We love what our old cohort Eli and his new gig GameClub are doing in the mobile space by resurrecting a ton of fantastic mobile games that have been lost to time over the years. Since early March, GameClub has been releasing these resurrected game through their own Early Access program via Apple’s Testflight, with a new game coming every week. These releases have been a great mix of popular titles, cult-classic fan favorites, and more obscure games that never received the attention they deserved. One of my personal favorite GameClub releases so far has been Venan Entertainment’s (who are now called Megaspace Industries) RPG/space shooter hybrid Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, which was our TouchArcade iPhone Game of the Year way back in 2010. It’s just an all-around phenomenal game and one that deserves to still be playable by new and existing fans nearly a decade after its release.
However, about 7 months after Space Miner’s launch, Venan released a really cool spinoff called Space Miner Blast. Whereas the original Space Miner was an arcade shooter with pretty complex RPG systems layered on top, Space Miner Blast offered the core arcade experience with a high-scoring mode and a more straighforward and simplistic upgrade system. It also served as sort of a lite version of the main Space Miner, as Space Miner Blast was free to download with ads and a one-time IAP to remove them. Also, seeing as Space Miner Blast was being developed RIGHT as Apple announced the iPhone 4 and its Retina Display, it sent Venan scrambling to add high resolution art assets that would take advantage of the new display. That’s not a cheap thing to do though, so anyone who bought the IAP in Space Miner Blast also got the ability to download those high-res assets into the game, while free players played with the regular standard definition graphics. This was also how Venan got around Apples then 20mb download limit, which seems so quaint looking back.
Anyway, all this is leading to the fact that along with its older sibling, Space Miner Blast has also joined the GameClub family. If you haven’t done so already, head over to the GameClub website where you can sign up for their Early Access program and every Monday you’ll receive an email with a Testflight download link to a new game. This service is totally free, and when Space Miner Blast hits this Monday it will be the 19th(!) GameClub release to date, and you’re free to download any or all of the previous 18 games for free as well. When GameClub launches formally this fall it’ll be a paid subscription service, which hey, maybe you’re a fan of and maybe you’re not, but at least for the Early Access program you can be playing all of these games in full without any ads or IAP completely for free, so there’s no reason not to be doing that.
But wait, there’s more! As has been the case with several of the GameClub releases so far, they’re offering EARLY Early Access to the folks on their Discord server, so if you head over there and join up you’ll be able to find a link to Space Miner Blast as of this posting. That’s like, right now! I’m a member of their Discord and it’s one of the most well-managed servers I belong to, with separate chats for each Early Access game, a one-stop repository for all previously released games, a lively general chat (and a dedicated meme chat room!), and a really slick logging system for getting any feedback and bug reports sent directly to the developers. It’s darn impressive, I tell ya. So definitely check out the GameClub Discord server, or at the very least sign up on their website for the Early Access program, and start playing Space Miner Blast and many other classic mobile games right now.
