and most unforgivably have sought ought and bought some of it years later. I wish somebody had told me how crap a lot of games were before I went after 'em. Besides, there's piles of decent Amiga games out there, though your point about it being early and therefore a bit primitive is well taken.

Also, some dick commenting on the video accused everybody of bashing the game of being just know-nothing 360 era kiddiez...ha!

What does that have to do with anything? Form your own opinions instead of using an Ad hominem fallacy.

Yeah, that was my point.

By the way, are you the Ed Oscuro from the Castlevania Dungeon? Whatever happened to that place?

Yes sir. IGN sucks. Konami is terrible at managing franchises. How much time do you have? It's a loooooong story.

I've been dreaming on and off about setting up a new site, but I end up wasting all my time on Shmups instead. What I'm certain of is that I'm not going to be suckered into doing any more "THE UNOFFICIALLY OFFICIAL FAN SITE OF GAME X" stuff because all series have their ups and downs. Castlevania was on the downswing even before I joined up. Ironically, it may be on the upswing again...we'll see (and hope for the best).

[Leader Bee]

To be honest, I thought The dungeon was on it's slippery slope to obscurity since the moment the new "improved" site was launched - yes everything looked nicer but it lost the oldskool charm then and a hell of a lot of content was never put back up (such as learn japanese through castlevania feature or the reviews of the vampire D movies and how they tied into the series)

[Khan]

Theres alot of borrowed ideas and content from other games such as the "Alien shooter" series, killing floor Loaded ect.

But the fact that theres online co-op and its harder makes playing the game worthwhile.

[Ed Oscuro]

All of this is way off topic!:

To be honest, I thought The dungeon was on it's slippery slope to obscurity since the moment the new "improved" site was launched - yes everything looked nicer but it lost the oldskool charm then and a hell of a lot of content was never put back up (such as learn japanese through castlevania feature or the reviews of the vampire D movies and how they tied into the series)

It's interesting to note that, last I checked, Kurt had put the site back up on Kontek.net; I don't know about any new content but I wouldn't hold my breath since he is working for 1up or somewhere (again last I checked). I'm happy it's preserved since it's an important bit of gaming history. I had some talks with the guy who revamped the Dungeon's visuals (Darkmoon, aka DarkmoonFirelyte, I believe) about the Contra HQ and he seemed to insist in making it a "standard" width, i.e. like the New York Times or any other 10-year-old website design that wastes all my monitor (at the time 1600x1200, now 1920x1200...no go with me). Don't get me wrong, he's a great dude, and all they were doing was revamping the website around Igarashi's imagining of the series, which was always heavy with the purples. I definitely dreamed bigger than I probably could have easily delivered on, and college courses definitely crimps the ability to deliver. Anyway, I liked the old design of the Dungeon for nostalgia, especially that silly sign menu it had and it accurately represented how fractured the game series quickly became, especially with the heavy sprite reuse.

What I eventually came to realize was that the point of the website was not that it had, in its static pages, anything particularly profound or innovative. Rather it was a place for all sorts of game fans to show up and talk about things more or less seriously, or not, but the place to find good information about the games was always in the forums where there were always a few experts. In that way Shmups forum is a bit like CVC, but also more "mature" feeling.

Much of the gang gets together on IRC, should still be irc.thanksgabe.com #cvcorner (it's rare that I get on though that can always change; I was on a few nights a couple months ago; I just need to reinstall my operating system one more time...). Last I heard Jorge had left, and somebody paraphrased him saying "You don't know me..." Last I saw him he was fighting with an old program by the makers of SNESamp to try to rip the Super CV IV sounds for a custom MIDI font or something.

Don't know what the Inverted Dungeon is about these days. Bloodreign, Redrum & co. always seem to be pushing the latest incarnation of some vaguely related forum or other but I try not to lose track of them.