In games, as in movies, you have the blockbusters and the arthouse titles. Most of the time, I just play the blockbusters: the likes of Bioshock, Portal, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and so on. But in the last couple of days I've been enjoying a couple of considerably lower budget titles.
The first is Audiosurf, a sort of driving game where the track is generated from any of the music you have on your computer (DRM-protected purchases from the iTunes store excepted, annoyingly). The aim is to hit coloured blocks on the track and score as highly as you can. It doesn't sound like much, but there's several different game modes, and it's a lot of fun. The high score tables are online, so you can compare your paltry scores with those racked up by everyone else. Available for only $9.95 from Steam.
Even Mandy loves it and insisted that we buy a second copy for her laptop. It's the first game of mine that she's taken an interest in since Unreal Tournament 2003!
The second game is Space Hulk, a faithful reproduction of an old Games Workshop board game I used to play when I was a kid. It only runs at a resolution of 640x480, so I had to drop the resolution on my monitor so I didn't need a magnifying glass to play. But despite that, it's still an enjoyable turn-based strategy game which made me feel very nostalgic. And best of all, it's free.
