Gaming For Good: Glum Buster
Well, we all make mistakes. This is my first one, so it feels weird, but I'm strong. Alec wrote about this a couple of months back. But it's great, and there's a good reason to get it, so there's good reason to write about it all over again.
Glum Buster is a beautiful game for two reasons. Firstly, it's a beautiful indie platformer with a ton of imagination, shifting approaches to how you play, and some remarkably detailed microscopic pixel art. It's also rather beautiful because of its charityware sales model, which is all kinds of lovely.
It's a traditional platformer in so much as you move left and right, and jump. Apart from when you fly. It's also reasonably traditional that you fire with your left mouse button. Except that you shoot at the glum shadows to bring them to brighter life. Then with your completely atraditional right mouse button, you place three points of a triangle which captures a creature within it, seemingly grabbing its essence and opening portals. Until that's not what the game's about, and you're flicking red and blue switches to change level patterns, and climbing on grasshoppers' backs, and flinging yourself into the air using special whirlythings.
It's constantly interesting, a little tricky, and always particularly soothing. And it's free, so you should download it and play it.
However, should you feel the desire, you can pay as much as you want for the game. Or play it as much as you want then choose to pay for it. Or decide to pay for it six hundred times. Or never. However you see fit. But there's a rather excellent incentive to pay - the more times anyone does, the greater percentage of the amount paid goes to the Starlight Children's Foundation. And he's being no stinge.
Every time 25 people buy the game, creator Justin Leingang increases the percentage that goes charitywards. This started at a very generous 51%, and is now in the 53% bracket. $292.63 have already gone toward the good cause. But this is a pretty great game, and RPS has a huge number of readers. Let's see if we can make that number go very high. Do it. Play it, and pay what you think it's worth.