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Game bundles for PCs and Macs are a dime a dozen. The best ones, like the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle I wrote about last week, share a portion of the proceeds with a worthy charity.
But here’s something you don’t see every day: an app bundle for smartphones. The Corona Indie Bundle comes with five games for Android and iOS. Purchased separately, they’d cost you around $8. Bundle price: 99 cents.
The deal gets better: 17 percent of the purchase price (an odd amount, I grant you) gets split between three good causes: Bliss, Child’s Play, and Dispensario de Managua.
Need even more incentive? If the Corona guys manage to move more than 100,000 bundles, they’ll unlock a sixth game (the identity of which is a mystery, mwa ha ha!). Here’s a rundown of the five you’re guaranteed to get:
Chickens Quest: Rescue the helpless chicks by guiding them safely to the end of each level. It’s a bit like Lemmings, but fowl-er.
Float: Remember that game you played as a kid where you had to keep hitting the balloon so it wouldn’t touch the ground? That’s Float in a nutshell–and it’s nearly as fun as the real thing.
Robot 99: Rescue the robots as they…fall out of the sky? This is weird little game, but cute and fun and addicting.
The Secret of Grisly Manor: A pretty puzzle-solving adventure game with a decidedly old-school feel.
Walkabout: Stars are scattered around each level. Your job is to collect them all–but you can land on each square only once. So what if this is a variation on other games? It’s a relentlessly addictive variation.
Purchasing the bundle works the same way as purchasing any app–except that the app you end up downloading contains five games instead of one. (A select screen makes it simple to choose the one you want to play.) The only tricky part is figuring out how to exit some of the games so you can get back to the select screen.
That’s a minor gripe; my bigger one is that there’s currently no ticker indicating how many bundles have been sold, so who knows if (or when) that sixth game will get unlocked?
Even so, there’s no question that the Corona Indie Bundle offers a lot of value–and the satisfaction of contributing to charity. Here’s hoping more app developers follow suit.
