Mercury Message Board

Presenting the first of a new weekly series, in which Porpentine of the excellent Free Indie Games takes us through some of the most splendid, er, free indie games released/discovered over the last few days. You may notice this column is in need of an image, a la Bargain Bucket and Sunday Papers – if you fancy creating one, in exchange for IMMORTAL GLORY, please email a 600x250pixel JPG here and we’ll see what we can do.

Now, what have you got for us, Porpentine?

Unleashing rat chaos. Inventing more powerful letters. Shrieking at paddles. A homicidal planet trapped in Space Prison. How poetry can help you navigate ruins.(more…)

Mercury is “an experimental winner-generated arcade roguelike”, which immediately made it sound more exciting than “a massively anti-aliased cover-based shooter set in a warehouse on the moon” when I read about it first thing this morning. It’s a free game in the early stages of development, which, because of its brilliant conceptual twist, makes it the perfect time for the good people of RPS to enter its dungeons. Mercury is “winner-generated” because after each cycle of play, the two players with the most points are allowed to make new content for the game. So what started as a single class, single enemy, single item dungeon crawl is becoming more complex and chaotic as time goes on. Try the beta now or read more below.

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#science The planet closest to the sun better be on its best behavior, because we're watching it. As of last night NASA's Messenger probe is the first man-made satellite ever to orbit the planet Mercury. What do we hope to find? More »