A triad of free casual games adorn our Download Discounts list today, and nestled among them is Today I Die Again, an indie game that might challenge your notion of what a video game is and what they mean. We’ve also got WantedZombies, a fast matching and tapping game that’ll be sure to challenge you, and a different take on the vertical jump genre that’s a refreshing contrast to members of the genre like Doodle Jump and its many clones.
WantedZombies (iPhone) Free (was $0.99)
Snag this fast-paced casual game while it’s cheap, because it’s great for killing a few minutes and has a tendency to draw you in. The screen is filled with different kinds of zombies — they come in varying colors and outfits, with different attributes mixed throughout. The simple gameplay just has you checking a box at the top of the screen that dictates which kind of zombie to look for, by color or some other attribute, and tapping away as fast as you can to score points by hitting all the zombies of that type you can.
WantedZombies includes multiple gameplay types, including the standard mode that has the game increasing difficulty the longer you play, and a time attack mode that challenges you to act fast. There’s also Game Center support for leaderboards and achievements to encourage you to attempt to best your friends’ scores as well as your own.
Today I Die Again (iPhone) Free (was $0.99)
This award-winning indie game is something different than what most gamers might be used to, which is why finding it for free is a nice surprise. In it, you’re presented with a small block of text, along with a few words you can use to replace them. Putting new words into the text changes the world around your character, a girl who seems to be drowning. Replacing “Hopeless” with “Fearsome,” for example, adds animals to the water around the girl. Grabbing those animals can unlock new words, but figuring out how to play, recombine the words, and utilize the objects on screen is part of the adventure.
Today I Die has been around for a few years, but the game has been reinvented some to accommodate the iPhone’s touchscreen controls. It’s not extremely long, but this is a game that’s more about the potential art of the medium than it is about actually playing. That said, Today I Die Again is one big puzzle, and it’s a challenging one, at that.
Itsy the Spider Goes to China (iPhone) Free (was $0.99)
Something of a fresh take on the vertical jump genre is presented by Itsy the Spider, a game that uses touch controls and a spider’s web instead of tilt controls and a constantly jumping monster. Your goal is still to climb as high as possible, but you must touch and hold staggered flowers scattered across the screen that rise into the air. The flowers serve as anchor points for Itsy’s web, which springs him up into the air like a bungee cord. Some flowers send him higher than others, but shooting web to a flower that’s too far away will cause the web to break from the strain.
Itsy the Spider features some addictive vertical jump gameplay and asks for you to adapt your strategy to think about what your next move should be, which is a nice change for the genre. It carries Open Feint support for achievements and online leaderboards, and allows you to post your high scores to Facebook to share with others.
