Freeware Game Pick – ‘Necro Gaia’ – Intergalactic Planetary

Here’s one from the ‘fifteen minutes of fun’ desk to help liven up a dreary, post-storm Sunday morning. Necro Gaia is a short, single-screen arcade shooter with a whole bunch of unique ideas. Playing as the Earth, you’re tasked with defending yourself as you hurtle through space to a new galaxy. Unfortunately, you’re being pursued by the evil cosmic serpent Necro Gaia.

So, being a planet, you don’t actually have the power to do much, other than orbit the sun, which you do. Pressing the space bar makes you orbit faster, and enemies that are caught in your shadow are slowed and weakened, but still undamaged. To defend yourself, you need to gather magical space-crystals, and use them to summon other planets to defend yourself with. Weird enough concept yet?

So, you orbit around the sun, grabbing green crystals. You then drag and drop five different kinds of defensive planets on-screen. Some of them shoot in the direction of your mouse cursor, one attracts crystals from across the screen, and the most expensive one generates extra health if you’ve taken a few hits. The planets are destroyed if hit by any enemy, though, and fade out after a while anyway, so you’re constantly juggling your summoning and gem-collecting.

The game continues until you’ve faced down and defeated Necro Gaia itself, although I do wish there was some kind of infinite survival mode. It really doesn’t make that much sense unless you play it yourself, really. So do so – it’s an 8mb download for Windows, and a cute little bit of faux-8-bit arcade gaming.