Prey is often maligned after it’s long development cycle left people disappointing themselves and their high expectations. The game can actually be quite enjoyable for fans of classic HL-era FPS (with some twists). The narrative appropriately sets the tone and drives the gameplay, like in the best of games. The protagonist is a Native American named Tommy who feels disconnected from his heritage, one that will end up being crucial to his survival. The action is a blast with many perspective shifts that keep it a unique experience. The weapons are enjoyable, thankfully, as that often tends to be crucial to my enjoyment of FPS games as a whole. They feel nice. That long development time surely wasn’t wasted here.

I think my only complaint was how you couldn’t lose. Similar to the chambers in Bioshock, but with added effort, you can revive yourself where you left off after you “die”. It runs on the Doom III engine (2004) to give you an idea of how well it will run on your system. It still looks great, as you can see in the screenshot.

Sokkratez and I have both played through the game and we both highly recommend it. You can probably find it for under $10, but it’s selling for $20 sold out on Steam as of this moment. (don’t ask me how) Luckily you can add any retail Prey cd-key to the Steam service.

See what I did there? No? Well, you might once you start reading about the game I’m going to be talking about today. It is from a developer called Cryptic Sea and it won awards for Innovation in Game Design as well as the grand prize at IGF in 2005.

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This game is called De Blob. According to The Wikipedia: “de Blob was originally developed as a free downloadable game for the Windows PC by eight students studying Game Design & Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts and one student studying Game and Media Technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.”. I’ll take their word for it, and you should too.
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In an effort to increase cheap and independent game awareness, I’m going to showcase Audiosurf today. It has been getting tons of good press all across the internet in the past weeks so you’ve probably already heard of it, and there is an almost equally good chance that you’ve played it yourself by now, but it’s so good that I simply have to make it the first game that I talk about here.
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If you’re looking for some great PC games to dive into with minimal investment, the first place you should check out is a list of awards for free games in the past year. You’ll find new and hot titles that are just begging for your attention. This particular list compiled by moddb.com even features some yet to be released mods and released/unreleased standalone games created by indie developers. You can read through the awards lists page by page or watch a video showcasing them all in order.

You can expect more posts featuring quality cheap gaming tips in the future.