Doeo

Well, let me put it this way: It will take me longer to write this review than it took me to play (and beat) Doeo for the first time. That should give you an idea of what kind of game Doeo is -- if you're looking for a complex, deep, or challenging game, go somewhere else! But if you want a fun, silly way to waste a few minutes (and I mean a few minutes), it'll do.

Anyway, the basic concept of Doeo is ridiculously simple, and if you enjoy Whack-a-Mole, you'll find it pretty familiar. Doeos will pop up, and you have to touch them with your mouse to -- catch them? destroy them? banish them? It's unclear. Anyway, you have 40 seconds to touch either 100 (on easy) or 200 (on hard) Doeos to proceed to the next level; after five levels, you'll battle the king. That's really all there is. Well, easy mode only features pink Doeos, while hard mode (to compensate for the higher total required) adds green Doeos, which are worth more points.

The design has a very Japanese aesthetic to it -- the art is cute and cartoony, and the background music is poppy and enjoyable, making this game a pleasure to play. Still, it's so simple that it just doesn't have much long-term value. I suppose younger players might find it more entertaining, but I can't imagine going back to play this over and over regardless of my age.

One note is that on a slower computer, I guess because there are a lot of Doeos on the screen, hard mode is embarassingly easy. However, the game is still not particularly difficult even on a fast computer; it just requires a few tries rather than one.

Ragdoll Invaders

Ragdoll Invaders is an extremely twitch-heavy game which manages to inject enough life into a relatively well-used concept to make for an entertaining experience.

The concept is pretty familiar, and pretty simple: Earth is being invaded by enemy ships, and you have to destroy them! To make it tricky, however, your character is a ragdoll that shoots bullets from its arms. You can't really control where each of the limbs points -- your movement only directly affects the head of the ragdoll -- so, while you're capable of shooting quite a few bullets, most of these will end up wildly off-target. Given some setup time, you can get a pretty good aim, but since you spend most of your time frantically dodging enemy shots, you'll rarely have this luxury. Meanwhile, the enemy ships are, as you might expect, horribly beweaponed, so you'll have to be quick to avoid being sliced in half by a laser, blown to pieces by a grenade, or killed where you stand (or, more likely, float) by some kind of energy ball. In fact, in an inversion of the way this type of game normally goes, you will probably die more times than the enemy -- the enemy ships are quite sturdy, and take quite a few shots to destroy (and the bosses even more than that), while one shot generally means that you're done for. (Your ragdoll can survive having an arm or a leg cut off, although losing an arm will correspondingly reduce your firepower, but most of the time you'll get killed outright when you take a hit -- the near-misses are less frequent.) Fortunately, extra lives are plentiful -- whenever you do blow up an enemy ship, it drops a heart which grants you can extra life, and the bosses give you multiple extra lives. (However, there's nothing more frustrating than killing an enemy ship and then in turn getting killed by one of its last shots, and watching the heart float past your dead corpse.)

There's only three types of enemy (plus the bosses), so the seven levels of the game basically consist of different permutations of increasing numbers of enemies that you face at one time. The bosses are also the same in appearance, although the weaponry that they field increases substantially over the course of the game. The sound effects are pretty basic, and the music, while thankfully long, is pretty mediocre techno.

Overall, the game is pretty challenging -- it'll definitely take you some practice before you get good enough to defeat all of the waves. Fortunately, since it is not too long overall (there's a total of 52 enemies, including all bosses), it's not too frustrating to get the hard badge, though it will require healthy doses of skill, luck, and fast reflexes.

Speaking of fast reflexes, however, brings me to the real problem with this game, which I alluded to in my last post -- the game is substantially easier on a slower computer. Ragdoll Invaders does push a lot of objects onto the screen, and even though it feels that each individual object shouldn't be that hard to deal with, you'll definitely notice the game beginning to lag on an older-model machine when there are a lot of objects around. I don't know if this is because the game itself is poorly coded, or just because Flash performance is poor when you're pushing a lot of objects; this seems to happen in a lot of games, but then again I'm willing to bet most of the code for these Flash games is not that great, so it's hard to say one way or the other. Anyway, playing on a slow computer can definitely give you those extra tenths of seconds that make the difference between victory and defeat.

Overall, this is a fun little entertainment, but they chose their length wisely; I don't think the basic formula could be stretched much farther without making this a very thin game. The speed issue is kind of a problem, but, as we'll see, it's hardly the only game on Kongregate with this problem to deal with.

Red

Red is a very simple-seeming shooter, but there's enough interesting features about it to make it an entertaining game. Red is designed by Ivory, who also brought you 5 Differences and 6 Differences, and this shows in the aesthetic of the game -- while the design is very simple, it's also very pretty.

In any case, the basic gameplay is familiar to anyone who's played Missile Command or any similar game: you command a turret (located on Mars, hence the name of the game) as asteroids fall. You have to shoot the asteroids before they collide with your turret; if you get hit, it's game over. Your ammunition replenishes over time, so you can't fire continuously, but generally it's enough as long as you're reasonably careful. Of course, it has a tendency to run out just as you're in the thickest of things and need it most. (You can also fire more powerful shots, which naturally chew up a larger amount of ammo.)

The most interesting feature of Red is that shooting an asteroid doesn't destroy it; rather, it merely deflects it. So shooting is not just a matter of pointing your turret and blowing things up; you have to decide where it's best to hit the asteroid to push it out of your way with minimal effort. It rapidly becomes clear that gently deflecting the asteroids to one side is a much better approach than trying to completely push them back up off the top of the screen. Your bullets keep going after deflecting off an asteroid, too; you can set up some very satisfying sequences where, for instance, two asteroids are descending on you side by side, and by shooting between the two, your bullets can bounce back and forth and push them both apart so that they'll miss you.

There are a few powerups which drift by from time to time: shields, which protect your turret from one hit, although you can only have one at a time; a powerup which makes your shots much more powerful for a limited amount of time; and a powerup which adds additional turrets on the ground. These additional turrets fire randomly, and they tend to get destroyed pretty easily, so they're not really that useful (also, they have an irritating tendency to get created right in the path of an asteroid, so they often only last for a couple of seconds). Every so often, there's also a "boss" in the form of a very large asteroid which fills a large portion of the screen.

To add to the difficulty a bit, there's also wind which can (and will) blow your shots astray. The wind starts out light but can eventually pick up to the point where it can blow your shots all the way across the screen, so shooting at asteroids at one side of the screen may be difficult or impossible (however, one thing you quickly learn is that asteroids far away from the center of the screen should generally be ignored, as they don't pose a direct threat to you). Although you don't really notice the difficulty getting harder, when I was trying to get the badge (which requires surviving for 600 seconds) I always seemed to die somewhere in the 500-600 second range, so clearly the game does get more difficult as you go on.

As mentioned before, the graphic design is extremely simple but still pretty, and the background music is a nice song which adds an ethereal feeling to the proceedings. (It also -- and I can't stress the importance of this enough! -- is long enough that it doesn't repeat until after a while, which means you don't get immediately bored and/or irritated by it. Hooray!) That said, the 10 minutes that you have to survive for to get the badge will feel like a rather long time, especially given that not much changes while you're playing the game.

This brings me to my final point, which is only a minor irritation in Red, but will be a major issue in some of the upcoming games in the queue: the timer length is heavily dependent on the speed of your computer. For whatever reason, Red is apparently pretty resource-intensive, so if you're playing on a relatively weak computer, even if ten minutes have elapsed on your wall clock, the game may only think that you've been playing for six minutes (since the length of time in the game is presumably determined by the number of frames), so beware! If you're trying to get the badge on a slower computer, you'll have to survive for longer than you thought. This problem is amplified by the fact that the timer isn't displayed until the end of the game, so I strongly advise against dying just because you think you've reached your destination time. (The game will kill you soon enough anyway; no need to rush.) Anyway, this is kind of annoying, especially since it doesn't seem like Red should be that dependent on your computer speed.

Anyway, overall Red is a pretty game and you'll enjoy playing it for a while, but the fact that the game doesn't change all that much as you play means that its long-term value is pretty limited. Still, it's a fun badge to get.

Two short ones for today, but first a philosophical statement.

One of the things that appeals to me most about Kongregate is the badges give me something to shoot for. I tend to like finishing games, so a game in which the only goal is to get ever-higher high scores tends not to hold my interest for long, unless it's a really, really good game. (This makes me wonder if in college I did play more of those games because I had my roommates to compete against -- there was only a high score, but you could always shoot for your friends' scores. But now that I don't have that, I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't really play that type of game any more.) Anyway, the badges give me a certain target to shoot for. You may notice that I often say something like "After finishing this game, there wasn't really much reason to keep playing". This isn't perhaps as harsh a criticism as it may sound -- all it really means is that the game isn't a truly amazing game, and, to be honest, while I've found a lot of fun games on Kongregate, there are really none that were so excellent that I really wanted to keep playing them after finishing them; I'm perfectly happy to move on to the next game. The real test is if I still enjoy a game up until getting to the badge; there are more than a few games where I've had my fun but the badge was still far away. That is obviously not a good sign. Anyway, on to today's games:

WetDike

The rather unfortunately named WetDike is an implementation of Klondike (i.e., normal solitaire). That's pretty much all there is to say about it. The pack art is very distinctive and interesting, and there's also a jukebox which seems to generally be playing interesting music, so those are two advantages it has over Windows solitaire. On the other hand, you can only play the three cards at a time variant, which I tend to enjoy less than the one card at a time variant, and there's also a chat pane at the side (inside the game, that is, in addition to the standard Kongregate chat) which tends to be even less worthwhile than normal chat. So, overall, it's probably somewhat more enjoyable than regular old Windows solitaire, but it's still the same basic game.

Balance Balls 2

Balance Balls 2 is an extremely simple game. You have a large ball on a teeter-totter, and you have to tilt the teeter-totter to keep your ball from rolling off; this task is complicated by other balls of various sizes constantly falling onto the balance beam. There are also three powerups you can collect: one to make your ball bigger, one to make it smaller, and one which adds spikes which crush other balls. It's not actually clear whether it's a better strategy to have a larger or a smaller ball; larger balls are harder to move away from the center, but if your ball does end up out at the end of the beam, it'll be almost impossible to save it; conversely for small balls. The spikes are incontrovertibly good, however. Anyway, this was an entertaining game for a while, although earning the badge (which requires surviving for 120 seconds) proved to be quite challenging. The graphics are crisp and clean, the sound effects are pretty minimal, and the background music is not bad, although there is a strange gap in it periodically.

Today, I'm doing a whole four-part series, Understanding Games. Understanding Games is a series that, as the name implies, attempts to teach people the fundamentals of game design. As such, most of each part isn't really a game; it's some explaining along with some demonstration. Each part does include a small game which attempts to illustrate the principles discussed in the section.

Understanding Games: Episode 1

Episode 1, as you might expect, tackles some of the most fundamental parts of games: the need for rules of a game, the need for a player to exist who can influence the outcome of the game, and the abstraction present in a game and its implications. All of this is illustrated by using one of the simplest video games of all, Pong.

Understanding Games: Episode 2

Episode 2 talks about another very important part of games: a clear goal, so the player can understand what he or she should do and not do, the need for competition (either against another player, a computer opponent, or the game itself), and feedback so the player can tell how he or she is doing. Finally, the episode mentions the need for a challenge to match the skill level of the player. All of this is illustrated with a simple race game in which catching the correct-colored blocks speeds you up and incorrect blocks slow you down.

Understanding Games: Episode 3

Episode 3 is perhaps the weakest of the bunch. It talks about puzzle games, and begins by giving you a mildly interesting puzzle game to solve. Then, after you've finished solving it, it goes on to talk about it. The discussion consists of going through the player's thought process, but of course this is entirely pointless, since it's mostly just a recap of your own thought process as you were solving the puzzle yourself. There are some useful lessons here about the value of trial and error, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.

Understanding Games: Episode 4

Episode 4 is a little less general than the rest. It talks about player identification, the distinction between games where you control the characters and games where you are the characters, and how characters can be different, which affects strategy and identification. The game in this episode is a simple tag-like game, which is rather poorly designed -- very few games ever actually end up with a winner.

Overall, this is a fun little series, and it definitely does a good job explaining some very basic concepts. The pixel art is perfectly functional, and the music is kind of a nice touch. However, I wish it had tried to go into at least a little more depth -- I didn't feel like I ended up learning all that much in the end, just a few principles.

A techno twofer today; Kongregate's challenge for that week was these two games, which is why I played them. Overall it was a pretty easy challenge; most of the challenges are pretty easy, but this one probably took 15 minutes at most. So, as you can probably guess, these are short games.

ELEPHANT RAVE

(Sorry for the caps, but that's what the game calls itself. I'm not going to keep doing that, though, so don't worry.)

Elephant Rave is one of those games that makes you go "Oooooooookay". It's thoroughly random -- you control an elephant, which is trying to dodge various colored bars attacking you from the top of the screen (and later, hurdles which move across the bottom of the screen) while techno music plays. The entire game is maybe 20 seconds from the start of the action to the finish, although you're probably not going to beat it on your first try. The action is preceded by an extremely lengthy (but fortunately skippable) random rambling asking for more understanding of elephants (no, really). And...well, that's pretty much it. It's very random, very short, and fun for about 30 seconds. Fortunately, it doesn't ask much more of you than that. At least the music isn't bad.

- Music in Motion -

Music in Motion is another experimental music-based game, although it has less of the "something whipped up on a lark" feel of Elephant Rave and more of a feel of something self-consciously trying to be experimental, with all that implies.

Music in Motion consists of four minigames, each consisting of various events happening in time with the music (at least I guess that's what the intent is supposed to be, though really in practice you don't notice it except maybe at the beginning and end of levels). In "Run and Jump", you have to run and jump over blocks which appear from the ground. In "Falling Blocks", you have to dodge blocks falling from the top of the screen. In "Disco Disaster", you're on a large disco ball and have to dodge spikes of light which appear from its surface. Finally, the final boss shoots various projectiles at you, and you have to stomp him at the appropriate time to defeat him.

I can't really say whether this is a successful experiment or not -- if the point is to notice the synchrony of game and music, then it's not really, as, like I said, it doesn't really seem to be that noticeable. But as a game, it's not much fun -- the games just aren't that interesting, and they're aggravatingly hard (not helped by the fact that the controls seem to stick occasionally), so beating this will probably take a few tries. It's not even particularly clear what you have to do for the final boss, which, given the frustration it takes to get there, is completely unforgiveable. Fortunately, getting the badge still doesn't take that much time, but this is a game I'm more than glad to see the end of.

Monster's Den: Book of Dread

Are you the type of person who enjoys pondering whether Runed Magesteel Plate Sabatons of Deftness or Soothing Planeforged Plate Sabatons of Discretion are the best sabatons for your level 11 cleric? If so, then Monster's Den: Book of Dread is the game for you! Book of Dread is a very old-school dungeon crawling RPG, and I mean that mostly positively, but it also has some downsides.

The basic formula is very standard -- you build a party of four characters, each of which can be one of 7 classes (warrior, cleric, rogue, ranger, mage, conjuror, and barbarian). You then take this party adventuring in a dungeon. Each level of the dungeon consists of a series of rooms, which may be empty, contain treasure, or contain monsters. The object in the level is to reach the exit to the next dungeon level; you can fight as many or as few of the monsters as you wish to accomplish the goal (more fights will bring you more stuff and more points, but of course have more chances to get you killed). Each level has one boss monster, which you get a nice point bonus and a rare piece of equipment for terminating. The fights are similarly pretty standard; you line up your party on a 3x2 grid on one side of the battlefield and the enemies do likewise, then you take turns acting. An action consists of picking a skill (attack, spell, etc.) and target. Turn order is determined by characters' quickness, making this a valuable stat to improve.

And now for a marginally-related rant. One of the things I enjoyed about the original Final Fantasy (to pick the first example that comes to mind) was that there was a very strong strategic component, not just a tactical component. By that, I mean that it's not enough to be able to win individual battles (which is what I'll call the "tactical" side). Rather, you had to be able to win a long series of battles without any rest or refueling (I'm thinking specifically about the Ice Cave here), which meant that merely being able to win a single battle was not sufficient -- you had to win a single battle while using as little of your resources (HP, spells, etc.) as possible. Over time in the Final Fantasy series, however, healing items (phoenix down, tiny houses, etc.) became more and more easily available and powerful, so that the strategic component practically disappeared. This left only the tactical component, but ordinary encounters couldn't be so powerful as to kill you (that would be really unfair, given the paucity of save points), so the game tended to consist of a boring slog through hundreds of normal encounters until you got to the one horribly difficult boss at the end of it all, which was the only place the game could really be tactically difficult. I found this not a particuarly welcome development, which is why I haven't played Final Fantasy in a while.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, strategic management plays a big role in Book of Dread. Ways to recover HP and MP (called "Power") and revive fallen party members between battles are extremely scarce -- each level has two healing shrines which restore you fully (but at a stiff cost in points), and if you've fully cleared the level above you, you can also return there once to rest for free. Other than that, you're limited to whatever potions you've managed to find in the treasure chests scattered about the dungeon. You're also quite restricted in your movement -- once you've gone down a level, you can never return to the previous level (except to rest as mentioned before). There is an item shop, but you can't visit it at any time; you need to find a portal scroll, and typically there's only one per level (some levels don't even have one at all). This makes the early levels very challenging. Unfortunately, every RPG I've seen which emphasizes strategy has a fatal flaw -- eventually your characters reach the point where they are able to regenerate enough HP and/or MP during combat that they can actually come out of a combat stronger than when they went in. At this point, the game becomes pretty easy. Fortunately, Book of Dread is well-balanced enough that if your only goal is to complete the campaign, that'll happen before you reach that point. But if you go for the 50,000 point badge, you'll reach that point long before you get to 50,000 points, making the game rather boring.

Speaking of points, the meter is always running. You gain points for exploring or clearing more of a level, and (as mentioned) killing enemy leaders. You lose points for using the aforementioned healing shrines, having a character die (even if he or she gets instantly revived!), and a really large penalty for having the whole party die (unless you have Hardcore mode on, in which case that ends the game). This brings me to the most old-school aspect of all of the game: there's no saving. Or, more precisely, there's saving all the time. Every time something happens in the game, it's instantly saved. So there's no going back to a previous save if something particularly bad happens to your party -- you're stuck with that result, whether you like it or not. I think that this adds a lot to the game, although it means that you do need to not be too careless with what you're doing! Note that while the game has points, it does not have XP in the traditional sense; you just gain a level every time you descend the stairs into a new dungeon level. Thus, there is no bonus (other than points and equipment) that you get from fighting more enemies. (This is probably also why you can't go back up in the dungeon; otherwise, you could just gain a level and then go back up to wipe the floor with the enemies there.)

Now, the downside of the old-school ethic is that a lot of content is programatically generated. Each dungeon level, for instance, is randomly generated. While this adds some variety to the game, and the random generator is good (no level that I've seen has any particular degeneracies), it also means that there's no really interesting elements in any dungeon level, either. Each dungeon level is also characterized by one of five different enemy types (undead, cultists, orcs, dwarves, and creatures), which can get pretty repetitive after a while. All of the equipment is similarly randomly generated (some random material combined with zero, one, or two random enchantments), which means that you'll be doing a lot of wading through equipment with names like I mentioned in the beginning. (There are some rare and unique items with more interesting names and properties, so it's not entirely monotony.) In any case, this means that equipment management, while a vital part of the game, can be rather tedious, especially if you're as careful about always optimizing as I am.

The game offers three different game modes. The Den of Corruption is the first, and is (apparently) a remake of the original Monster's Den. You fight your way through nine levels of the dungeon to encounter the Corruptor, a horrible monster with a few deadly tricks up his sleeve. After defeating the Corruptor, you can keep delving into the dungeon to score more points. The Den of Terror is slightly different -- each level of the dungeon now contains one Fearsower, an advance agent of the Dreadlord. Defeating nine Fearsowers allows you to travel to the Dreadlord's den and defeat him. Like the first, after defeating the Dreadlord you can keep exploring the dungeon. In practice, there's not terribly much difference between the two campaings, although the variety is welcome. There is also a survival mode, The Fall of Tellunos, where you fight an endless series of battles against successive waves of enemies with no interludes for equipping or healing.

The graphics are nicely done, although I wouldn't mind a little more choice in the character portraits. The sound effects are decent, and the background music is high quality, although (to repeat a very frequent complaint) the loop is a little short, so it will get a little repetitive after a while, although there are several different tunes it alternates among.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable experience, and does an excellent job making a very interesting and challenging RPG...at least for the first few levels. If you're trying to go to the very high levels, though, it doesn't hold up as well, so I would recommend sticking to just completing the basic campaigns.

Particles

It's hard to get a game much simpler than Particles. There's a playfield with a bunch of red balls bouncing around it, and you, the blue ball, have to avoid the red balls for as long as possible. As time goes on, more and more red balls get added, making your task more difficult.

The music is kind of nice (the opening reminds me of Greebles -- now there's a game I'd like to see remade) and the sound effects are crisp. The physics, while simple, is done correctly -- not all balls have the same velocity, so a nearby collision can suddenly propel an otherwise-innocuous ball toward you at high velocity, which can be quite startling.

Overall, this is well done for what it is, but it's a little too simple to remain interesting for long. Like many, many other games in this list, I played it long enough to get the badge and that was about it.

Mr. Bounce

Mr. Bounce takes an old classic and attempts to inject some life into it, but perhaps not entirely successfully. The basic gameplay is familiar to anyone who's ever played Breakout, or Brickles, or Arkanoid: bounce the ball off of your paddle to destroy the targets. Unlike most games typical to this genre, however, the ball does not bounce off of targets after hitting one, so it's very easy to bag many targets in a single shot. There are some levels which have indestructible walls (either fixed or moving) which your ball can bounce off of.

Your paddle has a few tricks up its sleeve you won't see in Breakout, though. First, you can set the altitude to which the ball will bounce by pressing the up or down arrows, which thoretically allows you to make nifty shots, I guess. In practice I pretty much always set the altitude to maximum and didn't mess with it, since I had better things to worry about. Second, the game includes a "trajectory prediction" -- the game shows a dotted line showing the current trajectory of the ball and where it will bounce after hitting your paddle. The trajectory prediction won't work at the edges of the screen, and it completely ignores any walls in the path, so it's not 100% accurate, but it obviously gives you a much better idea of where your ball will go. Thirdly, you're also given a limited amount of slow motion, which (obviously) slows the ball down so you can more carefully line up your shot. The slow motion gauge refills over time, so it's difficult to run out unless you use it continuously for a long period of time.

The graphics are in bright colors on a black background, and the music is a generic techno, giving the game an overall futuristic feel which is not bad. However, the simple fact is that all of the additions make the game rather easy -- I had no problems getting through the whole game (and earning 50 points in badges! See the below rant) on my first try. And really, there aren't enough changes from the basic formula to make this a game with lasting replay value. It's fun once, but not a game I have a burning desire to go back to.

Two games today, though one of them is less of a game and more of an opportunity to rant.

Castlewars

Castlewars is a cute little card game which reminds me a lot of Mille Bornes with the most frustrating parts of the game removed. I actually like Mille Bornes quite a bit, so you'd think that this would be a lot of fun, but I don't find this as fascinating as you might expect. It might just be that playing it on a computer isn't as fun as playing with a real deck of cards with your friends.

Anyway, the basic concept is pretty simple: you have a castle, some resources (bricks, weapons, and crystals), and a hand of cards. Each turn you draw a card and play a card; the cards will build your own castle, attack your enemy's castle, increase your own resources, or decrease your enemy's resources (or some combination of these). Either getting your own castle to a height of 100 or totally destroying your enemy's castle will win you the game. (You can also build a wall, which doesn't help your castle height but which will absorb most enemy attacks until it's destroyed; building walls is thus naturally cheaper than building the castle.)

Each card costs a certain number of bricks, weapons, or crystals to play. At the beginning of the game, you get 2 of each of these at the beginning of each turn, but there exist cards which increase your rate of accumulation. Naturally, the more expensive cards have more powerful effects. Not surprisingly, building typically requires bricks, and attacking requires weapons, although there exist crystal-requiring cards which can do either, as well as a variety of other effects.

You can also fully customize your deck, so if you're tired of drawing a particular card more or less than you want it, you can decrease or increase its frequency as appropriately. (Somewhat oddly, although I won all of my games with the default deck, as soon as I started tweaking it I kept losing repeatedly. Maybe this means I don't understand the strategy as well as I thought I did...)

The graphics, sounds, and background music are all simple but inoffensive. Now, for the important disclaimer -- like other games, I only tested this against the computer, which doesn't appear to have any horrible flaws in its AI, but I did beat it pretty regularly. There's also apparently a pretty strong multiplayer presence, which seems like it would add a little more interest than playing against the computer. Overall, while it's a fun and simple game, playing against the computer just doesn't remain interesting enough in the long run.


Kongregate Chat

Kongregate Chat is a very simple game. There are at least five, and probably a bunch more, "games" on Kongregate whose purpose is just to have a chat window so you can chat with other people without having a game. Most of these have nothing at all other than the chat panel, but Kongregate Chat includes a tiny, very simple game; you dodge stars and get points. The game itself isn't that terribly interesting (and wasn't designed to be terribly interesting, it was designed to be quick to load, so I'm not really faulting it for that). But Kongregate has awarded an easy badge for dodging 100 stars, which is really quite easy.

So, the rant here is that the Kongregate badge system is gravely flawed. For those of you who don't know, there are four types of badges. Easy badges are 5 points, medium badges 15 points, hard badges 30 points, and impossible badges 60 points. Now, this particular easy badge takes maybe 2 minutes if you're not particularly competent, and most easy badges are similarly not very time consuming. They might take up to 10 minutes at most, and most of them require little to no skill. Now, I'm sure you can guess what my complaint will be -- the hard and impossible badges are nowhere near proportional. Some hard badges are relatively easy, but the bulk of them are going to take a lot more than 12 minutes; probably at least an hour or two. And the impossible badges require a really substantial time investment; at least on the order of several hours, if you're already particularly skilled, and potentially a lot longer than that if you need to build up your skills to get the badge.

For the time being, the fact that there aren't that many badges on Kongregate makes this not a huge problem -- people have to earn hard badges in order to earn a reasonable number of points simply because there aren't that many easy badges. But eventually Kongregate will become large enough (or at least they hope that they will) that this simply will become ridiculous. And I'd really like the impossible badges to have a little more cachet, given how difficult they are to earn. Maybe the solution is to not have all badges measured in points, but to have different numbers of each required to earn levels. (Or, perhaps given how difficult the impossible badges are, have different numbers of easy, medium, and hard badges required to earn levels, and the impossible badges give some extra reward, like gold stars.) In any case, some way to give more recognition to the hard and impossible badges would be a very good thing to add to Kongregate.

3D Logic 2: Stronghold of Sage

3D Logic 2 is, as the title may imply, a sequel to the puzzle game 3D Logic, which I discussed previously. The basic principle is the same: to link each pair of different colors. However, 3D Logic 2 has a few differences from the previous game. While you start out with a 3x3x3 cube, it grows quicker and more complicated much more quickly; you pretty quickly reach 6x6x6 cubes with seven colors, which poses quite a challenge. As a result, I found 3D Logic 2 considerably more difficult than the original.

The interface is nicely improved: you can finally clear individual squares, and you can also use the scroll wheel to rotate between colors. These are both welcome improvements (though I found myself using the first considerably more). One thing which still didn't get improved is the overall interface; the game saves your current position, but there's no way to go back and look at a previous puzzle, and once you've completed the game, your current position gets reset so you can't look at any of the puzzles at all.

A few frills have been added. There's very peaceful and relaxing background music, which will almost certainly drive you crazy after a couple of minutes listening to it while stuck on a given puzzle. The sound effects have also been beautified a bit. Finally, a bit of "story" has been added where the game will tell you various mystical properties of the different colors between levels; I didn't really feel that this added much to the game.

Overall, this is a nice addition to a solid puzzle game, although don't play it if you're easily frustrated, since it will take a while to get through, unless you're much luckier or smarter than I am.

Dungeon Defender

Dungeon Defender is an interesting game -- it is an attempt to add some RPG elements into the traditional tower defense structure. While the effort is not entirely successful, there are some interesting ideas in here I'm glad the game designer took a look at.

The basic concept behind the game should be familiar to anyone who's tried a tower defense game. Waves of enemies come in and attempt to reach your base; your job is to build structures which will destroy them before they do so. So far, entirely normal. However, in this game, your structures aren't just static buildings which fire at the enemy. Instead, they are lairs which spawn creatures. These creatures then go out to attack the enemy (if they are melee) or fire weapons or spells (if they are ranged units); the enemy similarly has different types of units which will engage you differently. Your creatures have a finite amount of health just like the enemy's, and if the enemy happens to kill them they will be free to proceed unimpeded. However, your creatures will respawn after a short amount of time from their lairs. The enemy can also destroy your lairs simply by walking over them, but it won't go out of its way to destroy your lairs, so if you don't place them along the direct path to your base they'll be safe. (Of course, it may be harder to successfully block the enemy if you do that!) Note that you play the role of evil in this game, so your creatures are of the typically evil type (goblins, vampires, hydras, etc.). You can also augment your defenses with traps, which do various nasty things to the enemies (though the number you can place is strictly limited, so you can't just fill the map with traps) and support buildings, which increase the effectiveness of your lairs. There are also some maps that contain neutral lairs, which will fight any creature (yours or the enemy's) that stray nearby. The map begins with some paths running through the dirt from the enemy spawn points towards your base; you can dig out more dirt if you want more space to build lairs, but you can never fill space back in. Some dirt also contains precious metals that give you more money; these are usually cleverly placed so that digging out the most valuable deposits will also give the enemy a shorter route to your base, so you have to balance your monetary needs with your defensive ones.

There are also a few other RPG-like additions to the game. In addition to the lairs, you also have an avatar, which you control directly, and can be chosen from one of three different classes. The avatar is a powerful fighting unit (and hence is useful to throw in at the point where your defenses are weakest), but he can also be killed, in which case he will respawn at your base after a while. The avatar gains experience, and as he reaches higher levels, you can build more types of creatures and defenses. Similarly, unlike normal tower defense games where you increase the power of your towers by upgrading them, in Dungeon Defender your lairs gain more experience as they win battles and the units that they contain thus become tougher. Units also have their own strength, dexterity, and magic stats, and defeating certain enemies will give you items which can be equipped on your avatar to improve his fighting stats.

If you've made it this far through the block of text, you're probably beginning to get an idea of the first problem with the game: there's just too much crammed in. For instance, are you ever you ever going to look at the items on your avatar? Well, there is (unfortunately) a fair amount of idle time in the game, but even during that, you're probably not going to be interested in comparing the different kinds of breastplates that you might have picked up. Similarly, it's generally too much information to have such detailed stats on each creature -- all you really need to know is how generally powerful and fast they are, not the minute little details of their strength and magic resistance. Having to micromanage, for instance, the distance melee units should travel to engage the enemy also becomes quickly tedious.

The much more serious problem, though, is that it's frequently impossible to tell what's going on. As usual, units have little health bars over their heads. However, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the units are melee units. That means that oftentimes, you'll get ten or so units in an extremely small space, and it's simply impossible to tell what's going on, and then eventually some units begin to emerge, and hopefully they're yours, but it's impossible to tell why or really what happened. This makes it extremely difficult to get feedback -- the lifeblood of making a tower defense game (at least one which isn't a total pushover) is to give the user the opportunity to see what strategies work and what strategies don't. With this, though, it's impossible to tell which units are pulling their weight and which ones are completely ineffective, so it's very difficult to tell why a given strategy isn't working and what you might want to do to fix it. I find this personally extremely frustrating, and it's also why I resorted to using a walkthrough for four of the last five levels, simply because I found it so un-entertaining to try and fail without really being able to tell what I was doing wrong.

The graphics are pretty tiny, since there's a lot going on the screen (which only exacerbates the above-mentioned problem), and there aren't any sound effects, only music, which, despite being on an exceptionally short loop, isn't too bad (and there's more than one tune, so at least it doesn't become incredibly annoyingly repetitive).

In the end, this was a game which I found intriguing at the outset, but which really became a slog as it went on, and I was glad to get it finished. I like some of the ideas in the game, but it really needs more polishing to become a great game.

Filler

Filler is a game that will seem instantly familiar to you. If you've ever played JezzBall, or Barrack, or any of the clones thereof, you'll recognize the principle of Filler -- there's a number of balls bouncing around the screen, and your object is to claim as much of the screen as possible by placing objects on it. However, merely calling Filler a clone of those games would be quite inaccurate; there are major differences in Filler which make the gameplay substantially different.

First of all, in contrast to the aforementioned games (in which you claim territory by shooting lines across the playfield), in Filler you click and hold to draw a circle. The longer you hold the button, the bigger the circle becomes, but if a ball should hit you while your circle is still being drawn, then you lose a life and the circle vanishes. You can move the circle around while it's being placed, and once it has been placed, it can still be moved by gravity or by the action of the enemy balls hitting it.

The fact that balls can move after being placed creates a much more dynamic playfield than in traditional games of this type. For instance, you can drop balls from the top onto other balls to move them into more advantageous positions. You can also create balls in safe locations of the playfield and let them fall or slide into less safe areas. Conversely, it's much harder to trap enemy balls in a specific location because they can dislodge the balls that you've placed to block them (unless they're totally surrounded). This opens up new directions of strategy.

Unfortunately, the other major change has less beneficial effects. In JezzBall, for instance, once you've started firing a line, you can't stop until it hits the wall. However, the fact that you can release the mouse button and stop drawing the circle at any time means that you can get out of danger much more easily. (You do have a limited total number of balls that you can place, but in my experience this never became an issue.) This makes the game significantly easier than its counterparts; in fact, on my first play through, I ended up getting all of the badges for the game.

The graphics are exceedingly plain, and there's not much in the way of sound effects. The background music is kind of ethereal and relaxing, but it's not anything you'll be wanting to find a copy of for yourself or anything. Overall, the presentation is nothing special. So in summary, this is an interesting concept, but it really needs more attention to the game balance in order to be a truly fascinating game.

Micro Olympics

I tried out this game for one very simple reason -- the name. I was a huge fan of the original Apple II Olympic Decathlon, and the thought of a series of events, cleverly miniaturized, appealed to me greatly. You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered just how inaccurate this name was. This is a few events short of an Olympics, or even a decathlon. In fact, it's only one event. So apparently "micro" applies to the size of the Olympics, not the size of the competitors.

As for the event itself, it's pretty straightforward. You fire yourself out of a cannon (using the old "click to set angle, click to set power" interface) and try to go as far as possible. Going longer distances earns you money, which you can use to buy a variety of upgrades, which you can use to go longer distances, which earns you more money, which... etc.

The graphics are cute; there's no music, and the sounds can get a little annoying. As far as the strategy itself, once you've gotten the hang of just how the different components work (it's not as obvious as you might think), it's not a terribly difficult game, although you probably will be frustrated your first few tries, when you are trying to figure things out and you have to start over at the beginning when you don't make the right choice. It's worth playing through once, but after that there's not that much of a compelling reason to keep playing.

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.