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New Humble Indie Bundle Goes Live
Physicser writes "The latest Humble Indie Bundle has gone live, consisting of Super Meat Boy, Shank, Jamestown, Bit.Trip Runner, and NightSky. Also, if you beat the average price, you receive Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles. As always, the games are DRM-free, and this is the initial Linux release for all seven. I'm also curious to see what will be added later on, as has been the tradition of the Humble Bundles."
They have already surpassed the 930,000 $ mark within the first ten hours, will probably reach 1 million within 12h. Maybe slashdot helps it catapult to 2 million? Go Indies!
I think that humble bundle inc should slow down a bit..
2 bundles in a month?
I don't know if it's the games or just me but the last one I skipped because the games didn't intrigue me that much and this one seems about the same to me. It might also be that I'm just disenchanted because of the constant presence of some humble bundle to the point where it isn't something special anymore.
Am I being a fart or do others think less frequency more quality would be nice?
-- no sig today
This isn't actually news and it's also about 15 hours late.
~The roAm
Really? Really, really?
Here are some devs playing the fair and open game (you can pay one cent if you want) and you have to be a total shit and still rip them off? Exactly where do you get off being such a cock?
It's people doing exactly this kind of venture you should be supporting!
If you can afford your monthly broadband, you can afford a few dollars to pay them. If you can't, don't play. It really is that simple.
And as for "free", you do know that doesn't necessarily mean "without charge" don't you? I guess not, otherwise you would be acting like such a total fuckwad.
You're probably such a clueless shit-head that you torrent songs from Mangatunes and Jamendo to "fight the man, man".
Piss off.
Haters gonna hate
Hey, take it easy fella, I was only kidding. I've never pirated a humble bundle, and the number of seeds/leechers for the torrents that are up suggests that not many other people are pirating them either. Hence the whoosh (I was busy missing the point).
I would think its better for HIB if the people who would have paid a very small amount pirate it instead
Atleast they will save on the overheads
Though I dont know about their costs, so cant say what that amount would be
Any idea how much it actually costs them for the processing+Bandwidth+costs of keeping the accounts per bundle to breakeven?
FYI, YHBT
> such a clueless shit-head that you torrent songs from Mangatunes and Jamendo
Calm down, man. Jamendo officially uses torrents for distribution of its music.
Is the Linux version complete of Super Meatboy (i.e includes Super Meat World).
In fact are all the Super Meatboy versions complete. (Hate DRM but intend to buy it if its not crippled - never buy a steam game but also won't pay for an inferior product).
Don't get me wrong, I love these bundles and have picked up the last four. They provide solid entertainment at a good price, allow me to try out different types of games without breaking the wallet, it's great that most of the games work under both Linux and Windows (because I'm kinda moody when it comes to operating systems), and it's wonderful that we have some control over where our contributions go. It's also kinda cute that they have created a business model that actually makes these games move. (I don't know if I'm typical, but I wouldn't have spent a dime on these games otherwise.)
Yet, at the end of the day, posting each new release on Slashdot results in little more than an orgy of free advertising. And yeap, I think of pretty much every product release that's posted here in the same way.
So keep up the great work Humble Bundle salesmen and indie developers, but please find more appropriate places to advertise.
India has sent a bundle to the Hubble Telescope and it has be turned on.
Some people just outright don't give a shit. That is something that you need to accept. You can't logically sway them to do something they really don't want to do.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Most of the comments above are focussing on the "Humble Bundle" system. As I've actually got most of these already via various Steam sales, I thought I'd try to comment on the actual games.
Super Meat Boy is the best of the bunch and is definitely worth a few dollars if you don't have it already. It's ridiculously difficult in places, but also very more-ish. You really do want a gamepad to play it properly, though - keyboard mode is not nice.
NightSky is clever, but I found its appeal fairly short-lived. Bit.Trip Runner isn't really doing anything we haven't seen done better elsewhere. Shank and Jamestown are the two I haven't played.
You'll get a much more interesting package if you pay above the average. Cave Story+ is really very good indeed - and I suspect that between that and Super Meat Boy, you could justify paying over the average. Gratuitous Space Battles is a really great idea, but I've found that it works far better at a level of principle than it does in practice (where it tends to be deeply frustrating and has a learning curve that annoyed even me - and I've beaten and loved Dark Souls). It's the best game in the package from a graphical perspective, if that matters to you (though still a long way behind mainstream commercial offerings).
I don't want anything to do with Steam. I have no use for a game that needs an always-on connection. If I buy these games, Valve has no need to know I exist.
This makes me less likely to buy indie games. I paid full price for Gratuitous Space Battles not six weeks ago.
At least the Trine 2 page warns me: "Linux and DRM free versions will be added to Humble Store purchases in 2012." (Which is why I'm waiting on it. Screw Steam-spyware.)
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Actually, "15 hours late" is approximately the same as "33 hours beforehand" in Slashdot time.
I don't see it in the donation list. Where is EFF when it needed most? I may be an evil person, but I don't want to donate money to US and UK hospitals, I don't care.
For those that have missed it: Seems like the Humble Bundle is getting a bit competitions, a few weeks ago the IndieRoyale Bundles got launched, they follow a similar model of multiple games for an almost-pay-what-you-want price (min around $3). it however doesn't have the charity and it only sometimes has Linux versions of the games. Also their game selections seems to be not so great most of the times, however they include a gem every now and then.
Not so indie, not so humble, IMO:
Shank is published by EA.
EA is the opposite of indie, pretty much the monster in the industry. Lookup spouses vs EA lawsuits.
Looks as if I'm going to need a controller for Super Meat Boy. Any suggestions for a console-like OS X game pad? There are some nice Logitech wireless controllers out there but they don't seem to be OS X compatible.
It was news to me, because they can't (or don't want to) send me notifications of new bundles. And yes, I checked my spam folder. And if you knew 15 hours ago, why didn't you share it with the rest of the class?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...trundle bumble.
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
I quite liked Voxatron and Jasper's Journeys from the last bundle. For these two games it was worth it.
The only downside to both of these, in my humble opinion, is the game length. Would have liked more levels. Hoping that these games are extended in the future.
I could easily go for Jasper's Journeys 2
Could be I'm addicted to Mario clones :-)
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Don't know about their costs, but they already offer the downloads through the bittorrent "network". So, people who use this option put very little strain on the network of the Humble Organizers, and share this "burden" among themselves.
Most people purchasing are using Windows, and most of those users will use the Steam key provided. I don't know if Valve will charge HIB for using their bandwidth or how any of that works at all, but most of the bandwidth costs are just running their server smoothly during the sale.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I'm assuming your dayjob doesn't involve selling any products, services, entertainment, anything worth any money to anybody or in fact is nonexistant?
How else could you morally justify pirating games you can legally purchase for less than the cost of a beer?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They webseed the torrents, so still are paying for the bandwidth I believe
But hansamurai's comment makes sense
Yes, that's how torrents work, you seed for the first people downloading, then they become seeders themselves (before their download ends and after for as long as they keep seeding), and so on, until the strain on the original uploader becomes minimal, exactly like the pirated distribution except the torrent link is not public.
I don't know much about processing fees, but I do know that netflix said recently that it costs them a penny to stream a gigabyte of data. I doubt they get such a nice deal on bandwidth, but even if they pay ten times as much, I think those bundles are far more profitable to them than to the developers per hour of work invested, especially with the default money split which is suggested on purchase.
... is reason enough to get this bundle :) It's an awesome game.
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2011/12/14/humble-indie-bundle-4/
http://positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index.html
And know i don't
Really? I expect wrong words and typos when they have some benefit, for example, to save time. Using a longer word with the wrong meaning?
Perhaps parent was introducing a new word play, with the meaning of, "and know this, I don't want ..." instead of what I figured they meant, "and no I don't want..."
Meh
Seriously, have a look at ControllerMate over at http://www.orderedbytes.com/. This tool allows you to customize any input device that your Mac can read from. You could turn your built-in Qwerty keyboard into Dvorak, or use an NES Advantage plugged into your USB port to control iTunes -- almost anything is possible, from simple key mapping to full custom scripting. I used ControllerMate to customize button mappings for my wired USB Logitech gamepad for those games I've got that have the controls hard-coded. I don't have any wireless Logitech products, but so long as your Mac can read the signal coming from the device, you could use ControllerMate to make it do what you want.
FWIW, I'm not the dev, and I don't know him. I've just used the software in the past (and found myself wishing that something this versatile and easy to use also existed for Linux).
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
true, but thats only IF the downloaders are seeding as well. Most people will just limit upload to 1-2kBps and stop when the DL completes
Buy the package for $0.01 then. See which ones install and when you're happy with the results, increase your bid accordingly.
Looking at those two sites, all games will run under Windows, apparently, and a small handful on Mac, but neither site has any apparent support for Linux. "Boo hoo," some might say, but multi-platform support is one of the big draws for me with the Humble folks.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I bought this for Super Meat Boy, and it turns out I can't configure any controls or set and settings at all, since this is all done through the steam client, and what you get in the bundle is a standalone application. I'm not too happy with only being able to play in windowed 640 x 480 with the keyboard.
Holy shit, you knew about some niche indie event that lasts for two weeks, FIFTEEN HOURS before it was discussed on Slashdot?
Take note: a rare case when "information wants to be free" is aggressively downloaded on Slashdot, despite being used in the same exact context it's regularly used in +5, Insightful comments.
Well, my overall experience with the Humble Bundle #4 so far has been nearly as bad as my experience with many open source games: seemingly heavily excessive requirements that an older computer like I have can't match and general instability/slowdowns/simply not working. Just for perspective, this is a Sempron 3000+ with 1.25GB of RAM with a Radeon 9200 (ie, no pixel shader support) with 128MB of VRAM.
Cave Story+ crashes with SIGILL in libsdl-1.2 on a movq instruction (on idea how that's possible as Semprons most definitely support mmx) which was resolve by renaming the lib directory so the system libsdl-1.2 would be used. Still, there's noticeable slow downs.
NightSkyHD seems slow, doesn't seem to work in full screen, and trying to load "The Beach" which I assume is the first map just hangs it.
Gratuitous Space Battles hangs at the splash title screen. At least according to the specs, it look might the game might actually work if it actually worked.
Jamestown refuses to work because of "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" although I'm rather certain it'd still not work as the System Requirements listed for the Windows version says I need OpenGL 2.0 and 256MB+ of VRAM.
Bit.Trip.Runner has the same "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" and again I don't think it'll work anyways because the Windows specs say I need OpenGL 2.1 and shader model 3.
Super Meat Boy requires a set of GL extensions my video card doesn't have.
And I'm still waiting on Shank to finish downloading to find out why it will probably not work.
Now, obviously if I had a newer computer with Windows, at least some of these problems would go away. But as noted again in the System Requirements, Intel Integrated graphics won't necessarily work in at least one of the games. So, to actually play all the games, I'd have to make sure to make a special purchase for a video card...which at this point might as well be called a game card since that's the only real reason to buy it. And at that point, I'd rather just buy a game console and skip all the fuss of libraries and GL extensions and whatever other shit that's involved. It's simply not worth the headache and Humble Bundle just further confirms it.
PS - Okay, I do actually do some gaming on the PC. But, it's incredibly hit and miss. Only a hand full of open source anything games actually work on my system. Now, I'd assume that if I used Windows and not crappy open source drivers* then things would be better, but I don't think it'd be that much better. The overall point is that developers, be they open or closed source ones, are unwilling to support anything particularly old intentionally, so it's more of a crap shoot and testing and praying. This holds true even for "2D" games, a lot of which use OpenGL and specifically various features that my card simple doesn't support at all or not well. Of course, there's also the general issue that a lot of games are probably just badly written, where actually scaling to full screen suddenly causes massive frame rate loss and noticeable slowdown. *Sigh*
*I say this with all due respect. I recognize that a lot of the drivers are significantly, if not entirely, the byproduct of reverse engineering. Never the less, some of them are simply very obviously incomplete, unstable, and glitchy and there's no one either willing or able to work more on them precisely because they're related to older hardware. In my case, I simply don't know enough about the technology or I'd gladly contribute; I simply don't know where to begin. To that end, I'm also rather too lazy to try to fix a lot of the problems because I know that with the hardware being so old, it's not like I could work miracles to support enough features to make a lot of games work. That is, I'd have to not only fix the graphics first but I'd then have to fix/downgrade the requirements of a lot of the games. It's simply too large of a task for me to even begin to contemplate.
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Bought the sometimes funny, sometimes very disappointing, hope this time to buy interesting things.2012 cheap ugg boots
Over 4 Billion PubNub Messages delivered since Humble Indie Bundle #4 Launch.
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