Cheap PC Gaming: SuperCrateBox

This week on CPCG we’ve a got a new game that looks like an old one. SuperCrateBox is a fast-paced arcade game that is perfect fodder for high-score battles between friends. The game is styled and plays like an ‘old school’ arcade game, complete with rapidly increasing difficulty and the ‘just one more go’ mentality.

[drop]The object of SCB is to collect crates. Every crate you collect will give you a random weapon which you must use to kill baddies whilst you collect the next crate – and then repeat. The baddies come in 3 delicious flavours; small yellow walking skulls, big yellow walking skulls and flying white skulls. The walking skulls will drop into the level from a hole in the ceiling and, provided you don’t kill them, walk through the level until they fall into the firey pit at the bottom. If they manage to get into that pit, they will get angry and drop back into the level as red running skulls which, as you might have guessed, move quite a bit faster. The flying white skulls will just float around the level, getting in your way at the worst possible times.

If you touch a baddy you’ll tragically die, which is game over. However, a quick press of a button and you can try again, which is where the ‘just one more go’ mentality might come from – that and the fact that the game is ridiculously enjoyable and perfectly balanced. By which I mean when I die, it’s always because I neglected to pay attention to a flying skull, I managed to cut myself in half with my own weapon, or just ran into the fire pit like an idiot (which I did embarrassingly often). So obviously, it’s in your best interest to crack some skulls using everything from a shotgun or machine gun all the way up to a flamethrower and a laser gun. Some are better than others but you’d better master them all if you want to survive for any period of times.

[drop2]There are unlockables, too. You unlock some extra weapons, another mode (which increases the amount of baddies) and the two unlockable arenas quite quickly, and after that you’ll continue to unlock characters (you spawn as a random character each time) for a while.

SCB is a superb little game that will run on pretty much any machine thanks to its retro stylings. It’s free, addictive, light-weight and has high scores. It’s also much easier to play with a joypad if you’ve got one, much in the same way Super Meat Boy is easier to play with a joypad (read: impossible without one). It’s available to download for Windows and Mac (and can probably be emulated in Wine on Linux easily) from the official website.

There’s a gameplay video below, but for whatever reason the game slowed down quite a bit whilst recording, so it’s essentially slow motion SuperCrateBox. Still, it shows the game. Just…slowly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lljw65ijeUE