Found In: Abandonia.com

Genre: Action.

Cost: $0

Worth It?: Yes.

Ah, Night Raid. This is one of those shareware game you used to play as a kid, where you'd only do the first few levels but you'd do them over and over again. Frankly, even back then, the game was too dumb to consider shelling out $10 or so for. The premise is simple: you are out in the middle of desert inside an adobe hut with a rapid-fire cannon mounted on top of it. Planes and helicopters would fly overhead and drop little green men via parachute, and you were trying to kill them all. Occasionally a missile would appear and you'd have to shoot that. Basically there are three ways of killing the grunts, you shot them into tiny pieces, you shot the parachute and they splat into tiny giblets on the ground, or you shoot a plane and little plane pieces would shower on them crushing them.

It was a pretty simple game even when it was made, but now it's less sophisticated than most flash games. But it did have tons of charm. Watching hordes of parachuters get killing by falling plane chunks is absolutely priceless. You could kind of make combos, by destroying the topmost plane and having those chunks destroy another, lower plane and so forth until the entire field is covered with what looks like flying wooden boxes and pixel-sized giblets of soldiers. Every four levels, you'd get a little intermission. I've gotten to see two of them so far... one of them was your little dude ordering pizza, and the other was an outhouse getting ported in.

Now that the full version is available free, I've got to admit I wasn't missing much from the demo. The only enemies that I hadn't fought were the choppers, and really they are identical to the cargo planes except they fly a lot higher. Maybe there's more, I dunno. But it's the little intermissions which really keep you going, though, so I've got a lot of playing ahead of me.

Booting it now, it works decent on XP. The sound is terrible though, you'll want to mute it if you can help it. Occasionally your turret will get stuck, I think it's because you press one of the cursor keys  too long. I haven't tried running it under dos-box or VDM sound, so that may solve those issues.