Tactics 100 Live

(Note that I'm only going to talk about the single-player part of this game, since that's all that I've played. This is true in general, in fact -- I tend to avoid games which require playing with other people. Also, this is the last of the games that I had played before joining Kongregate, for what that's worth.)

Tactics 100 is brought to you by the same designer as Drone Wars, which makes this an object lesson in what genres are well-suited for Flash games, because this game (while not spectacular) is a fun little diversion, and a vastly more enjoyable game than Drone Wars.

The basic principle is pretty simple: it's a turn-based strategy game, where you have units of various types (knights, which are slow melee units capable of dealing and taking a lot of damage; rangers, which are fast ranged units but do little damage; mages, which are slow and vulnerable but can use their magic to deal large amounts of damage to multiple targets; and clerics, who heal other units) which battle it out on a square-grid battlefield. There's a fair degree of tactics involved; for instance, attacking units from their flanks or rear is generally advantageous. There's also high and low ground, though the battlefields are organized in such a way that this almost never comes into play.

One nice thing is that your army is fully customizable; if you choose to create your army from scratch, you're given 100 points, which you can spend either on buying units or on upgrades for the units you've already bought. (You can also choose to start working from the default army, if you prefer.) So you can build an army with lots of relatively weak units, or an army with a few super-powerful units, depending on your preferences. Quite a lot of the fun in this game is derived from tweaking your units to try to get the best combination psosible. (This process is somewhat aided by the fact that some upgrades are obviously much more useful than others, as you will rapidly discover.)

The single-player mode features ten successive fights against different enemy armies, some of which will provide a tough matchup and some of which are pretty much pushovers. Fortunately for those of you trying to earn the hard badge (which requires beating all ten without losing a single unit), the AI is not very smart, so once you've worked out a good army, rolling through all ten is not terribly difficult. The graphics are nice, the sound effects are pretty good, and the music isn't bad either. The game does tend to run a little slow on older computers, but that's not a really big problem for a strategy game like this.

Overall, this is a nice little game, but the replayability of the single-player mode is hampered by the fact that it's a little too easy. Perhaps the multiplayer feature would help make up for this, but that requires playing with other people.

SHIFT 2

Although SHIFT 2 is one of my favorite games on Kongregate, I'm afraid this review is going to be rather short because I've already said nearly everything there is to say in my previous commentary on SHIFT.

Both the gameplay and the spirit of SHIFT 2 are quite similar to the original. The gameplay does have a few interesting additions, though. There are now buttons which can rotate the screen 180 degrees without needing to shift, and even buttons which rotate the screen 90 degrees, adding another dimension to the puzzle solving. These buttons make it surprisingly easy to end up going around in circles in some levels, though, so you'll need to pay a little more attention to what's going on. There's also checked squares, which cannot be shifted into but can only be removed by hitting the appropriate trigger. However, while SHIFT 2 may require a bit more thinking, it's still not a difficult game by any means.

The music is different from (and perhaps not quite as good as) the original, but provides a nice background. One welcome addition is a set of achievements, which gives you some goals to shoot for in addition to simply completing the game. Collecting the medals unlocks some additional bonus material (one thing that is promised, for instance, is the option to play as the "classic character" from the original SHIFT). There is also a level editor, which is a nice addition, and comes with a few extra sample levels that you can try out. On the other hand, the proofreading in the game is awfully poor -- there's a lot of typos in the game text (and there's not that much text, so fitting a lot of typos into it takes some work).

Overall, SHIFT 2 doesn't feel that radically different from the original -- it's still a very entertaining game, but still awfully short. But better a small addition than no addition at all, given how much fun it is.

Today, a three-pack to make up for nothing yesterday.

rotaZion

RotaZion is a game with a very simple concept, with one twist. (You might notice that I use this description, or variations of it, pretty often. There's a good reason -- you don't want to make a game which is exactly like some game that already exists; who would want to play something that's just another version of Breakout? On the other hand, inventing an entirely new genre is a difficult task; not that many Flash game designers haven't tried, but not many have succeeded. So a lot of the games which are successful are ones that take a well-established format and add something to make it unique. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.)

Anyway, rotaZion is a pretty canonical "dodger". You're confronted with an undersea minefield, and your job is to dodge the mines and stay alive as long as possible. A few various powerups, which give you points, slow things down, or make you temporarily invincible, occasionally drift by. The one twist in rotaZion is that your vehicle is a rotating bar (hence the name, I guess). Occasionally this allows you to pull off nifty maneuvers; when your bar is just in the right position you can evade the miners, but more often you'll end up with the bar in the wrong position and crash.

Ultimately, this isn't really enough of a twist to make the game terribly interesting. The music and sounds are both functional but forgettable, and so there was really no incentive to keep playing after I reached the requisite number of points for a badge.

Bubbles 2

In contrast to what I said above, Bubbles 2 doesn't really have a twist. It's an entirely straightforward dodger: you collect bubbles to get points, avoid mines which make you die and end your game, and that's about it. As you collect more bubbles, you yourself become larger, so the game becomes harder quite rapidly, meaning that your typical game is probably less than a minute.

The one distinguishing feature of Bubbles 2 is the variety of powerups, ranging from the straightforward (for example, invincibility) to the offbeat (for instance, Noir, which makes everything a high-contrast black and red, which is actually quite useful for picking up bubbles against the background). However, the short amount of time each game lasts means that whether you end up with great powerups or less useful ones is pretty much a total crapshoot. Also, really, you don't end up playing the game long enough to remember what each powerup is and how it does (or at least I didn't).

The music is pretty well-suited for the average game length, but I doubt it would survive as the music for a longer game. The sound effects are pretty much what you would expect. Overall, this is a fun game to mess around with for a couple of minutes, but I imagine it would have a hard time holding anyone's interest for any longer than that.

Bubble Tanks

And here's the third in our serving of bubble-themed games. Unlike the other two, Bubble Tanks is a shooter with pretty traditional controls (keyboard to move, mouse to shoot). Each screen comprises a single bubble battlefield; moving off the edge of the screen (in any direction) takes you to a new bubble with new enemies. The central concept in Bubble Tanks is that popping your enemies creates a bunch of bubbles which you can pick up and add to your own tank, while being hit by enemy fire will knock bubbles off of your own tank. As your tank grows larger, your gun becomes more and more powerful, which is good because you'll face more and more powerful enemies.

The problem with Bubble Tanks (like the other two) is that it simply doesn't have enough to hold your attention for long. There's not that many different kinds of enemies, and they're mostly differentiated by their size rather than anything else, so the action pretty quickly becomes repetitive. You can't even really die, since if you lose your last extra bubble you're simply ejected into the nearest safe battlefield. Once you've taken the boss down (or a boss -- it seems like there's a lot of them floating around, though you only need to defeat one to get the badge) there's not really much incentive to keep playing.

The music and sounds are both somewhat below average, as the music gets repetitive very quickly and the sounds are kind of annoying. Overall, it's a quick way to get a 15-point badge, but like the other two, there's really no reason to go back to it once you've gotten the badge.

The Several Journeys of Reemus

This may be the most difficult review I've written so far, simply because The Several Journeys of Reemus isn't a great game, nor is it an obviously flawed game. It's just kind of, well, a game.

The Several Journeys of Reemus is a graphical adventure, much in the tradition of the old LucasArts adventure games I think of as the prototype of the genre. There are various objects in the environment you can interact with by clicking on them, and that's about it as far as the interface goes; the puzzle is to first figure out what objects can be interacted with, and then to figure out how to use them to accomplish whatever it is you're supposed to do. (It should be noted that, unlike the old LucasArts games, you can die, and probably will experience many deaths of varying gruesomeness before finally guiding Reemus to his objective.)

The serious weakness of the game is that the environment is simply too small for good puzzles. There aren't that many objects you can interact with, and so solving the puzzles is more a job of finding these objects in the first place (which often involves, at least for me, a lot of annoying waving my mouse around until it alights on an object that you can do something with) and less a job of actual logic. That said, some of the puzzles are pretty clever, which only makes me wish that the environment was better so that you'd get more of those "aha!" moments that are really the core of an enjoyable experience and fewer of those "why can't I find anything to click on?" moments.

One interesting feature is that there are two separate endings (one of which is, in my opinion, noticeably easier to get than the other). Unfortunately, to get both you'll have to play through the whole game twice; but once you've figured out the puzzles, this is a very quick affair, so it's not really a big handicap. The game claims that either solution is equally good, but it clearly wants you to figure out the harder one.

The graphics are kind of charming (though the animation is a little crude, but it's a Flash game, so I'm not really expecting anything particularly great, after all). The music is way too short and will almost certainly drive you crazy (unless you manage to solve the puzzles a lot quicker than I can).

Anyway, like I said at the outset, I wasn't really left with any strong feelings about the game. There are certainly less enjoyable ways to get 30 points on Kongregate, but after completing it, I certainly had no desire to play it again.

SHIFT

If I asked you what game on Kongregate is most like Portal (the real Portal, that is), your first guess might be Portal: The Flash Version. But, as I mentioned earlier, Portal: The Flash Version doesn't actually share all that much in common with its parent. In fact, it's SHIFT (or perhaps SHIFT 2, but we'll get there in due time) which is far closer to the spirit of Portal. It's got a simple but intruiging and creative concept at its core, it's very playful, and overall a very short game, so that you can play it in a single session but still feel that you would like to try more.

The basic concept behind SHIFT is very simple. At first, it looks like an ordinary platformer-type game with platforms and keys and deadly pits of spikes. However, the twist is simple, but very interesting -- when you find yourself stuck, you can press Shift, and suddenly the screen rotates 180 degrees and instead of a black figure on a white background standing on black floors, you're a white figure on a black background standing on white floors. With up and down now switched, it's a piece of cake to get to the high ledge you couldn't reach before. (Or maybe it isn't...)

The game teases you in much the same way that Portal does (indeed, the parallels between the timer and the cake are obvious, and the author makes no secret of where exactly he got his inspiration from), and the whole thing has a very light-hearted feel, which makes it an enjoyable experience to play.

That said, the game is somewhat limited, first simply by the fact that the size of the Flash screen means that the puzzles remain pretty small and hence nothing is too complicated, and second by the fact that there just aren't many levels in the game. (Also, the last level seems a bit misplaced in a game which otherwise is pretty cerebral.) So when you finish, you'll definitely be surprised at just how short the experience was. Still, it's much better to have a game which provides a quick, pleasant experience than one that overstays its welcome (Areas, I'm looking at you...).

The presentation is appropriately sparse -- the graphics are very simple black and white (the better to survive the inversion, I suppose), and there's no sound, though the background music is a nice touch. Like many other Kongregate games, there's no way to go back to specific levels, but since playing through the game is so quick, it doesn't take particularly long to get to any level anyway, so this isn't perhaps as much of a handicap as it might be in other games.

Anyway, there is a SHIFT 2 out, and a review for that coming up soon, so if the game does leave you with a thirst for more, you can get more! But if not, it's still a fun way to spend 20 minutes, and something that really shows the spirit of good game design at work.

3D Logic

3D Logic is a perfect Flash puzzle game: it's simple in both concept and controls, no one level takes a particularly long time (although individual levels can be quite difficult), but overall it's engaging enough that you enjoy the experience.

The basic concept behind 3D Logic is quite straightforward. You're presented with a cube (or, more precisely, the three near faces of a cube), initially 3 by 3 by 3, but moving up to 6 by 6 by 6 at the end, of which some squares have been marked with a color. There are precisely two squares of each color, and your goal is to connect each pair of squares of the same color with a continuous path. Some squares are also blacked out so your path cannot pass through them.

The initial puzzles are quite easy, but they rapidly become more complicated. Though you soon develop a range of tricks to deal with some common situations, the puzzle-solving procedure (at least for me) involves a lot of trial and error, rather than pure deduction. So sometimes you will get lucky and stumble across the correct solution early on, while sometimes you can get yourself stuck in an unproductive corner for a while. In this case I highly recommend restarting the whole thing so you can start from a fresh slate and hopefully avoid falling into the same incorrect pattern as you did previously. The comments agree that levels 16 and 23 are the most difficult, and I think this is true -- the difficulty definitely increases at the beginning, but it kind of reaches a plateau near the end, so if you're a little frustrated, don't go too crazy.

The interface is quite simple, but effective. The one frustrating thing is that you can't clear a square once you've drawn a path there, so the only way to remove an incorrect guess (other than painting it over with another color) is to reset the whole puzzle, which is kind of annoying. There are a few small sound effects which are nice, but that's about it. Also unfortunately, you can't go back to a level once you've completed it. Note, also, that this game doesn't really need to be 3D -- since you only ever see the three near faces of the cube, you could just as easily map it onto a flat 2D surface without changing the substance of the puzzle at all. But the 3D cube does look nice.

Anyway, overall 3D Logic is an entertaining and challenging puzzle that will keep you occupied for an hour or so, depending on just how good you are at solving these puzzles.

You Have To Burn The Rope

(Well, I feel a little cheap reviewing this one next, but it is the next one in my list, so...)

You Have To Burn The Rope may be the only game I've ever encountered where the title is a walkthrough for the whole game. The game is...well, I'm not sure how best to describe it. An experiment? A joke? A trenchant social commentary? (Hopefully not.) Anyway, I feel a little silly describing the game, but I shall. You go through a tunnel (filled with helpful commentary) and meet a boss. To defeat the boss, you have to perform the titular action (sorry for my overuse of "titular" recently, but I just couldn't resist). Then you are treated to a triumphant song over the final credits. That's it!

Anyway. It's not the funniest of jokes, nor the most fun of games, but it will hopefully at least get a chuckle.

Four Second Frenzy

(Sorry for missing yesterday! Somehow I convinced myself I had already written one for the day. I'll see if I can squeeze in another, but you may have to wait for tomorrow.)

(Four Second Frenzy is the second-to-last of the games I have in this list which I had played and completed before reaching Kongregate. It also took the least amount of time to re-earn the badge, since four seconds, even times 50, is not a particularly long time.)

(I'm skipping Areas right now, because I haven't yet finished it and I want to stay true to my pledge to not review games until I've finished them, though I doubt the last three levels will change my opinion. So this parenthetical is really more of a reminder.)

(Holy parenthetical notes, Batman! Shouldn't we actually get to the actual post?)

If you've played WarioWare, then Four Second Frenzy should look awfully familiar. The concept is very simple: you're presented with a series of "microgames", each of which lasts the titular four seconds. (Well, four seconds at maximum. It is possible to fail or succeed, depending on the game, in less than four seconds.) Each game uses a very simplified control set (just the arrow keys and space bar, and not every game even uses all of those), and all of the instructions you get about each game are presented in a quickly-flashed command at the beginning (like "Avoid!" or "Get treasure!"). When you first play the game, of course, trying to figure out what you need to do and then doing it in the space of four seconds is a very entertaining challenge, but after you've seen the games a few times, it becomes much easier. Unlike WarioWare, where the game difficulty changes in two ways (over time, the games speed up, and the goals become more difficult to achieve (for instance, the target you have to hit becomes smaller)), the games in Four Second Frenzy are always the same, meaning that the replay value is pretty low after you've finished everything. The game offers a variety of game modes, which are not particularly different. Normal mode requires you to beat 20 games within 7 lives, followed by a boss; endurance mode gives you 10 lives to beat all 50 games and the boss; and survival mode gives you a single life to see how far you can get.

The strength and weakness of Four Second Frenzy is the diversity of game design. In WarioWare, all of the games (or at least all the games in a single category) have a fairly unified aesthetic, which makes them feel like a nice package. Four Second Frenzy, though, has microgames contributed by a horde of developers, which means that no two games feel exactly alike. Indeed, everything from the art style to the difficulty to even the feel of the directions varies wildly from one microgame to another. This results in kind of a disorienting experience. The varying difficulty can be annoying, too; there are some games which are almost insultingly easy, while other games are infuriatingly difficult (and often dependent on the initial conditions). Especially frustrating is that the physics laws often change unexpectedly: in some levels, pressing the arrows will change the velocity of your object, while in some levels it will change the position, and telling which is which is often impossible.

As far as presentation goes, the graphics (as mentioned) vary wildly, but usually are at least serviceable; most of the individual microgames don't have their own sound, though there is an occasional effect or two, and there are some general success or failure sounds. The overall soundtrack is provided by a techno track which does a nice job of lending the appropriate intensity to the proceedings.

Overall, Four Second Frenzy is a fun little game to play with for a little while, but once you've gotten the hang of most of the minigames and gotten the badge, there's really not much reason to keep playing that long.

Music Bounce

Music Bounce is a very interesting game which is also very impossible to describe. Seriously, when you read the instructions, it sounds like the most confusing game ever, but once you actually sit down and start playing you see it's pretty straightforward and intuitive. So I recommend that, if the following attempt at a description confuses you, just try playing it for a minute and you'll see what I'm talking about.

All right. So you have a playing field with some bricks on it. A series of gates is located along the left edge of the field. Clicking a gate will release a ball, which travels diagonally. The ball will then proceed through the playing field; if the ball hits a brick, the ball bounces off and the brick is destroyed, but only if the ball hits the brick from the top or bottom -- if a ball hits a brick from the side, the ball is destroyed instead. You can release more than one ball from the gates; the precise total is determined by the level. (You cannot, however, ever release more than one ball from a single gate, which often means you need to plan carefully.) Some bricks require two hits to destroy, and the object, as I'm sure you can guess, is to destroy all of the bricks with your given allotment of balls.

So far, the game I've described is relatively simple and, I suspect, not terribly interesting. What adds the additional layer of complexity is that everything in Music Bounce is cyclic. The time in of the game is measured in beats, and every eight beats, previously destroyed bricks reappear and another ball is released from your selected gates. This means that your balls soon settle into a rhythm (as long as you're not changing things), but it also adds another layer of order. Obviously, even if everything were static, the order in which you choose to release the balls is important; but now, not only do you have to initially release your balls in the correct order, but you also have to carefully choose what beats your balls are released on, which leads to some surprisingly tricky situations.

A lot of the levels in Music Bounce are clever. Unfortunately, not all of them are -- in some levels you just kind of mess around until you manage to get all of the bricks eliminated somehow. Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter levels also tend to be more difficult than the former, since a clever solution is often easier to figure out than a brute-force solution. This sadly means that you'll spend a lot of time being frustrated. The size and speed of the game mean that tracking the path of a single ball is difficult, so when you're trying to figure out exactly why a particular brick is or isn't getting destroyed, you'll often have to watch very carefully over the course of several cycles. And because the ordering is so sensitive, you can often unexpectedly screw up your whole setup when trying to make small changes (which can sometimes be pretty helpful, of course!).

As for the presentation, the graphics are pretty simple. For a game whose name makes it sound like it depends heavily on sound, the sound effects are definitely mixed; sometimes (especially on some of the more ordered levels) the sounds combine to make a pleasing melody (assuming you're hitting things in the proper order), but on some of the less well-organized levels, the sounds just come out as a seemingly-random assortment of percussion.

This perhaps makes my opinion of the game sound a little more negative than it is. There are a lot of clever puzzles that you will have fun with, but just be warned you'll have to slog through some less interesting ones as well. Level 50 is also exceedingly clever, although (to my shame) I had to look up a solution, as I was utterly stumped. I hate doing this, especially when it's the kind of solution that triggers the "Why didn't I think of that?!" feeling, but I do have to admire the extreme neatness of the solution. Overall, the underlying idea of Music Bounce is an interesting concept, and one I am glad to see brought into this simple but pleasing game.

Desktop Tower Defense 1.5

(Note: DTD was yet another game that I played and enjoyed before coming to Kongregate. I suppose, technically speaking, I haven't yet finished it, since I haven't yet earned the Impossible badge, but it's so impossible that I doubt I'm going to any time soon. Anyway, I've certainly played it enough that I feel entirely comfortable reviewing it.)

As of this writing, DTD is currently #2 on Kongregate's highest rated list, and unlike Sonny, I believe it is entirely deserving of that position (if not higher). DTD is the perfect example of what a Flash game should be: easy to learn, but hard to master. The interface is straightforward and easily grasped; the game offers a wide range of difficulty to keep you challenged even as your skill level increases; and the underlying concept is quite a lot of fun.

So, apparently, tower defense games have been around in one form or another for quite some time, although I lived blissfully unaware of that fact until I encountered DTD. (After playing the heck out of DTD, I sampled some other examples of the genre, but none of them was quite as good...but I'm getting ahead of myself.) The basic concept of a tower defense game is very simple: a horde of enemies (called "creeps" in DTD) steadily marches onto your screen, usually with the objective of safely crossing it. You build a variety of defensive systems (the titular towers) in an effort to destroy them before they successfully cross. Some towers will just damage the enemies, but there is of course a wide range of possible effects; some towers do area damage, some will slow or stun enemies, and so forth. Every creep destroyed earns you money, which you can use to upgrade existing towers or build new towers (you can also sell obsolete or misplaced towers); each creep that successfully crosses costs you a life, and should you run out of lives, well, I'll bet you can guess what happens. The creeps also come in a variety of forms: some are faster, some are stronger, some are different colors; you get the idea.

This description, so far, applies to a host of tower defense games. Now, in most tower defense games, the creeps move along a fixed path. This means that there exists an optimal point (or set of optimal points) for you to place your towers alongside this fixed path, and the game reduces to finding these points and then placing as much firepower there as quickly as possible. The big innovation that Desktop Tower Defense introduces is that you create the path -- the creeps begin moving across an empty desk, but as you place towers on the desk, the creeps are forced to move around them. Thus, you can create your own maze and optimize it as you want, and you can even change the maze as it's being built. (Of course, you are never allowed to completely block the creeps' path, but you can create new openings and close off openings that they were heading to.) This adds a whole new dimension of strategy to the game and adds a lot of spice to what can otherwise be a pretty dull concept.

This innovation isn't the only thing setting DTD apart from the host of other tower defense games; it also gets all of the little things right. A lot of tower defense games can drag, but the pacing of DTD is nicely brisk; you'll rarely find yourself with absolutely nothing to do, so it's good news that the interface combines keyboard and mouse to allow you to quickly deploy and upgrade your towers in the heat of battle. (It's also good at presenting information, so you can tell quickly just how powerful a tower or upgrade that you're contemplating is.) DTD also offers an overwhelming host of game modes -- in addition to the basic game play mode, which comes in three different difficulty levels, there's also a bunch of challenges (most of which require you to play under some restrictions, which can make for some quite interesting games) and "fun" modes (these are somewhat silly modes where the rules of the game have been altered somewhat for unpredictable results). The result is enough to keep you challenged from when you're just starting out all the way up until you're an excellent player.

I actually cut my teeth on version 1.2, which is also available on Kongregate, but the new version, 1.5, is by far the more popular. 1.5 features some different modes, a few new creep types, and a couple new tower types (which I haven't really gotten the hang of yet), making it overall somewhat more complicated but still very easy to learn and handle. The presentation is not bad. The graphics are clean and simple, and the sounds, while a little basic, are well-chosen to be fun rather than annoying when hundreds of them are going off at a time.

Overall, DTD is a tremendously entertaining game. If you have fifteen minutes of spare time, sit down and give it a whirl, and you should have a lot of fun.

6 Differences

As you might be able to guess from the name, 6 Differences is a followup to 5 Differences (below). There's not terribly much difference between the two -- certainly the basic principle and the whimsical attitude are both still quite present -- but there are a few differences (no pun intended).

6 Differences features photographic images (in this case, of night scenes) rather than the rotoscoped images of 5 Differences. This often makes it somewhat more difficult to pick out the differences. (However, the changing differences feature of 5 Differences appears to be gone, as the differences are the same each time, as far as I can tell.) Animation also plays a heavier role, as many of the different elements are moving. There's also some pleasant background music available which fits nicely with the game. Time also plays a larger role -- there are some differences that don't become apparent until other things have happened. Finally, sometimes the two panels are reflections of each other, which adds a layer of difficulty. As compensation for the additional differences, there's also a hint feature, which reveals one difference. The interface is still non-existent, alas.

Despite these changes, this is still pretty much the same game, and an enjoyable way to spend twenty minutes or so (depending on just how skilled you are at difference-finding).

5 Differences

(I'm somewhat breaking my promise to do these in order here, but the next couple of games in the queue deserve a meatier review than I can give them at the moment, so I'll quickly hit this one.)

5 Differences' creator describes it as "more of an art project than a game," and I would be hard-pressed to disagree. The premise of the game is very simple: find the 5 differences between the two panels. Just click on a difference, and it'll be flagged.

If Drone Wars is an example of a game hampered by its medium, 5 Differences is an example of a game which exploits the advantages of Flash. There are a few small touches which set it aside from the equivalent in a newspaper. While there is no interface to speak of, there always is an indication, usually cleverly included in the environment, of how many differences remain to be found. Little touches of animation enliven the scene. And perhaps most interestingly, the five differences aren't always the same -- a replay reveals that they do, in fact, seem to be selected from a larger set of possible differences, giving the game at least a tiny bit of replay value. It also helps that when you click a difference, it disappears, helping you to find other differences without having to remember if you've already found that one.

The real star of this game, though, is of course the art. The scenes are well-drawn, and tend towards the surrealistic and whimsical, providing an entertaining backdrop for your task. The complete lack of an interface is somewhat frustrating -- you can't replay an arbitrary level without starting all over again from the beginning, and there's no save or anything, so you'd better be able to finish this all in one sitting, but it should be an enjoyable and relaxing sitting.

Drone Wars

(Sorry I missed yesterday -- I was traveling to Fermilab. To make up for it, two reviews today!)

Drone Wars is, ultimately, a cautionary tale -- an illustration of what can happen when medium and game don't blend well at all. So far, most of the games I've reviewed here have been well-suited to being Flash games. Puzzle games, which typically have lesser graphics demands and can be broken up into small level-sized chunks, are of course a perfect fit for the medium. Third-person shooters or dodgers are also extremely popular, as you can make an interesting game with a relatively simple control set and a relatively small battlefield which also lends itself to quick, casual play. Turn-based strategy and RPGs, while they're not quite as conducive to five minutes of play, are still a good fit for Flash, since they don't require graphics and the player can take his time making his decision, making a good interface comparatively easier to design. Drone Wars, on the other hand, is a real-time strategy game, and an engaging RTS requires a relatively large battlefield and a way for a player to quickly carry out complex instructions, and it is here that Drone Wars falls flat on its face.

Since Drone Wars is a space-based RTS, it's natural to compare it to the granddaddy of all RTSes in space, Starcraft. To say that it suffers from the comparison would be an understatement. Drone Wars completely lacks any strategic element -- you have your base (a "mothership"), one asteroid for resources, and no way of ever expanding. There's no different races; each and every player in the game is exactly the same. You can't build any buildings, either, only ships (excuse me, "drones"). There's no tech tree to speak of -- while you can research some limited vehicle upgrades at your mothership, you can't create any new units. Units have absolutely no personality beyond the occasional beep, much less the sophisticated voice acting in Starcraft. So what do you have? You have four noncombat drones: resource drones, repair drones, scout drones (which behave like an Observer), and control drones (which behave like an Overlord), and four combat drones with varying degrees of toughness and damage ability. That's about it.

There are two main modes: in the somewhat-misnamed Arcade mode, you go through eight missions which walk you through the various aspects of the game, ending in a 1-on-1 battle and a 2-on-2 battle. Since the AI is not particularly competent (it doesn't, for instance, appreciate that if one attack wave fails, perhaps you should build a bigger attack wave the next time), these are pretty much a breeze. But the near-total lack of any strategic component means that even a competent AI wouldn't help things much -- there's no kind of large-scale economic battle to be fought, and for the question of "what units should I build?", there's no rock-paper-scissors element requiring different build strategies when confronted with different opponent strategies; it's just rock versus more rock. The Survival mode totally dispenses with even the small amount of resource management in the Arcade mode -- enemies come at you from all directions and you get a fixed quantity of ore for each wave you survive. This makes it simply an exercise in tactics and micromanagement, which Drone Wars is even more ill-suited for, thanks to its extremely frustrating interface.

Really, the interface was the thing that really left a bad taste in my mouth about this game. As I said earlier, an RTS demands that you be able to move quickly, and Drone Wars' interface does not do a good job at all of bringing this about. The map doesn't scroll, so the only way to move to other parts of the battlefield is by using the minimap, which makes it impossible to move along the battlefield in a convenient way (especially since the standard Starcraft technique of tapping the button assigned to a group twice doesn't bring up that group). Since you're limited to a single mouse button (thanks to the limitations of Flash), a lot of times you'll find out that clicking doesn't do exactly what you want it to do. (When you've got a repair drone selected, will clicking on another unit select that unit, or cause the repair drone to repair that unit? Be prepared to be frustrated multiple times by this!) This simply does not work for a fast-paced RTS.

The presentation is pretty mediocre. The music is OK, but it's far too short a loop; the sound effects are pretty bland; and the robotic computer voice which announces various happenings to you is a robotic computer voice.

I played through the whole game to get the badges and the challenge card, and I revisited it briefly to write this review, but I have no desire to play this game again. It's just an exercise in frustration.

Indestruct2Tank

(Like Portal TFV, I had played this before Kongregate, but played through it again to get the badges. Yay badges!)

Indestruct2Tank (the somewhat peculiar internumbering is because this is a sequel to the original IndestructoTank, not currently on Kongregate) is a game with a thoroughly ridiculous, yet entirely enjoyable, premise.

So, here's the basic idea. You have a tank, which is indestructible, as the name might imply. A massive flotilla of airplanes and helicopters battles you by flying around and dropping bombs on you. The good news is, as mentioned earlier, that you're indestructible. So all the bombs do to you is cause you to fly up in the air. This is actually very good news, from your standpoint, since when you're up in the air, you can collide with the enemy airplanes and helicopters and destroy them. Each collision also gives you a little upwards boost, so you can rack up massive combos in which you destroy tens of enemy vehicles before touching the ground again. Large combos are far more profitable in terms of points than destroying vehicles one at a time, so there's a fair amount of skillful maneuvering required in order to keep aloft for as long as possible given the available enemies and their ordnance. The catch is, of course, that your tank isn't completely indestructible. (There's always a catch...) As time passes, your fuel decreases, and if you happen to run out of fuel, your tank (somewhat inexplicably) explodes. The only way to prevent this is by reaching some goal before running out of fuel.

So, like I said, completely ridiculous. (To ask the most obvious question, why don't they just, you know, stop shooting at you?) But pulling off a combo of 30 or 40 is extremely entertaining. There are two basic game modes: regular mode and adventure mode. In the regular mode, you have to accumulate a certain number of points to finish the level and refuel your tank. When you advance a level, you can spend the points you've gotten on increasing the frequency of enemies that attack you (which you'll need in order to get longer combos in order to get the higher number of points required to advance to higher levels). In adventure mode, you just have to survive the length of the level to advance; interspersed are various cutscenes which advance the (thoroughly ridiculous, appropriately enough) plot. There are also boss fights in which you have to defeat the boss before running out of fuel.

The one flaw in the gameplay is that sometimes enemies just won't show up when you need them. This is especially irritating in adventure mode, where some of the later levels are filled with obligatory bottomless pits, and sometimes you just end up falling into the pit because no airplane is considerate enough to fly by and bomb you in time. Conversely, sometimes the screen is just filled with so many enemies that you couldn't possibly get all of them, which only makes the preceding situation that much more frustrating.

The presentation is not bad. The programming itself is solid; there aren't any glitches or problems (at least that I could see), the graphics are fine if a little vanilla, and the sound effects are serviceable. The music is OK, but since there's only one track, you're going to get pretty tired of it after a while (which seems to be the case, really, for nearly every Flash game that lasts longer than a few minutes or so, so maybe I shouldn't be too harsh here). There's even some voice acting in the adventure mode, which is by no means great, but I definitely appreciate the effort.

Kongregate only awards two badges for this game, but there are a bunch more you can get within the game itself, which unlock some not-particularly-interesting rewards. So in conclusion, it's definitely a fun little game worth playing if you want to get the Kongregate badges. I enjoyed playing it to unlock everything, but that's mostly because I'm a horrible completionist.

Portal: The Flash Version

(I actually played this game long before finding Kongregate, but on Kongregate, it has badges attached to it! So naturally I had to play through it again to get the badges. Fortunately, this didn't take too long.)

The next time someone says to you, "Games of today really don't need their fancy 3D graphics and voice acting; all that really matters is the underlying gameplay concept" (and yes, I know that sounds like something I might say), have them play this game, then have them play the real Portal, and then patiently wait for them to admit that they were wrong. (Since I'm going to be doing a lot of comparison between the original and the Flash version, if I say "the original" or just "Portal", I'm talking about Valve's original product. The Flash version I'll call "TFV". Hopefully this will at least somewhat reduce confusion.)

Portal is the perfect example of a game which pairs an innovative gameplay concept with excellent writing (and the voice acting implementing that writing) in order to make a truly great game. TFV totally lacks that deft writing touch; the writing (which appears in floating text boxes at the top of the screen rather than in a disembodied GLaDOS voice) is functional rather than amusing (compare, for instance, how the two games introduce the concept of player death to the player). And, of course, it's hardly accurate to call the gameplay concept in TFV "innovative" when it's been, ahem, borrowed directly from Portal (which, in turn, got it from another game, but at least they paid for it).

The gameplay in TFV is pretty much identical to that in Portal, although the perspective shift from first person to two-dimensional third person side view naturally affects game play significantly. Because of the limitations of Flash, the simple two-button interface of Portal is absent; instead, the left mouse button alternates colors, and you can use keys to open portals of a specific color. There's also a button to close both your portals, which is quite useful and something I found myself wishing for occasionally when I went back to the real Portal. Most of the elements in Portal (cubes, buttons, turrets, doors, and Aperture Science High-Energy Pellets, though not fizzlers or the Weighted Companion Cube) are present in TFV; TFV also introduces a few new elements: blue plasma fields, which are solid with respect to you and cubes, but which the portal gun can shoot through; red plasma fields, which can also be shot through but result in instant death; crushers, which pretty much do what they say; and electric fields, which zap you when they're on. As you can see, many of these elements are focused on killing you, making TFV a much more deliberately hostile environment than Portal. (Yes, I know that there are crushers in parts of Portal, too, but those are just pieces of machinery designed for other purposes; the crushing is just incidental. The ones in TFV are covered with person-crushing spikes, and are clearly designed for one purpose only: to stab the unwary or slow test subject.) The game is also somewhat glitchy, especially (but not only) when you're carrying boxes around; they can end up in the weirdest places if you're not careful.

The presentation is average. The graphics are OK but nothing special, the sound effects seem somewhat, um, familiar, and the music is OK but not really quite appropriate. The interface is minimal but has pretty much everything you would want an interface to have; the one thing that can be somewhat frustrating is that there's no way to save your progress in the middle of a level (either voluntarily or with some kind of checkpoints), which can get really, really annoying in some of the later, longer levels.

As for the level design -- I will be the first to admit that, for all that I love Portal, the level design is only fair, at least from the perspective of requiring you to think creatively. Although the portal gun opens up all sorts of crazy possibilities, if your goal is just to get through the game, variations on the Fling will be nearly everything that you need. (The challenges, on the other hand, do require you to deploy more of your arsenal.) Unfortunately, TFV doesn't really take advantage of this opening; the levels in TFV are pretty well thought out (and there are more of them than in Portal, which is a plus, although since the levels are limited to the size of the screen in TFV, the total amount of puzzling you have to do is probably the same or possibly even less), but there's not anything which requires a really insightful solution. Because of the greater emphasis on things which can kill you, there's also a greater demand for being able to execute complicated maneuvers quickly and precisely than in Portal; this definitely makes the game harder, but not in a way that I would consider as much fun. I would prefer the game being harder in terms of requiring more thought than more dexterity. There are also a few levels which are just super-frustrating in requiring perfect timing and execution.

Since it might sound like I'm totally ripping on TFV, I should point out that falling short of Portal, which is a great game, is nothing to be ashamed of, and the gameplay concept is still a lot of fun. Overall, TFV is a fun way to spend an hour or two, but after you've played the real thing, it will feel like a pale imitation.

Sonny

(Oh, if you haven't noticed yet, the post title is a link to the game. Hopefully you have.)

OK, so as of this writing, Sonny is currently the highest-rated game on Kongregate. I have simply one question: Why? Not that Sonny is a terrible game, but if it has the highest rating, this says something not terribly good about either the quality of games on Kongregate or the tastes of the people who vote (in my opinion, a little bit of both).

Sonny is a very traditional turn-based RPG which should seem familiar to anyone who's ever played a bit of the genre. You have a character (of 1 of 4 possible classes) with some attributes, some hit points and some points which he uses to cast spells ("Focus" in this game). You fight enemies, either hitting them with whatever weapon you happen to have on hand or with a variety of spells. As you gain experience, your stats increase and you get more skills available. You get various equipment which you can equip on various parts of your body; your party gains more people who will help you out (although you can control their equipment, you can't control their skills or their actions in battle, which can be frustrating). In between battles, there's no larger map or anything; all there is is a screen where you can visit the item shop (actually an equipment shop), a "Next Battle" button, and a "Training Battle" option (which is convenient if you're stuck on a boss; you can just level up a bit and try again).

One distinctive feature of Sonny is the skills system. The skill tree is pretty deep and varied (although, alas, it is the same for all four classes of characters). As the name implies, it is a tree, so some useful skills at the bottom of the tree you'll have to acquire several skills before reaching. (No skill has more than one direct prerequisite, though some skills are prerequisites to more than one skill, so it is a proper tree. Well, more precisely, a set of trees, since it's composed of several disjoint sets.) Some skills have many levels, becoming more powerful with each level you acquire, while some just have one level and you're done. The usage of these skills is also somewhat innovative; you can put eight skills on your action ring at any one time. You can put multiple copies of a single skill on your ring, which is useful, because skills, in addition to their MP (excuse me, Focus) cost also have a "charge time" -- an interval after you use a copy of a skill that you can't use it again. That is, if a skill has a charge time of 8, you'll have to wait eight rounds after using it before you can use it again. But if you put multiple copies on your action bar, then you can have it available more often. You can rearrange skills on your bar at any time between battles; you can also do a complete reset of your skills and get all of your skill points back to re-spend as you want. This is useful if you find that one of your skills is a complete clunker, or if you need a skill at the bottom of a neglected branch to deal with a boss (which happens not infrequently). The downside is that the skill tree is simply too deep; a lot of the skills you'll never see unless you make an explicit effort to try and see every skill in the game, which will require a lot of resetting and playing around which probably isn't worth the effort in the end. You could probably prune a substantial fraction of the skill tree without most people noticing.

To distinguish the various attack skills from each other, nearly every attack skill comes along with a status effect. So in combat, you'll often see four or five effects stacked onto a single character. The variety of skills and their effects, along with the charge time limitation, tends to make combat much more tactical and interesting than a typical Final Fantasy combat, which is good, given that you spend nearly all of your time in combat. Somewhat oddly, given the plethora of status effects, there aren't any combat items; most conspicuously, there's no Phoenix Down equivalent, so if a character goes down he stays down for the rest of the battle. On the other hand, at the end of battle all characters are restored to full HP and MP.

OK, I think that covers the mechanics. Now, on to the plot. The blurb for the game makes a big deal out of the fact that you are, apparently, a zombie. (Or something of that nature -- all you learn in the game is that you were apparently dead before the beginning of the game, and then you're not. There's someone who might be able explain it to you but doesn't, and there's a tape which might have an explanation, but its contents never get revealed.) But, does the fact that you are a zombie (or whatever) affect the game in any way? No. You can't eat people's brains to gain their abilities; you can't turn other people into zombies; healing spells still heal you; in short, the "being a zombie" thing doesn't affect gameplay one bit. Anyway, there is a plot of some sort, but it's pretty thin. You're apparently trying to return to civilization, but you have to hack your way through various enemies first. These enemies have some personality, but it's not clear why you couldn't, say, just go around. It also feels like they ran out of time on the plot -- in addition to the aforementioned tape, which is just left hanging, the most conspicuous clue is that the story ends at the end of Level 3 -- Level 4 is just a bunch of bonus extra monsters without any plot at all. Ultimately, the questions of why you're fighting all of these enemies, or what you're gaining by doing so, are pretty much left unanswered.

Finally, the presentation. The presentation is top-notch (which is undoubtedly part of the reason this game ends up being rated so highly). The graphics are crisp and well-done, and the animation is nice and smooth; the sound effects are a cut above the generic terrible Flash game sound effects; there's even voice acting, which is nicely done (of course, "better than laughably terrible" already puts it way ahead of nearly all Flash games, but this is definitely good work). The music is also good (it strangely reminds me of the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 music), although it's a little too short given the number of times you'll hear it repeated.

Anyway, the initial parts of the game are pretty fun, but if you want to beat the whole game, it eventually turns into a kind of a slog. Especially if you want to beat the extra bosses in the 4th zone, which requires a lot of tedious leveling up. Still, it is a very well-crafted game, so I have to give it points for that.

(If you've read this far, here's my list of recommended skills, in no particular order: Break, for dealing with enemies that power up. Shatter Bolt, ditto. Electro Bolt, really useful for blowing off those annoying Interventions. Block, a nice all-purpose skill when you need to protect yourself. Regeneration (as many levels as you can spare), so you don't have to worry about your Focus. Heroic Intervention (level 2 is really nice), for getting rid of pesky bad status effects. You'll also want Disruption and Subversion for use against particular bosses, but you don't need them all the time.)

WhiteboardWar: ChopRaider

I'm doing these in strict order of when I played them, so there'll be some not-so-great games mixed in with the good games. (Why did I try this one again? Oh yeah, I was mousing over what other people were playing, and it looked like it had an interesting name, so I decided to try it out. This method of game selection actually hasn't worked out so great for me, and yet I keep trying it. The moral, I guess, is that you should give your game an interesting name. Note that Sonny utterly fails this test, but it had enough buzz that I played it anyway...but we'll get to that soon enough.)

As far as game play goes, the game itself is an extremely traditional top-down shooter. You command the titular ChopRaider, a helicopter which is a "raider" despite apparently packing enough weaponry to destroy several small cities, equipped with bombs for dropping on ground targets and a gun for shooting at...well, mostly other ground targets, actually, and the occasional plane. The map is naturally packed with various things shooting at you, and your job is to shoot them first. There's also, in some maps, the obligatory POWs to rescue, although the game doesn't really seem to care very much if you actually rescue them or not.

Anyway, it's a pretty familiar formula. One somewhat unexpected feature is that when you kill a gun, it doesn't stay dead; after a while, the enemy War Factory will rebuild it. The only way to stop this is, naturally, to destroy the War Factory, which conveniently (and somewhat inexplicably) blows up everything in its sector; destroying all the War Factories on a map will clear that map. There's also factories which build smaller, mobile things to shoot at you (ports, which build destroyers, airbases, which build fighters, and tank factories, which build, well, you can figure it out); taking these out will destroy all of whatever they've been producing. You don't have to destroy these, but it makes life somewhat easier.

It is literally impossible to lose this game. If you die, you simply respawn on your carrier (with a slight deduction from your score). Now, there is a timer in the upper-right corner, so naturally I figured that the penalty for dying really came in the fact that it would cause you to lose precious time and thus increased the odds that you would run out of time before completing the mission. Imagine my surprise, then, the first time I saw the timer reach zero and blithely continue going. Apparently, the only penalty for running out of time is that you don't get any points for that mission. Since points are, to me, somewhat less interesting than just completing the game, this really isn't a particularly meaningful penalty. (There is one possible exception: The airbases occasionally produce bombers which will bomb your carrier. When this happens, a warning tone sounds. So maybe it's possible that if you're extremely careless, the enemy will sink your carrier, which would presumably cause you to lose. I was pretty careless, though, and nothing particularly bad ever happened to my carrier, so maybe this is just an empty threat.)

On to the presentation. The "WhiteboardWar" apparently refers to the art style, which looks as if someone has been drawing these things on a whiteboard (though apparently they have much finer markers than I do!); it's a simple and clean look. There's no music, just the background "whup" of the helicopter blades, which gets a little monotonous after a while, and the sound effects, which are also simple but effective.

Summing things up, then, there's really nothing about this game which makes it stand out from the pack and makes it an interesting game to play for more than about 15 minutes or so. It's competently executed, certainly, but there's just not enough imagination at its core. I rated it 3/5.

(One addendum which I forgot to mention: While ChopRaider's interface is pretty minimal, it does at least save your progress and allow you to replay previous missions. You would think this would be a pretty basic expectation in a Flash game, but you would be surprised how poor the replay features are in some Flash games.)

Chronotron

OK, we'll kick things off with the game that Kenneth first sent me, beginning this whole odyssey. If it had been less clever, maybe my whole trip through Kongregate would never have happened. Ah well.

(Brief disclaimer: As I discuss the game, there may be very minor spoilers. I certainly won't reveal how to solve puzzles, but I may discuss some mechanics which the game doesn't explicitly specify, though I'll try to keep to things which I think are pretty obvious. This is true in general, so consider yourself warned.)

So, the basic concept behind Chronotron, as mentioned above, is very, very clever. You're a robot with a time pod. You start out at some time (which, being a physicist, I'll call t₀), leave the time pod, go around and do some stuff, and then return to the time pod. When you return to the time pod, you're transported back to the original time t₀. Now, you see your past self go out and do all of the stuff you just did, but your current self can go off and do different things. Your two (or more) selves will never directly interact (that is, you can't collide with a past self), but they can indirectly affect each other in all sorts of ways, which is the heart of the game.

Most of the time, you want to keep the interactions relatively simple. A pretty common case is to go out, stand on a button which holds a door open for a while, and go back in. Then your next self will go through that door and do whatever you need to do on the opposite side. However, your future selves can also affect the past. Let's say that on the other side of that door, you accidentally trigger a switch that opens a pit between the button and the time pod. Now, when your past self tries to return to the time pod, he'll fall into the pit, which means he never returned to the time pod, which means you never created your second copy of yourself, which means you never triggered that switch and opened the pit, which means your past self could have returned to the time pod, which means...you've created a paradox! When this happens, you'll need to back up and try again. However, as the game helpfully tells you, "it's possible to alter the past without creating a paradox". This creates all sorts of interesting possibilities.

Now, some of the negatives. The most glaring is that the game is a little glitchy. Sometimes your past selves won't do what they did the first time around, even if nothing else has changed. This can range from slightly annoying to incredibly infuriating. The presentation is also a little basic. The background music is serviceable, but gets a little tiring after a while. The graphics are OK, while the sound -- well, the jump and pause noises are clearly borrowed from Super Mario Bros., so I doubt the rest is original, either.

A game like this is obviously going to depend heavily on its level design, and here the results are a mixed bag. The design is solid throughout -- there aren't any levels which feel like a real clunker, and there aren't any levels which depend on really annoying timing or positioning precision, which is definitely a huge plus. And each level (beyond the first few introductory levels, at least) will make you think at least a little (and some will make you think quite a lot). That said, there are a few criticisms to be made here, too. Remember above when I said that a common thing to do is to stand on a button to open a door for future selves to go through? You do this a lot. And going out, standing on a button for 20 seconds, and then going back is not really the most exciting thing in the world. It becomes even less exciting when you realize that 20 seconds isn't quite enough time for your future self to do all of the things he needs to do on the other side of that door, so you have to restart and then go out and stand on that button for 30 seconds instead. This gets boring pretty quickly. But also, remember above when I said that you can alter the past without causing a paradox? You don't do this very much at all. This has the potential to be a very interesting mechanic, but it's not really used very much in the game. There aren't many levels where you do something that seems aimless with your first copy, and then later copies do other things which turn that something aimless into something really useful, and this could be pretty fascinating (although in the wrong hands, I can also see how it could be pretty horrible).

Anyway, overall I gave this a 4/5, but obviously this concept has a lot of room to grow. I can see a sequel easily fixing a lot of these complaints and being a really excellent game.

Intro (also, a little more technical issues)

I suppose I should talk a little bit about what Kongregate is. At its base, it's just a place where people can upload Flash games and other people can play them, which is not too different from many other sites such as Newgrounds. There are a couple of features which differentiate it, however. First is that it's very oriented toward building a community (hence the name, I guess), so, for instance, every time you're playing a game, there's also a chat panel to the right where you can carry on enlightened discussions on Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undestanding with everyone else in the room. I'll leave it to the clever people in the audience to figure out how well this works in practice, so this is a feature that doesn't really do anything for me.

The feature which does do something for me, however, is badges. After all, adding achievements to a terrible game instantly makes it something that you want to play, because you get rewarded with this achievement at the end!

Anyway, as you might expect, Kongregate is no stranger to Sturgeon's Law, but that doesn't mean that there are some good games there. And hopefully I can find some of them!

Oh yeah, the obligatory referral link: Sign up using this link!

OK, the promised technical issues. (Try to contain your excitement!) It looks like Blogger can't import comments from external sources, so the old comments will not appear (I still have them saved on bantha, however). I suppose I could go in and add them by hand to old posts, but that is not terribly exciting, to say the least, so I think I'll pass.

One item of curiosity: the old blog, even when lying completely dormant for years on end, never seemed to get any comment spam, which pleasantly surprised me. I guessed that my comment system was so old and janky that the spam scripts didn't know how to handle it. Well, it turns out that I was half right. So, my old comment script saves the comments in a file with a name of ###.comment, where ### is the ID number of the post being commented in. When I was cleaning out the comment directory, I found that there was, in fact, an extremely large file called .comment. Apparently the spam scripts would just submit their comment without any post number attached at all, and the comment script (apparently not being so great) would accept this. The spam comments would never show up on the blog, of course, because they weren't actually attached to a post, and a casual ls of the comments directory wouldn't turn them up, either. Anyway, this makes it quite easy to nuke all of the spam.

Paul's Trip Through Kongregate (also, hello there!)

So I was talking with Kenneth yesterday, and he happened to bring up this blog. And we were talking about Kongregate, which I have recently been sucked into. And I had an idea! I have comments about these games that I've been playing, and they're a little too substantial to just put in the comments section. Besides, why would I want to put them in the comments where they could be read by hundreds of people (including maybe even the game authors), when I could put them here and have one or two people read them if I was lucky? So I decided to dust off the blog and put it to that purpose.

Anyway, I'll probably comment on one game per day. I'll only comment on games that I have finished (for some value of "finished"), since that seems like the fairest thing to do, so there may be a bias here towards games that are good and/or short. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that!

As you can also see, I'm trying to modernize the blog a little bit by using one of the current Blogger standard templates. Also, instead of using the old janky custom comments system I had, I've just switched over to the standard Blogger comment system (yes, this blog was created before Blogger had comments available). This has caused the old comments to disappear, naturally, though I still have them around; maybe I'll figure out if I can put them back into old posts properly. For the time being I've just left it at the default of requiring a Google account to post, but if this annoys people I can make it less restrictive. Anyway, there will probably be more changes in the immediate future, but I mainly just want to get things into a condition where I can post with minimal effort and without the result looking horrible.

Oh, yeah, obligatory plug: If this series induces you to sign up for Kongregate, use this link, if you would be so kind.

First review tomorrow!

How to make a particle accelerator
(part two in an occasional series)

The two most important considerations in making a particle accelerator are (1) what particles you want to accelerate, and (2) what shape your accelerator will be. As it turns out, answering one of these questions will answer the other one for you, so let's consider (1) first.

Now, working from first principles, we can specify some limitations on what it's practical to accelerate. We'd like to accelerate stable particles, because it's rather a pain to have particles decaying when you're trying to accelerate them. (Though research on muon colliders is an active field, we're nowhere near actually building one.) Furthermore, we're pretty much limited to charged particles, as charged particles can be steered using magnetic fields and accelerated using electric fields, while neutral particles can't. (Neutrino beams do exist, but these are produced by steering and accelerating charged particles, which then decay to neutrinos.)

So, limiting ourselves to charged, stable particles, we're left with a very short list: protons and antiprotons, and electrons and positrons.

Considering all of the possibilities, colliding electrons with electrons will not produce very interesting results (the conservation laws in effect severely limit the possibilities of what you can get back), and positrons are easy to make anyway. Colliding electrons with protons can be done (and is done at HERA at DESY), but it's more of a specialized case (translation: I don't know that much about it), so I won't talk further about it. This leaves us with three interesting possibilities:

1) Protons and protons
2) Protons and antiprotons
3) Electrons and positrons

Now, our choice of geometry is pretty much determined by our choice of what to collide. If we choose electrons and positrons, a ring is pretty much ruled out, as the loss of energy via synchrotron radiation will prevent us from reaching interesting energies. So choice (3) leaves you with a linear collider. Conversely, if we choose protons, then there's no reason not to choose a ring over a linear collider, as the ring will allow us to reach higher energies (as the particles can be accelerated many times, rather than once).

The next obvious question is: why choose one over the other? Well, let's consider the advantages and disadvantages of each. Generally, for the reasons just mentioned above, a proton collider will allow us to reach higher energies. On the other hand, when a proton and an antiproton (or another proton) collide, only two of the six quarks (or antiquarks) involved actually interact, and they only have part of the total energy (and, worse yet, you don't know exactly how much that part is), while the other four will take some of the energy and do something uninteresting. Conversely, an electron-positron annihilation is much cleaner, conceptually speaking, and the entire energy goes into whatever they produced. So (and this is, of course, a drastic oversimplification, but good enough for my purposes), a proton collider will be better for producing new and interesting things, but a linear collider is better for making precision measurements of things. (Those of you paying attention might notice that my current project is trying to make a precision measurement using data from a proton-antiproton collider. That's part of the reason it's so difficult.)

How about choosing between options (1) and (2)? Well, the practical advantages and disadvantages are pretty straightforward. If you have protons and antiprotons in a ring, then you can use one set of magnets: the same magnetic field will bend protons one way and antiprotons the other way, so you're all set. On the other hand, having protons go in both directions requires two sets of magnets (and two separate tunnels for the separate beams), increasing your cost and complexity. However, the big disadvantage of using antiprotons is that they're hard to make. The efficiency of the antiproton-making process used at the Tevatron is about one one-millionth, so making antiprotons is a very slow process (and if the antiprotons are lost for any reason, as they not infrequently are, you can have hours of dead time while you wait for the antiproton stash to build up again). Ultimately, though, the decision is made on physics grounds: at the energies used at the Tevatron, top quarks are typically made by the interaction of a quark and an antiquark, so having an antiproton around greatly increases the number of top quarks (and other interesting stuff) produced; thus, the Tevatron uses protons and antiprotons. For the energies that will be used at the LHC, however, top quarks are more often made by the interaction of two gluons, and there are plenty of those in ordinary protons. Consequently the LHC can get away with being a proton-proton collider.

All right, now you've decided what you want to collide. Now, you want to make your collider the best damn collider it can be. How can you go about doing that? Well, there are two basic variables that determine how useful your collider is going to be: (1) energy -- the higher energy you have, the more interesting interactions you can produce; and (2) luminosity -- the number of interactions that take place per second. If you want a really good collider, you'll want to maximize both of these, given the constraints.

What are the constraints on energy? Let's consider a linear collider first. Well, a linear collider has a bunch of RF generators (called "klystrons") which pump energy into the electron beam. So, it should be pretty clear that the two ways to get more energy out of a linear collider are to (1) inject more energy in each klystron, and (2) have more klystrons. The latter means a longer linear accelerator, and so there the main constraint is cost (not only in building, but also in running, since each klystron is going to take a prodigious amount of power). The former is limited by technological constraints on how much power you can produce (given the stringent timing requirements necessary in any accelerator).

As for a circular collider, the injection of energy is no longer a major problem -- since the beam can travel around the ring as often as necessary, the RF generators are not the limiting factor. Rather, the trick is building magnets strong enough to hold them in the ring, since the magnetic field required to get a particle to travel in a circular path is dependent on the particle energy. Again, there are two possible ways to deal with the problem: (1) build stronger magnets, or (2) build a bigger ring (which reduces the force needed), and again, the former is a technological issue, while the latter is cost-constrained.

Now for the luminosity side of things. First, I'll need to define some terms. Suppose you have an object, and you fire a wide stream of bullets at it (where the width of the stream is much bigger than the object). It should be obvious that the number of bullets that hit the object is going to be dependent on (a) the rate of bullet-firing and (b) the cross-sectional area of the object. For particle physics, the story is much the same. We define a quantity called the "cross section" which is essentially the probability of a given interaction occurring, and then the total number of that interaction we would expect is given by the "rate" (which is called the luminosity) times the cross section. The cross section is usually expressed in units of "barns" (a particle physics joke derived from the expression "as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn"), and typically the luminosity is expressed in units of inverse cross section per time. So, if my accelerator has a luminosity of 5 inverse picobarns per second, that means if I have a particular interaction with a cross section of 2 picobarns, that means I would expect to see 10 of that interaction per second.

All right, hopefully you understood most of that. (If not, don't worry too much; the rest of this article doesn't depend that much on it.) Now, for a wide variety of practical reasons, a typical beam in a particle accelerator is not a continuous stream of particles, but rather a series of bunches -- you have a bunch of particles, then a gap, then another bunch, and so forth. So, it should be clear that if you want to increase the luminosity, you have (once again) two options: (1) increase the number of particles in each bunch, or (2) decrease the spacing between bunches.

Option (2) seems like the simpler one. It is primarily limited by the speed of your readout electronics -- you need to be able to finish reading out one event before the next one comes. As you might expect, this is one area where there's been a lot of progress in recent years. The electronics used in ATLAS, for example, will be so fast that the particles from one interaction won't have even finished travelling through the detector before the next interaction happens. But the electronics are fast enough to handle this, so it's OK. (You might worry that a faster particle from a later interaction might "catch up", but since all of the particles, even the lowest-energy ones, are travelling very near the speed of light, this is not a big concern.)

Option (1) has a few drawbacks as well. For a proton-antiproton collider, like the Tevatron, the obvious disadvantage is that you have to have the particles in the first place -- you can't stuff more antiprotons in each bunch if you don't have any more antiprotons to begin with. This is not a problem for proton-proton or electron colliders, since protons and electrons are easy to make, and positrons are much easier to make than antiprotons. Another issue is that the more particles you stuff into a single bunch, the more likely you'll get multiple interactions in a single bunch crossing; this is not the end of the world (especially since most of them are likely to be uninteresting); indeed, ATLAS plans to typically have (if I recall correctly) about seven interactions in every bunch crossing, but it does make your reconstruction task more difficult (and thus makes greater demands on your detector, since it needs to be able to distinguish these different interactions). Finally, more particles in a bunch makes them harder to focus, since these particles (all having the same charge) will naturally tend to repel each other, so keeping them in a confined volume becomes trickier the more of them you have.

Anyway, those are all of the "big picture" issues I can think of an an accelerator. Of course there are hundreds of tinier issues that I've glossed over or not mentioned at all, as I'm sure you'll rapidly discover when you try to build your own particle accelerator. What do you mean, you weren't planning on doing that?

Cake
I originally posted this as a comment to Matt's blog, but given the lack of content on here lately (surprise!) I figured it deserved a wider (huh?) audience.

So, here's my ranking of all of the Cake songs I know. This includes all of Fashion Nugget, Prolonging the Magic, and Comfort Eagle; all of Motorcade of Generosity except "You Part the Waters", which my mental iPod couldn't come up with, and "No Phone", the only track I've heard off of Pressure Chief. Conveniently, this totals 50 in all.

Note that these rankings are off the top of my head and probably are highly mutable, given the interchangeability of so many of their songs.

1. Jolene (Motorcade of Generosity)
2. The Distance (Fashion Nugget)
3. I Will Survive (Fashion Nugget)
4. Cool Blue Reason (Prolonging the Magic)
5. Comfort Eagle (Comfort Eagle)
6. Friend Is a Four-Letter Word (Fashion Nugget)
7. When You Sleep (Prolonging the Magic)
8. Satan Is My Motor (Prolonging the Magic)
9. No Phone (Pressure Chief)
10. Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle (Motorcade of Generosity)
11. Shadow Stabbing (Comfort Eagle)
12. Never There (Prolonging the Magic)
13. Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Comfort Eagle)
14. Ain't No Good (Motorcade of Generosity)
15. Open Book (Fashion Nugget)
16. You Turn the Screws (Prolonging the Magic)
17. Arco Arena (Comfort Eagle)
18. Mexico (Prolonging the Magic)
19. World of Two (Comfort Eagle)
20. Frank Sinatra (Fashion Nugget)
21. Pretty Pink Ribbon (Comfort Eagle)
22. Sheep Go to Heaven (Prolonging the Magic)
23. Opera Singer (Comfort Eagle)
24. Mr. Mastodon Farm (Motorcade of Generosity)
25. Stickshifts and Safetybelts (Fashion Nugget)
26. Commissioning a Symphony in C (Comfort Eagle)
27. Guitar (Prolonging the Magic)
28. Is This Love? (Motorcade of Generosity)
29. Daria (Fashion Nugget)
30. I Bombed Korea (Motorcade of Generosity)
31. Meanwhile, Rick James... (Comfort Eagle)
32. Where Would I Be? (Prolonging the Magic)
33. Haze of Love (Motorcade of Generosity)
34. Race Car Ya-Yas (Fashion Nugget)
35. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (Fashion Nugget)
36. Ruby Sees All (Motorcade of Generosity)
37. Long Line of Cars (Comfort Eagle)
38. She'll Come Back to Me (Fashion Nugget)
39. It's Coming Down (Fashion Nugget)
40. Up So Close (Motorcade of Generosity)
41. Love You Madly (Comfort Eagle)
42. Comanche (Motorcade of Generosity)
43. Walk on By (Prolonging the Magic)
44. Jesus Wrote a Blank Check (Motorcade of Generosity)
45. Let Me Go (Prolonging the Magic)
46. Sad Songs and Waltzes (Fashion Nugget)
47. Pentagram (Motorcade of Generosity)
48. Hem of Your Garment (Prolonging the Magic)
49. Nugget (Fashion Nugget)
50. Alpha Beta Parking Lot (Prolonging the Magic)

Thought of the day

Think of as many temporally-based names as you can. These have to be names that you can think of actual people having, not just things that "could be" a name. Here's all of the names my coworkers and I could think up:

April, May, June, Summer, Autumn, Dawn, Sunrise, Sunset, Christmas (OK, I can only think of one example of this, but still, it counts), and Thursday (this one is kinda cheating).

Notice something they have in common? They're all female names. Can you think of any temporal names which are male? (And people actually have to have this name for it to count.) The only one I can think of is the knight January in one of the Canterbury Tales (damned if I can remember which one), but that's iffy at best.

Odd.

Oh, joy!

Of all the webcomics that have come and gone in the time that I was reading them, it was Nothing Nice to Say that I missed the most. Like Penny Arcade, Nothing Nice has an exceedingly rare trait: though 99% of the time Mitch Clem was referring to a band (or game, in Penny Arcade's case) that I had never heard of, or at least not heard enough of to get any inside references, it was still exceptionally, and consistently funny. The thing that made me saddest about the comic was all of the stupid mail that he received, which made me realize just what a thankless task nearly any webcartoonist has, but which also made me realize that he simply wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. And so it was no surprise when NN2S finally went away, but it was a sad event.

I still kept it in my bookmarks, and in those days when I was really, really bored I'd go to visit again, in the hopes that it would be back. But no, it never was; for a while the domain name had even expired, but I still couldn't bring myself to delete the bookmark, and eventually the domain came back but there was nothing there...

And today, I was reading Questionable Content (my best recent webcomic discovery), and it mentioned Nothing Nice to Say, and I did a double-take, and I clicked the link, and it was back! Yay! And has been back for a month! I have no idea how long this will last, but I'll be glad as long as it's still around.

How to build a particle detector
(also part 1 in an occasional series)

Why am I writing this? Well, I've learned quite a bit on the subject in the last couple of years, and I wanted to share that knowledge in a simple, easy-to-read form. If this fails to interest you, feel free to ignore it.

Anyway, let's consider the purpose of a particle detector. You have one beam of particles coming in from one side, another beam (usually of antiparticles) coming in from the other side, and they collide, hopefully producing new and interesting particles. Your job is to detect as many of these new particles as possible, measuring their properties as completely as you can.

The first consideration is the overall shape. Obviously, when an interesting collision occurs, the new particles will fly off (more or less) randomly in all directions. So, your first thought would be that you want your detector to be a sphere, centered around the point of interaction. This would be true, if collisions only occurred in one solitary point. However, for a variety of reasons, collisions typically occur in an "interaction region" along the beamline a couple of meters long. (To briefly summarize, this increases the number of collisions and thus the odds of actually getting something interesting.) So, your typical particle detector is actually mostly cylindrical centered around this interaction region (usually with caps on the end to catch any stray particles).

The four detectors I know the most about (CDF and D0, the two detectors at Fermilab, the world's current highest-energy collider, and ATLAS and CMS, the two detectors at LHC, which will be the world's highest-energy collider when it opens) all follow the same basic pattern (more or less). If you want to see some layouts, you can see them here:

CDF (or a much nicer PostScript version), D0 (only PostScript, sorry), ATLAS, CMS.

In any case, the general layout in all cases is as follows:

* Closest to the beamline is a silicon detector. The silicon detector is designed for very-high-resolution tracking. This is extremely important to the physics, since some of the particles produced in the initial interaction have very short lifetimes and will thus travel a short distance before decaying again. Identifying the location of the secondary decays ("secondary vertices" in the parlance) allows us to see the presence of these short-lived particles.

The technology used in these silicon detectors is not too different from the technology used in ordinary digital cameras. The detector is made of several layers, each containing a large number of appropriately-prepared silicon strips or pixels. When a particle hits a strip, it knocks off some electrons. By applying a voltage to the strip, these electrons will move to one end, where they can be collected and measured. The big difference between this and your digital camera, of course, is that these detectors operate in an extremely demanding environment. In order to operate at the necessary speeds, very high voltages are are used (typically a few thousand volts), which in turn generates a lot of heat (the silicon can literally melt within minutes if the cooling system fails). Furthermore, the high dose of radiation received this close to the interactions puts a high strain on the electronics used. All in all, it's not an easy job.

The silicon detector is typically not very large. The original CDF silicon detector used is maybe the size of two coffee cans on top of each other; the current one is approximately a foot in diameter and three feet in length (about the size of a large trash can), with some additional layers further out. This is partially because most of these secondary vertices are very close to the interaction point, and partially because the silicon is very expensive.

In general, the amount of silicon is usually limited by cost considerations; over the past 10 years, technology improvement has allowed most detectors to considerably expand their silicon coverage. CMS, in fact, uses silicon for all of their tracking (so they don't have a general-purpose tracker as described below).

* Outside of the silicon tracker is a larger, general-purpose tracker. This is typically a few meters in diameter and a few meters in length. The details vary from detector to detector, but the basic principle is almost always a "drift chamber": you have a large cylinder filled with gas (usually argon or some mix), and some wires running along the length of a cylinder. You apply a positive voltage to some of the wires and a negative voltage to some of the other wires. Again, particles passing through the gas will create some ions, which will drift toward the wires (hence the name) where they can be measured. In CDF, many wires are present in a "cell", while in ATLAS, each wire is isolated in its own "straw".

Drift chambers are a sturdy, (relatively) simple, and (relatively) cheap technology, and they provide good resolution, though obviously not as good as the silicon detectors.

The tracking chambers are typically enclosed in a powerful magnetic field. This magnetic field bends the path of charged particles, so that their momenta can be measured by how much the track is curved (higher-momentum particles will curve less).

* Calorimetry: In contrast to the trackers, where a goal is to disturb the particles as little as possible so that their track can be measured as accurately as possible, the calorimeters have the exact opposite goal: to absorb all of the energy of the particle so that the energy can be accurately measured. Unlike the tracker, where silicon has emerged as the dominant choice, there are a wide variety of technologies used in calorimetry.

The most straightforward way, conceptually speaking, is to use a material which has strong stopping power and emits light as the particles deposit their energy in the material. Then the amount of energy that the particle originally had can be measured by the amount of light emitted. Unfortunately, such materials don't grow on trees; CMS uses crystals of lead tungstate, but these are expensive to fabricate and maintain.

A compromise solution (used in CDF, D0, and ATLAS) is to alternate slabs of a material with strong stopping power (typically lead or steel) with slabs of a material which emits light (either a plastic scintillator or liquid argon). This is much cheaper than the first alternative, since all of the materials are easily available, but at the cost of some resolution. This is called a "sampling" calorimeter.

Calorimetry is, while an extremely valuable technique, inherently limited in its precision: as a particle interacts with the material of the calorimeter, it produces a large "shower" of secondary particles created by the interaction, and measuring the energy from all particles in a shower is inherently imperfect.

Typically, calorimeters are divided into two parts: the inner, or "electromagnetic", section absorbs particles which deposit their energy rapidly (electrons, photons, and pi-zeros), while the outer, or "hadronic" section absorbes heavier particles (hadrons) which lose energy less quickly.

* Muon chambers: Ideally, in the calorimeters everything is absorbed, with two exceptions: neutrinos, which can't (practically speaking) be detected by anything in an ordinary particle detector, and muons. A muon, which is a heavier relative of an electron, is extremely penetrating, and will make it through the lead or steel of the calorimeter without being terribly affected. So, typically, outside the calorimeter there's another tracker which detects the muons (and, occasionally, incoming cosmic rays). This tracker is usually another set of drift chambers, like the central tracker, but with much less demanding specifications (the central tracker has to deal with hundreds of particles in a very small area, while the muon chambers typically only have one or two muons to detect in a much larger area). Muons are very useful as triggers, since the presence of a muon almost always signals that something interesting has happened, so the muon chambers (which tend to be pretty slow) are usually supplemented with fast scintillators (which don't give you much position information, but which do tell you that a muon has passed by) to provide a trigger.

There are, of course, lots of other, smaller, systems involved in a detector, but these are the principal ones.

Musical Interlude #1
(Part of an occasional series, I hope.)

It might not surprise you to learn that the first semester of my senior year in high school (OMG THAT WAS TEN YEARS AGO [hush, you, it's barely more than nine]) was not one of the happiest periods of my life. Sure, my junior year was great, but by senior year, there was the stress of college applications, I had assumed a little more responsibility in various organizations than I was perhaps ready for, and I desperately, desperately needed a girlfriend -- for the sake of brevity, let's just say that things had not been going so well on that front by the time a dark December night rolled around. On that particular night, I had to do a paper for my AP American Government class (on Texas v. Johnson, if my memory serves me correctly). I had put it off to the last moment, as usual, and about 9, I set off for the USF library. (Since my father, at that time, was still teaching for USF, I would occasionally borrow his ID so I could use the library there. The principal advantage was the extended hours, which I was taking advantage of in this case.) Anyway, to sum everything up, I wasn't in the best of moods when I set off, and by the time I arrived, the darkness and the loneliness and the stress had combined to make me miserable. Then, just as I was pulling into a parking spot, a song came over the radio. I sat there in the car and listened to the whole thing, and it was so beautiful, it had a nearly magical effect on me. By the time I got out of the car, I still had work to do, but it felt manageable and I wasn't so unhappy about everything. It's the first time I can recall that a piece of music had anywhere near that profound an effect on me.

Needless to say, while I've tried to replicate this effect later, it's never been quite the same. It was just once of those unique confluences, the right event at the right time, and I'm sure that trying to make it happen probably makes it less likely to work, too. It's still a pretty little piece, though. That piece was the Bergamasca from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 2. (This was back in the days when I still listened to classical music on the radio some of the time. But that's for another story.)

Comments are now fixed
Looks like the change from PHP3 to PHP4 broke the comments. I shold probably junk this old commenting system and get something more modern. Hopefully comment spam won't become a problem. If it does, that might force my hand.

Incidentally, if you did try to comment, it was never recorded, so it's lost into the void. Not that I suspect this is a big problem.

The obligatory technical issues post
It looks like comments aren't working (probably broken by the move to the new bantha), so if you're dying to leave your wisdom here, you'll just have to wait a bit. I'll try to fix them today.

Celebrating one year of inactivity...oh, damn.

Well, it's now been one year since the last post here. I see that the Blogger interface has changed considerably.

Anyhow, if you're wondering if I'm planning to resurrect the blog, probably not. But there are still occasionally things that I want to post. For instance, the other day we were eating at Fuddrucker's in Emeryville after watching House of Flying Daggers. The sound system was playing the usual extra-schmaltzy Christmas-season music, when suddenly, I noticed an extraordinarily familiar melody: the Troika from the Lt. Kije Suite. You can color me pleasantly surprised.

There's a couple of longer posts which will appear here in the next couple of days.