Torus Trooper looks a bit like Wipeout at first glance but it soon becomes apparent that this is something completely different. The player races with his ship in a tunnel like environment dodging enemy bullets all the time and shooting back at them so that they cannot shoot more bullets.

The game is controlled with the arrow keys and the CTRL key to fire, keep it pressed for rapid fire, and ALT for slow motion that releases something that resembles a smart bomb when released. The up key increases the speed of the own ship.

The game is time based which means that the player can continue playing as long as the time has not run out. It gets reduced by 15 seconds if the player ship is destroyed and increased when a certain score is reached or a boss is destroyed.

Torus Tropper has very nice graphics for a free game, great speed and an interesting gameplay. I felt a bit sick at first because you literally turn around quite a bit in the game. Probably not a game for players who get motion sick easily.

Titanion is another game from the creator of Tumiki Fighters. It’s a vertically scrolling fast paced shoot em up that lacks variety which becomes apparent after the first ten or so waves of enemies that attack the ship of the player.

The player moves his ship with the arrow keys, shoots with CTRL and uses a Tractor Beam with ALT to attach enemy ships to his own ship. That’s a variation of the way Tumiki Fighters handles that. Reminds me a lot of Space Invaders.

The game can be played in windowed or full screen mode and the player can choose between three games modes: Classic, Modern and Basic.

Basic mode provides unlimited use of the tractor beam while it can only be used for a short time in Classic mode where it replenishes over time. Hitting an enemy ship in basic mode knocks the player’s ship away while it is destroyed in classic mode.

The modern mode on the other hand is different from the other two. You can use the beam to make the enemies aggressive so that they fire more bullets in shorter time which increase the score multiplier. There is also no collision between your ship and enemy ships, they simply pass through each other.

TUMIKI Fighters is a wonderful colorful side scrolling arcade shooter. The Japanese developer Kenta Cho calls it a sticky shooter and I first thought that this was a translation error.. Boy, was I wrong. Every ship in the game is made of several objects which make for great particle effects but also add to the uniqueness of Tumiki Fighters.

Objects that are shoot from enemy ships can be attached to the ship to block enemy bullets. Some even add firepower to the own ship. It does become unclear if you happen to attach lots of objects to your own ship but it usually does not take long until the situation clears up.

The game is running perfectly fine on my Windows XP Service Pack 3 system. The ship can be moved with the arrow keys, Z fires the bullets and X is a slow key. Wonderful game, lots of fun.

I was never a huge fan of the Postal games nor the abyssal movie directed by Uwe Boll who is known for creating computer games into extraordinary bad movies. In a move to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Postal series the team decided to release the multiplayer part of the game Postal 2 Share The Pain.

The game features 14 multiplayer maps, 25 playable characters, 4 different gametypes and 11 crazy weapons. The download is available at Filefront and has a size of roughly 600 Megabytes.

This looks like a similar move to Sierra’s move to offer the multiplayer part of their shooter Fear for free. Downloads are a bit slow currently with roughly 300 Kilobyte per second which could be due to many users downloading the game at once from Filefront.

I cannot really say much about the game because I have not played it at all. Wikipedia has the following information on the game:

Postal² is a 2003 American computer game by Running With Scissors (RWS). It is a sequel to the 1997 game Postal. Both are intentionally highly controversial due to high levels of violence and stereotyping. Unlike its predecessor, Postal² is a first-person shooter based on the Unreal Graphics Engine.

It’s definitely not a game suited for minors and parents should take care that such a game does not get in the hands of their kids.