Sportsfriends: four developers team up to make the ultimate party game collection

And now for a Kickstarter that isn't about space, or bringing back the Old Ways - in fact, this is probably one of the most innovative projects on the site. Sportsfriends is a collection of clever party games, four of them to be exact, including Johann Sebastian Joust, which doesn't even rely on a visual display. The four games' four developers are asking for a modest - well, by space sim standards - $150,000, around a quarter of which they've already achieved.

The Kickstarter page will give you the full details, but we'll briefly run through the included games, and why you should probably be excited. Johann Sebastian Joust is a game you've probably only heard of if you're invited to trendy indie festivals, which is criminal because it looks like a lot of fun. I described it in a webgame round-up as "a cross between musical chairs and stuck-in-the-mud"; it uses extra-sensitive Playstation Move controllers in lieu of a screen.

Super Pole Riders will be an expanded version of Bennett Foddy's free browser game Pole Riders , which you should play if you like weird physics and hating yourself. Foddy also made QWOP, GIRP and my personal favourite CLOP , which coincidentally are the noises you'll make as you repeatedly fail at each one. Barabariball, on the other hand, is a Smash Bros-esque fighting/sports game, while Hokra is described as a "minimalist digital sports game".

All four will be coming to PC, Mac and Linux shortly after the PlayStation 3 release. (That's expected to be in Autumn 2013 - providing the collection reaches its Kickstarter total, of course.) Pitch video, as usual, below.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.