Natural Selection is a modification for the video game Half-Life. Its concept is a mixture of the first-person shooter and real-time strategy game genres. The game was created by Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland, who later founded the company Unknown Worlds Entertainment. Natural Selection v1 was first publicly released on Halloween 2002, and is now at version 3.2. Natural Selection 2 was released in late 2012.
Grinding, specifically in video games, is the act of repeating an action or set of actions to achieve a desired result. Players usually perform these tasks to earn experience points, in-game items (loot), or to improve a character's level/stats. Grinding is commonly, but not exclusively, performed in MMORPGs, as improving the player's character is often the main goal of these games.
Kongregate is an American web gaming portal and video game publisher. Its website features over 110,000 online games and 30+ mobile games available to the public. The company also publishes games for PC, mobile, and home consoles. It was purchased by GameStop Corporation in 2010 before being acquired by Modern Times Group MT AB in 2017.
Desktop Tower Defense is a Flash-based tower defense browser game created by Paul Preece in March 2007. The game had been played over 15.7 million times as of July 2007, and was one of Webware 100's top ten entertainment web applications of 2007. Desktop Tower Defense is available in an English, Spanish, German, French, or Italian interface. In May 2009, a commercial Nintendo DS version became available.
Tower defense (TD) is a subgenre of strategy games where the goal is to defend a player's territories or possessions by obstructing the enemy attackers or by stopping enemies from reaching the exits, usually achieved by placing defensive structures on or along their path of attack. This typically means building a variety of different structures that serve to automatically block, impede, attack or destroy enemies. Tower defense is seen as a subgenre of real-time strategy video games, due to its real-time origins, even though many modern tower defense games include aspects of turn-based strategy. Strategic choice and positioning of defensive elements is an essential strategy of the genre.
Bloody Fun Day is a puzzle Flash game developed by Urban Squall and published by Kongregate on March 12, 2009. Players control one of a family of three grim reapers and are tasked with moving around an island of hexagonal tiles, killing creatures called Cuties in order to replenish their own life force. Cuties come in four colors. Only the red ones restore life; the others charge special abilities that give the player more ways to kill further Cuties.
Heroes of Newerth (HoN) was a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game originally developed by S2 Games for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The game idea was derived from the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne custom map Defense of the Ancients and was S2 Games' first MOBA title. The game was released on May 12, 2010, and re-released as a free-to-play game on July 29, 2011. On May 5, 2015, Heroes of Newerth development duties passed to Frostburn Studios, with the development team moving over to the new company. The service ceased operations on June 20, 2022.
Tanki Online (TO) is a browser-based multiplayer free-to-play video game created and published by AlternativaPlatform. It was released on June 4, 2009. A remake of the game named Tanki X was released on April 20, 2017.
Realm of the Mad God is a massively multiplayer online shooter video game co-created by Wild Shadow Studios and currently owned and developed by DECA Games. It was in public beta from January 2010 and the browser version launched on June 20, 2011. On February 20, 2012 the game was made available on the digital distribution platform Steam for Microsoft Windows and OS X.
Kixeye is a video game company founded in July 2007 and headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The company creates, develops and publishes massively multiplayer online real-time strategy games (MMORTS) for PC and mobile devices. Kixeye gained popularity as a pioneer in midcore action games featuring real-time combat on the social networking website Facebook. Following their initial launch, Kixeye's games generated twenty times more revenue per daily active user than other social games, retaining active users five times longer on average.
Smite is a 2014 free-to-play, third-person multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed and published by Hi-Rez Studios for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, and Amazon Luna. In Smite, players control a god, goddess or other mythological figure and take part in team-based combat, using their abilities and tactics against other player-controlled gods and non-player-controlled minions.
Super Smash Flash is a series of fighting browser games published by indie company McLeodGaming, led by Gregory McLeod under the alias Cleod9. It is based on the Super Smash Bros series. The original Super Smash Flash is based specifically on Super Smash Bros. Melee. Its follow-up, also considered a reboot, is Super Smash Flash 2.
Infinite Crisis was a 2015 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game based on the fictional universe of DC Comics, developed by Turbine and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, loosely based on the comic book series of the same name. The game featured two squads of DC heroes and villains as they competed in combats across multiple destructive battlefields featuring in-game changing catastrophic events. It was a free-to-play game that was supported by micro-transactions.
Risk of Rain is a 2013 platform game developed by Hopoo Games and published by Chucklefish. The game, initially made by a two-student team from the University of Washington using the GameMaker engine, was funded through Kickstarter before being released on Microsoft Windows in November 2013. Ports for OS X and Linux versions were released a year later, with consoles versions being released in the later half of the 2010s.
Arena of Fate is a cancelled free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Crytek Black Sea. The game was announced in May 2014, closed beta began on August 5, 2015. It featured five-against-five battles with legendary heroes from history and fantasy.
Robocraft is an online vehicular combat game developed and published by Freejam Games. The game is set on different planets, with players constructing robots to fight with and against others in battle. The game features contained garage bays in which players can build various functional vehicles with basic block-based parts, such as cubes and wheels, along with weapons that can be used for combat. The initial alpha build was released in March 2013, and gained over 300,000 players by the following year. It officially released out of beta on August 24, 2017.
Mikengreg is an independent video game development team of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. Their games include Solipskier, Gasketball, and TouchTone. The two met in a game development class at Iowa State University and later began to collaborate on the Adobe Flash game Dinowaurs. When the project was funded, they founded Intuition Games with other college friends in Ames, Iowa, where they worked on small Flash games such as Gray, Liferaft, and Fig. 8 for Flash game sites such as Kongregate. Dinowaurs was one of the first games signed for the Kongregate platform. Their other games involved controlling the weather, influencing individuals in a riot, and riding a bicycle. Boxleiter and Wohlwend worked on several additional games that were put on hiatus.
Vainglory is a free-to-play video game with in-game purchases, developed and published by Super Evil Megacorp for iOS, Android and PC. The game is a version of the MOBA wherein two opposing teams of three or five players fight to destroy the enemy by controlling the path between the bases, which is lined by turrets and guarded by AI-controlled enemy creatures called minions. Off the path, players battle for control points that provide resources. The game was released for iOS on November 16, 2014, after being soft-launched for over half a year, with the Android version being released on July 2, 2015. A Mac and Microsoft Windows version of the game was released in July 2018. Through cross-platform play, players on all four platforms can play together simultaneously.
Paragon was a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game developed and published by Epic Games. Powered by their own Unreal Engine 4, the game started pay-to-play early access in March 2016, and free-to-play access to its open beta started in August 2016. Epic Games shut down its servers in April 2018.
Forced: Showdown is a top-down single-player bullet-hell brawler developed by Danish indie game developer BetaDwarf. The game was released in March 2016 for Windows, OS X and Linux through Steam as well as GOG.com. The game revolves around Contestants fighting for wealth and glory in an ever-changing galactic game show. The gameplay mixes roguelike aspects with a trading-card game. It consists of selecting a champion, enhancing and empowering him and his abilities to battle through hordes of minions and dodging their attacks to survive.
