Fruits Of A Feather 2017-05-14

I have trouble finding games I like. In fact, I have trouble finding games I can just play. You see, I don't like Microsoft .NET, or Microsoft Visual Studio runtime libraries, or Python, or Java or... well, you see where I am going with this. I just don't like installing any kind of extra interpreter to make applications work. I also don't like Steam, or Happy Cloud, or Pando Media Booster, or... well, you see where I am going with this. I just don't like installing an application to manage applications, that seems like such a waste. Unfortunately, lots of modern games use this kind of junk.

Somewhat recently I came across itch.io, which has some games that are not full of dependencies (most seem to be made with Unity) and are not generally made by giant rich corporations. In other words, they are perhaps not very typical games. What is also great about itch.io is that many of the games are on a "Pay What You Want" basis. Sadly I am sure that many people see this as an opportunity to pay nothing for games. I see it as an opportunity to try a game and then go back and pay what I think is fair. If that happens to be nothing, then so be it... but I don't want to treat it as just a free game repository.

Fruits Of A Feather.

Yesterday I tried out Fruits Of A Feather made by Samurai Punk. A game in which you are a bird exploring an island. There are [192] fruits scattered about the island that you can collect, but to me the main goal was just the exploration of the island. The fruit collection aspect was helpful in learning fine control of the bird's flight. One of the comments on itch gives me the impression this game is not completely finished, but it is still pretty fun to play. It won't take you months of grinding like a typical MMO, but it will keep you very immersed in the game for an hour or two.

I really like seeing games that are a little outside-the-box in a gaming landscape of recycled ones and zeros. I hope a lot of people try this one out and decide to drop a couple of bucks on the authors when they're done.