Tactical Assassin

OK, I know what you're thinking: "Paul, I can understand why you played Tactical Assassin 2. After all, it had badges. But after discovering that it was pretty mediocre, why would you go back and play the first one, which doesn't even have badges?" Well...I don't really have a good answer to that question. Mostly it's because I was curious, since the Tactical Assassin games consistently rate high in their category, and for all of its flaws, Tactical Assassin 2 is not bad mindless fun, so I decided to try the original.

So, the basic concept is the same: find people, shoot them in the head. Unlike the sequel, there's no buying things in between missions; you just have one weapon, and no worries about accessories or ammo. The random jitter is also gone, which is kind of a relief. The game is a little shorter -- seven missions divided between two chapters. The spelling is still amazingly poor, and the missions are still as simple as before, if not simpler; one frustrating thing is that in several missions, you will lose if "an alarm is raised", but it is very unclear exactly what the trigger conditions are, so you'll need several tries to get through. Still, it's by no means a difficult game.

Anyway, playing this one second reveals just how unnecessary most of the improvements added to Tactical Assassin 2 are, and it's kind of a nice experience stripped down to the basics. Still, there's just not enough actual game there to make it really interesting.

Tactical Assassin 2

Tactical Assassin 2 is a very simple game. In many ways, the game it reminds me most of is Button Hunt (review here), except in this case, the button is someone's head. But other than that, they're pretty much the same: you have to find the target, occasionally solving simple puzzles to make it visible, and then click on it. That's pretty much all there is. Though in Tactical Assassin 2, your crosshairs do have a little random jitter, to reflect your natural body moving, which adds an element which I feel like I should praise for its realism but which, in practice, only adds a degree of irritation. You can counter this by taking diazepam, which for some reason is activated using the right-arrow key.

The missions are exceedingly simple -- none of them takes more than 30 seconds. I managed to horribly overthink this in my first real mission -- I had been informed that my target liked to smoke cigars outside, and looked briefly at the people inside; none of them was smoking a cigar, so I figured I just had to wait for my target to come out. I waited for a couple of minutes, and felt intrigued that the game was so accurately simulating the long periods of boredom in being a sniper. Then I waited a little more, and decided I was missing something. Turns out he just had the cigar in an ashtray in front of him. That's pretty much the level of difficulty you can expect from the game.

In between missions, you can visit the store to buy more ammunition (useful) and diazepam (also useful), as well as a variety of accessories which aren't really useful. There's a lot of detail on each of the possible sniper rifles you can buy, but none of these details really matter in the game itself, so you're kind of left wondering what the point is.

The presentation is not great. The artwork is passable (stick figures, simple backgrounds), and the music is a good complement. The music is a nice complement, and each rifle has its own distinct sound, which is also a nice touch. The interface is pretty bad, though -- the original version that I played had a horrible font problem which made nearly everything unreadable. This appears to be fixed now, but the interface is still pretty confusing and not well-organized. And while I've, alas, grown used to a certain degree of bad spelling in Flash games, the spelling in this game is simply atrocious. It stands out even among Flash games.

Overall, I can see why this game idea appeals to people, but there's simply so little substance in the puzzles that this is not a particularly great game. You might as well play it and get the badge; it's not like it'll take you that long, and you can feel moderately clever for figuring out the few small puzzles there are, but that's about all I would recommend.

Nano War

Nano War is like the opposite of the Holy Roman Empire: it's a real-time game, and it's a strategy game, but it's most definitely not a real-time strategy game. Rather, it's a very simple concept packaged in a very simple game, which is entertaining for a little bit but rapidly loses steam thanks to its limitations.

The basic system of Nano War is very simple. You and your enemy are in battle in a field of circular cells. Cells controlled by your side will gradually increase in population, as will cells controlled by the enemy. There are also neutral cells, which are held by neutral troops; these don't increase in population over time. To attack an enemy cell, merely click once on your own cell and once on the destination cell; this sends half of your troops in the source cell (but you can click multiple times to send another half, and then another half of this, and so forth). Combat is settled by removing equal numbers of troops from both sides; the side left standing occupies the cell. (It is possible, though of course rare, for mutual annihilation to occur, in which case the cell becomes neutral.) It's also possible for two competing forces to encounter each other in transit, in which case the conflict is settled the same way. Larger cells on the battlefield produce more troops more quickly; each cell also has a maximum population beyond which it will stop producing more troops, which is higher for larger cells. Thus, the large cells tend to be the most important strategic points.

That's really all there is. While a pleasingly simple system, the problem is that there just isn't much to distinguish one level from another -- some may have more large cells, and some may have more small cells, but it doesn't really change the game all that much. This limits the game's long-term value. But the second problem is much more severe: because you are naturally much smarter than the AI, in order to make it a challenging game at all, the AI has to be given ridiculous advantages to start with. In the first few levels, the AI is still ridiculously passive, allowing you to defeat it with ease despite its huge starting advantage. Only around level 12 does it really begin being more aggressive, which can be quite frustrating given its still large initial advantage; you'll need both some luck and some skill to beat it at this point. But playing against an opponent on such unequal ground is less satisfying and more frustrating than it would be against a more competent and skillful AI, especially given the natural AI advantages of being able to coordinate multiple movements more effectively than you can hope to.

I believe I've described many games here as "brightly colored", but this might be the first time I think a game is too dimly colored -- both your color and the enemy color are kind of washed out, and if you're in a real hurry it may be difficult to distinguish the color of a small, heavily-contested cell. The music is a little spectral, and kind of creepy, but it's not bad, either; the sounds are pretty basic.

Anyway, while the underlying concept in Nano War is rather nifty, the poor AI and the simplicity of the concept mean that this just isn't a game which is good for long-term play. Currently the game has 14 levels, which is already the point where it begins to drag. Getting the badge wasn't too bad, but I wouldn't want to have to play significantly more than that.

The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2

In case the name didn't tip you off, The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2 is a sequel to The Fancy Pants Adventures (review here). By and large the game engine is the same, and the whimsical sense of humor very much intact, but World 2 adds a few features to add a little more flavor to the game.

In case you're too lazy to click on the link and read about the first one, World 2, like its predecessor, is a charmingly hand-drawn platformer. It adheres to pretty much your standard Mario platformer conventions (even down to Fancy Pants Man falling asleep if you sit idle at the keyboard too long), but its well-crafted levels and general cheerfulness more than compensate for any familiarity in the basic gameplay principles.

World 2 adds a few additional features. First of all, it's longer, with six levels, plus transitional levels between and a small introductory scene at the beginning. (Alas, there's still no level indicator.) A skeletal plotline has been added; there's not much to it, but it's cute, and it's definitely a nice addition, given that the original had no plotline at all. There's still a bunch of hidden trophies (none of them particularly hard to find, but each requiring you to go at least a little bit out of your way). More music has also been added; the new music provides welcome variety but is also excellent, so this is a quality addition. Also, the backgrounds have been spiced up, with lots of cute little tidbits hidden in the background of many levels, amking the game much less static. Furthermore, a whole new side game has been added: in addition to the normal progress of the level, each level now has a snail shell and a hole somewhere in the level; knocking the snail shell into the hole will grant you a new color for your pants! This is kind of a neat little addition, though as a game, it can be extremely frustrating getting the shell to go where you want it to go.

Anyway, this is still a very entertaining and charming game, and I can't imagine anyone not enjoying it. While the snail shell may not be a great addition, the basic gameplay is still wonderful. Like its predecessor, it's not a terribly long, nor a terribly difficult game; it's best enjoyed as a simple, well-crafted morsel.

BoomsticK

BoomsticK -- and no, I'm not going to keep using that capitalization -- is a relatively straightforward shooter with a few interesting ideas balanced out by a few irritating flaws.

The basic concept behind Boomstick is quite simple: you have a shotgun, various brightly-colored shapes flit by overhead, and you have to shoot them. When you do, the shapes drop ammunition which you can pick up. In the early levels, at least, the shapes pose no threat to you, and your main concern is running out of ammunition -- each shot gulps 10 ammo, and if you only hit one target with each shot, you'll quickly run out. Thus, the key to survival is hitting two or more shapes with every shot. This is the first flaw of the game -- it slows down the pace and means that you have to spend time waiting for the perfect shot to come by, which makes for a pretty boring experience. Also, your character moves frustratingly slowly, so even if you do manage to pull off a good shot, you may not be able to collect all of the ammo dropped. But, in any case, giving an advantage to the player with infinite patience is generally poor game design.

As the levels (or, as the game calls them, "tiers", for no explicable reason) go by, eventually more hazardous enemies appear: first, enemies which shoot at you, which cost you ammo, and then finally enemies which aim to directly collide with you. This is the second unpleasant surprise the game has in store -- after you've been cruising along for a large portion of the game without any worries other than your ammo stock, you can all of a sudden be killed. Fortunately, the game doesn't force to restart from the beginning (which would be unbelievably poor design), but even still it's rather a rude shock the first time. (Especially since, once you restart, all of your carefully stockpiled ammunition is gone; fortunately, once you reach these last few levels, targets are generally plentiful enough that ammo is no longer a huge worry.) The boss in the last level is also quite the challenge, especially since you still have to play through the last four levels every time you fail to beat the boss.

The graphics are nothing special; the shapes (as mentioned earlier) are brightly-colored, though. The background music is not bad, and fits in well with the slightly futuristic feel of the game. The sounds are nothing special, but they don't take anything away from the table, though the sound when you get squished is surprisingly graphic. The spelling also gets shaky when you get to the really-high-multiple kills, unfortunately.

Overall, the ammo-conservation mechanic is a neat feature in the game, and definitely is a nice feature to have in a shooter like this, but the frustratingly slow pace in the early levels means that this is not the best realization of that idea. The badge is a worthwhile challenge, though.

The Last Stand 2

The Last Stand 2 is, as you might be able to guess, a sequel to The Last Stand, and tempted though I am again to do a one-sentence review, I'll give it the full treatment. But first, you might ask, how can you have a second last stand? It's supposed to be the last stand! The game actually does attempt to explain this. But in Last Stand 2, you don't actually stand. Unlike in the original, where time is your friend, here you have to evacuate the area by reaching Union City within 40 days, so the clock is against you. You move from city to city, mounting a defense through the night in each and looking during the day for weapons and fellow survivors.

The basic gameplay is nearly identical -- you have barricade, zombies approach barricade, you shoot zombies. However, some things have changed from the original. First of all, you can give your excess weapons to your survivors instead of them having to rely on their own dinky little pistols, which greatly increases your firepower (on the other hand, you can field fewer survivors total than in the first). Secondly, some zombies now carry weapons (actually, in the original Last Stand, zombies would sometimes carry weapons too, but they never used them; in theory, you could take them if you didn't already have one, but in practice they only showed up long after you already had one of your own, so that feature was pretty much completely worthless), and if they reach the barricade they can use those weapons to kill your fellow survivors, so you need to keep them away at all costs. A couple of weapons have also been added (and the chainsaw power reduced to make it more reasonable). But the most major change is the search interface. Instead of just dividing your 12 daylight hours among three options, you have a choice to search various buildings in your current town, with different buildings taking different amounts of time. Unfortunately, what's in what building is still pretty random. You can still spend time repairing your barricade, of course, but in addition to finding weapons and survivors, you can also find supplies and traps. Supplies allow you to move to another city, which takes time but brings you closer to your goal, and also gives you a brand-new barricade to start behind. (Any given weapon only appears in one specific city, so if you have your heart set on a specific weapon, you'll have to go to its appropriate location.) Traps can be used to slow down or blow up zombies approaching your barricade, but they're one use only, so you can't do too much with them.

The presentation is still nicely done, as in the first; the interface is crisp and clean (although the weapon selection is improved, it's still not great); there's now an assortment of different spooky background tunes to go with each different place you're in, along with well-rendered environments for each location; the sounds are still pretty much the same.

Like the first game, this is not terribly difficult, but it will probably pose a challenge the first time through simply because you're likely to run out of time. And also like the first game, it's an enjoyable game to play through once, since it is a well-crafted challenge, but because the genre is so familiar and it doesn't really do much beyond the basic, well-established conventions, it doesn't retain very much replay value.

The Last Stand

The Last Stand is yet another survival shooter game. But this one is different! It's from a side-view perspective!

OK, I'm very tempted to end the review there, but I suppose I should say a few things about how the game works. So you have this barricade, with you on one side and the zombies on the other. The zombies walk up to the barricade and attempt to destroy it; if they succeed, then you'll be easy prey for them. You have to shoot them with whatever weaponry you happen to have on hand before this happens. You're also apparently not very good at shooting diagonally, so you have to move around a fair amount behind the barricade to get the best shots on zombies. Like in all survival shooter games, you have a wide variety of weaponry, distinguished by the number of shots they can fire before reloading, how long they take to reload, and how much damage you do. Your goal is to survive 20 nights, after which a helicopter arrives to rescue you.

Aside from the perspective, there are a couple of additional features worth mentioning. First of all, accuracy is very important also; some of the weapons are very inaccurate at long range, which makes it vital to select your shots wisely. Secondly, the normal mechanic of earning points during the level which are then spent in a shop to buy better equipment is replaced with a slightly more interesting mechanic -- each day, you have 12 hours, which you can split among repairing your barricade, looking for weapons, or looking for survivors. Survivors provide a little additional firepower, though since they don't move they can only help in a small part of the screen; they also make time spent repairing your barricade more effective. Looking for survivors is frustratingly random, though. Looking for weapons is somewhat more predictable -- you get a weapon once you've put in a certain fixed amount of time. However, any searching (either for survivors or weapons) carries the risk that one of your fellow survivors will be lost in the search party, which is also frustratingly random. The weapons are your typical array of weapons, starting with pistols, moving up through a couple of submachine guns and a rifle, and up through assault rifles to the extremely powerful sniper rifle. There's also the chainsaw, which is extremely satisfying to use but of course only works at short ranges. (I'd still call it somewhat overpowered, though.)

One nice touch is that nearly all of the zombies look different -- there's a wide range of heads and bodies, so that you don't just get the same zombie over and over again, and there's a lot of funny ones, like the undead preachers. However, they're nearly all functionally equivalent -- some zombies can run, which means they get to your barricade sooner, and some are fat, which means they can take more damage, but that's all the practical difference there is. As for the rest of the presentation, the graphics are not bad; there's no background music during the levels, only the moans of the undead and the shots of you and your fellow men; these are fine, but nothing special. There is a little spooky ambient music in the menu screens. The interface is nicely done, except for the weapon selection screen, which is rather clunky, but there are a lot of cute touches which clearly show that some thought went into the interface; overall, it's definitely better than average.

Anyway, this is enough better than the typical entrant in the genre that I didn't feel like playing it was totally pointless, but on the other hand it doesn't really add enough to the basic conventions of the genre to make it a really good game, either. It was fun to play to get the badge, but that was about all.

Generic Defense Game

Generic Defense Game is a well-needed satire of the top-down survival shooter genre. It goes for the most ridiculous possible scenarios: Nazis attacking your bowling trophy, zombie football players trying to tear down your goalpost, Pac-Man ghosts, killer ants, and of course ninjas...it's got it all. There's a variety of game modes, some with a fixed turret and some with a moving player, and some where you have to defend a fixed target and some where you only have to defend yourself. The format is still the usual, though: shoot enemies, get points, buy better weaponry, shoot more enemies, etc., and of course there's ever so much blood that gets spattered all over the place.

While the tongue-in-cheek attitude is a welcome addition, the fact remains that this is still, at heart, a very generic survival shooter, and there's nothing other than the silliness of the enemies that you're fighting to distinguish it from any of the many other near-identical products out there, so I found it hard to maintain interest in this game for very long. The graphics, sound effects, and music are appropriately generic: they're serviceable, but none of them is particularly great.

Anyway, I played this game long enough to get the badge (actually, longer; because the game doesn't inform you that you also get points for each wave completed, I kept playing for a fair amount of time after I actually had enough points to quit), but didn't really find it engaging enough to come back and play any more after having done so.

Amberial: Nebulosa Realms

The somewhat incomprehensibly-named Amberial: Nebulosa Realms is, as you might guess, a sequel to the original Amberial. The basic rolling-based platformer gameplay is pretty much unchanged from its predecessor, but the game adds enough flashy features to make for a lengthier and more engaging playing experience, albeit not one without its flaws.

The gameplay elements in Nebulosa Realms are pretty much identical to the original -- your ball, which can only roll left and right, and various springs, trampolines, moving platforms, spikes, red balls of destruction, and so forth. There are a few more levels which play around with gravity, which has the potential to add a lot to the puzzles but which is still not really explored to much extent in Nebulosa Realms. A few of the more irritating features of the original have been fixed: the scrolling is now continuous, so it's more obvious where the edges of the level are; dying now brings you a dialog box offering you a chance to retry rather than going straight back to the level select screen; and the music (which is not bad, although not anything great, either -- like so many other Flash games, the msuic gets very irritating in large doses) now plays continuously throughout the level.

The game also now has considerably more content. There are now 22 levels, most of which are much larger and more difficult than the original levels. In addition to the normal finish and Ace finish options present in the original, you can now also get a "thunder finish" for finishing the level in a certain amount of time. Collecting Aces and thunders allows you to unlock hidden levels, including the quite difficult Tower of Glory 2, a sequel to the difficult hidden level in the original which is even more difficult and insane.

Overall, this game is a worthy sequel, but it still lacks a lot of that polish that you need for a really great game, and the level design, while not bad, isn't quite up to the standards of a great game, either. It's entertaining for a while, and frustrating for a while when you're trying to get some of the more difficult achievements, but I fear you'l run out of entertainment before finishing the game.

And now, I have to mention one very, very serious complaint. As I've mentioned before, many Flash games have the problem that they're easier if your computer is slower. And, in general, time measured by the game is tied to your frame rate, so that if you have to, say, survive for 5 minutes, that 5 minutes might actually take longer on a slower computer. This can be somewhat irritating, but obviously there's no simple solution to this either. However, Amberial: Nebulosa Realms chooses the wrong solution. See, I was trying to get the thunder finish on a given level. It seemed like I was doing everything perfectly, but I was still a good second and a half slower than the required time. I spent quite a bit of time racking my brains to see if there was some kind of shortcut I was missing, but I couldn't find anything. The problem was that at one point you have to wait for a moving platform to arrive, and it simply didn't arrive soon enough for me to get to the end of the level in time. Finally, in frustration, I turned to YouTube to see if there was anything I was missing. The YouTube video, though, did it exactly as I was doing it. And it's not like they were just a little bit faster, since they were constrained by that platform -- rather, when I watched closely, I could see that the moving platform was arriving at an earlier time than it was for me. I could only conclude that the timer was not tied to the frame rate, but rather running asynchronously, which meant I was basically screwed by having a fast computer. So, I started playing a movie in the background, tried the level again, and my time instantly improved by two seconds, allowing me to claim the thunder finish. This is really, really poor programming and it strongly negatively impacted my opinion of the game.

Amberial

Amberial is a very minimalist platformer which is elegantly executed, but which is relatively short and simple. You'll enjoy it, but there's not quite enough depth to make it feel like a truly engaging game.

Amberial veers from the normal platformer conventions by eliminating something which is normally a staple of the genre: the jump. In Amberial, you control a ball, and all you can do is roll left or right, so handling the vertical dimension becomes much more tricky than in your conventional platformer. Naturally, there's a wide array of springs and trampolines so that you're not always headed downward, but it does add an interesting constraint to the game. You have to reach the exit while avoiding your normal array of hazards -- spikes, moving balls, lasers, and so forth.

Each level features a normal exit and an Ace, which is supposed to be harder than the normal exit but is often as easy, if not easier than, the regular exit. Collecting all the Aces will give you a badge. Some levels require you to press a switch to make the exit appear, and others have a switch for the Ace, which adds a bit of difficulty. Still, the levels tend to be pretty straightforward. There are 12 levels, which form a sequence with several branches, so you don't have to do all of the levels to reach the end, but as none of them is particularly difficult, there's no real reason not to do them all. There's also three bonus levels, accessible by collecting Aces; the last bonus level is not an easy one, especially to get the Ace. One awkward feature of the levels is that they tend to comprise several distinct screens, and it's not always easy to tell if the level continues off an edge or just ends there other than experimentation.

The graphics are simple, but they're not bad (although a little bit dark), and the sound effects are serviceable. The music is kind of strange -- the little snippets that you get aren't bad, but they only repeat for a short amount of time at the beginning of the level, leaving you in silence for the rest of the time. I don't know if this is a bug or a design decision, but it definitely feels a little weird. The interface is also very spartan -- dying immediately returns you to the level select screen, which can be kind of annoying if all you want to do is immediately retry the level (which is almost always the case).

Overall, Amberial is not a bad game, and you'll enjoy playing it, but it does feel a little sparse and unfinished -- it could use a little bit of sprucing up, and a little more substance, and a little more content. Still, it's an enjoyable way to kill 20 minutes or so.

Platform Racing 2

If you've read my review of Platform Racing (here), it probably won't surprise you to learn that I was somewhat dreading playing Platform Racing 2. Fortunately, the good news is that Platform Racing 2 has improved dramatically on its predecessor. I still wouldn't call it a great game, but at least playing it doesn't make me feel like a total idiot who's wasting his time.

The basic concept of Platform Racing 2 hasn't changed much from the original -- it's like a platformer, and you have multiple characters racing to the end. So what makes it better? Well, first, there's more building blocks in the toolkit (is that a mixed metaphor? I'm afraid it is). In addition to the basic blocks, there's ice blocks, blocks that can be pushed, blocks that disappear after a little while, water blocks, and even blocks that rotate the entire playfield 90 degrees, which can make for some very confusing levels. (This is used to very interesting effect in some levels -- for instance, there's one level in which two players rotate left and two rotate right, so that one pair ends up on the top and the other pair ends up on the bottom.) The levels also look much less drab -- in addition to the new blocks, which help to add splashes of color, there's also nicer backgrounds, which makes looking at them much more enjoyable. The music is also vastly improved, courtesy of the Newgrounds music portal. Also, more items have been added (most of which don't add very much, but the more variety is always welcome), and you can customize your character a bit more.

The real improvement that makes Platform Racing 2 vastly more enjoyable, though, is in the level design. Remember how I said how important level design is in a game like this? If you're not convinced of that fact, just compare these two games. Wisely, Jiggmin selected many levels not designed by him for Platform Racing 2, and this substantially improves the game -- the levels now have interesting features, and cute touches, and other sorts of challenges than just "jump from this one block to this other block". It is perhaps no coincidence that the last level, which is designed by Jiggmin, is by far the worst, most frustrating, and least enjoyable level -- it is clearly designed to be hard, but it isn't hard in a fun way; it's just mindlessly hard. There's also a thriving community of player-submitted levels, though I tried checking a few of the top-rated ones out and was not terribly impressed; I would expect that there are some good ones lurking, but I wasn't able to find any.

The multiplayer is pretty much the same -- the flaws of the matchmaking system are still present. There are a couple of improvements, though; you don't have to wait for everyone else to finish before receiving your points and leaving, and (much to my relief) the ability to jump on other people's heads and stun them is now gone. The silly system where you have to gain rank before you can play the rest of the available levels is still present, alas. Winning races gains you body parts which you can use to customize your appearance, which is a nice touch; races with more people tend to bring you the best stuff. Cheating also appears to be much less of a problem, which I am grateful for.

Overall, the game has improved enough that it's moderately fun to play. The basic concept, to be honest, is still a little lacking, but at least the level design is interesting enough to make this a game that's worth playing again.

Typing Ninja Hunter

Typing Ninja Hunter is, as the name might imply, a typing game. That alone probably scares a lot of people off. But not me! I love typing games -- I played quite a few in my youth (none of which I remember, but all of which revolved around the basic concept of "type quickly to destroy these bad things"), and they're certainly a large part of the reason for my typing skills today. So believe me when I say that my bitter disappointment with the game stems not from the fact that it's a typing game, but from the fact that it's a bad typing game.

So, the basic gameplay is not particularly surprising -- hordes of ninjas come at your temple, each with a word conveniently positioned above them; typing the word will take out the ninja. The basic ninjas just run toward the temple, but as the game goes on, ninjas with different powers arrive, and you have to kill them before their powers activate, or else you'll have to do even more typing. The words are generally four letters (though some harder ninjas have five or even six letters), and the word selection is kind of strange -- there are a lot of ordinary words, but also a few really strange words like "xyst" and even a few outright offensive words like "kikes". I don't know how those managed to slip by -- there's really no need to include them in a game like this. Anyway, as you correctly get words, your power bar increases, and when it fills you have the option of unleashing one of three different powers. Enemies come in waves, at the end of which are bosses, although there is also a survival mode in which enemies just keep on coming.

Now, the first problem is simply that the game is too easy. Now, of course, I'm an exceptional typist, but even on hard mode, there isn't much of a challenge. To amuse myself, after reaching the high score I needed to get for the last badge (which was on hard mode), I tried playing the game one-handed, and I still managed to rack up another 30,000 points or so before succumbing. I understand that the game needs to remain accessible to people of all skills, and that's fine; the way to do that is by making the game gradually harder until even unbelievably good typists can't handle it. But here, the difficulty ramp seems to stop and flatten out long before it should (well, really, it shouldn't flatten out at all). I have no doubt that (at least in survival mode) the only thing limiting how long I could last is boredom.

But the other, vastly more infuriating thing about the game is the aforementioned bosses. You see, in order to beat the bosses, you don't have to type at all -- you just have to press arrows at the right time when they're displayed on the screen, or sometimes just hammer arrows as quickly as possible. This isn't typing! It's an entirely different game, and one which requires an unreasonable degree of precision. On a fast computer, the game will occasionally fail to recognize your keystrokes, but you at least have a fair chance of winning; on a slow computer, though, it seems like 90% of your arrow presses simply disappear into the ether, making it essentially impossible to clear the game.

The graphics are not bad, though the game does something weird with your cursor which makes it flicker constantly when not in the Flash frame, so you can't leave this game on a background tab and go to do something else. The background music gets pretty annoying pretty quickly, and the sounds are mostly just generic people-getting-killed sounds.

Anyway, I would enjoy immensely seeing a truly interesting typing game on Kongregate, but this really isn't it. Making the bosses a real typing challenge rather than simply a test of reflexes would go a long way, as would working on the poor performance issues, but what I'd really like is a game that challenges me, and this game totally fails on that score.

Rings

Rings is hard to explain. I suppose it's best introduced as a cross between Tower of Hanoi and Tetris. You have a playing field with six circles surrounding a center circle. New rings appear on the center circle, and after a short amount of time, they will move to one of the outer six circles (you know which one they're going to move to). The rings come in four different sizes, and if ever a ring moving from the center circle moves onto a smaller ring, you lose. When you successfully complete a stack of rings, it disappears, and completing a certain number of stacks will advance you to the next level. This description probably sounds at least a little confusing, but it's quite simple once you actually start playing.

Not surprisingly, the most frustrating aspect of the game is the randomness -- sometimes, the game will just keep not giving you the ring that you need. It does seem like the game is nice enough to never completely screw you -- there's always some legal moves you can make if you're fast enough -- but obviously some times you'll be luckier than others and not have to work very hard to complete the level, while other times you will have to do a lot of frantic moving or accept a lot of subpar stacks. The other problem is simply that the game doesn't change enough -- maybe at the higher levels the time you have allotted before the center ring moves gets a little less, but I didn't really notice it. Some more pronounced changes to the difficulty (adding more types of rings? decreasing the time more strongly?) would do a lot to make this game keep my interest.

There's no background music, which makes the game feel a little sterile; the rings are brightly colored, and the sound effects are not bad, but they also don't add that much to the game. Overall, this is a neat concept at its base, but I feel like there just isn't quite enough done with the basic idea to make it into a game which is engaging for more than a little bit of time.

The Fancy Pants Adventures

The Fancy Pants Adventures is an utterly charming platformer. It doesn't have anything particularly new, I must concede, but it is so well executed and thoroughly whimsical that it is still a joy to play. The only disappointment is that it's a relatively small game, and when that's the worst I can say, you know it's a good game.

The game will look and feel instantly familiar to anyone who's played a Mario game. Sure, you have Fancy Pants Man instead of Mario, squiggles instead of coins, and patrolling spiders instead of Goombas, but the basic scheme is pretty much the same. In some ways, it is more in the spirit of the old 2D Mario games (down to the control scheme where up arrow is used for entering doors, while a separate button on your other hand is used to jump, which in some ways feels downright archaic), but there are touches of newer Marios as well, as can be seen in Fancy Pants Man's backflips and wall jumps; also, your character has a life bar, which can be replenished by collecting more squiggles. There's even a little bit of Sonic in Fancy Pants Man. Like I said, there's a lot of familiar elements.

But what makes this game still fun to play, even for someone who's spent countless hours playing all sorts of Mario, is the attention to detail. The artwork is lovingly hand-drawn, and the animation is excellent. The level design is solid -- there are three levels, with two little transitional levels in between and the final boss at the end, and each is enjoyable. My only complaint is that it doesn't actually tell you what level you're on, so if you're not paying close attention it's easy to lose track of how much you have left. Each level is pretty short if you're just aiming to get from beginning to end, but there's some other things scattered about -- you can find trophies, and there's also a hidden feature, as well as a few coin -- I mean, squiggle -- rooms. Overall, the levels do a good job of keeping you entertained; there's usually something else to be explored or optimized, but the game doesn't frustrate you, either.

The music is also excellent. To repeat an all-too-familiar complaint, the loop is a little short, but it's good music, and there are a few different themes (there's separate music for the transitional levels, as well as the final boss) so you don't get completely tired. Anyway, it's perfectly appropriate for a light little platformer like this.

Like I said at the beginning, this is not a particularly long game (even if you're looking for all the trophies), nor is it a particularly difficult game (though achieving the speed required to get the hard badge will require a bit of practice), but it is still a lot of fun to play. It's a game I would have no problems recommending to anyone, partially because it's not horribly violent or bloody or gory like so many games you'll see on Kongregate, but mostly because I can't imagine anyone not enjoying it.

Turkey Fling

Turkey Fling is a very simple game: you launch a turkey into the air, and you try to keep him aloft as long as possible. Clicking the mouse will flap his wings, but you need to collect corn to keep your power up, otherwise you'll run out of energy and not be able to flap. Below you is an infinitely long dining table with plenty of hazards for your poor turkey to fall into should he run out of upward momentum.

My first time, I tried to play this like Hedgehog Launch and failed miserably. It was only when I realized that you wanted to launch the turkey (mostly) horizontally that I was able to succeed. Once you do that, it's not a terribly difficult game; you just click at the right time. I got the single (medium) badge without very much trouble at all.

The graphics are amusingly cartoony, and your poor turkey looks awfully terrified. There's no background music, but the sound effects are decent. A single play of the game doesn't take up very much time anyway, so there's not very much time to get bored. Overall, this is kind of your classic very simple Flash game: a useful time-waster if you have a minute or two, but not really worth playing much beyond that.

Snowman Attack

Snowman Attack is another survival shooter game, and there's really not that much to differentiate it from all the other members of that genre, so most of what I could say is pretty much covered in my review of The Endless Zombie Rampage. This particular game comes in the flavor of top-down, fixed turret, but other than that it bears pretty much all of the hallmarks of the genre.

One nice thing is that (as the name implies) you're fighting snowmen with snowballs, rather than spilling zombie blood and guts all over the place, making this game a somewhat kid-friendlier example of the genre (also cleaner; the zombie games always seem to end up with the ground coated with blood, whereas here the snowman remains blend into the ground nicely). One annoying thing is that the collision detection seems to be awfully sensitive -- there were a lot of times where I thought I scored a hit and the snowball went right on by.

The music is not very good -- it seems kind of inappropriate to the setting -- and is rather repetitive. The sound effects are pretty generic, and the art is definitely on the simplistic side. Overall, this is not a particularly impressive example of not a particularly great genre. Though the game does get points for the Calvin & Hobbes reference in the badge name, there's really not much to recommend it beyond that.

Grid16

Grid16 is a collection of minigames, much like Four Second Frenzy (review here), and like Four Second Frenzy, it is brought to you by the prolific jmtb02, which means that you'll see a well-polished game with not necessarily particularly deep gameplay. (Unlike Four Second Frenzy, however, in which each game has its own separate designer and hence separate aesthetic, here all the games are designed by jmtb02, which gives the game a much more unified feel.)

The basic gameplay concept is very simple: one out of the 16 minigames starts, and you play it for a few seconds. If you survive, you are switched to a different minigame; if you fail, then that minigame is removed from the rotation. When you've failed on all 16 minigames, the game ends and gives your rating in three different categories of game skills, which is kind of neat. As you go along, the speed multiplier increases, making the games considerably more difficult. Grid16 doesn't even give you the courtesy of flashing an instruction before starting a game; you're plunged right in, with some text of varying helpfulness scrolling along the top.

The main problem with Grid16 is that it has the reward system backwards. Games that you're bad at you will get quickly eliminated in, meaning that you don't get much of a chance to improve in those games. This is especially frustrating when you don't even see a minigame until the speed multiplier has already been cranked up a few notches, giving you even less of a chance to survive your first time. (The minigame selection is always random, so you may see one minigame several times before you see the first appearance of another.) Conversely, you can do well by being proficient in only a few games, since once you're down to just a few minigames left you'll just keep getting those. In the extreme case, you could probably just practice to be really good at one game and ignore the other fifteen entirely. This kind of defeats the purpose of having so many minigames, really. The other flaw is that one of the games is bugged -- at least in some Flash versions (it works fine on my home computer, but not other computers), it's possible to fall through the floor, which makes the game awfully easy. One other thing to watch out for is that each minigame always picks up from where you left it off last time, which can be surprisingly frustrating -- you can't just plan to survive for your three seconds (or however long it is), but always have to be thinking ahead.

As befits a jmtb02 production, the production values are solid -- the graphics are simple but clean, and the music is nicely intense, but there is the occasional typo. This is not an easy game -- even getting the easy badge is not quite trivial, and getting the hard badge is exceedingly difficult. Unless, alas, your computer is slow, in which case it's much, much easier. Overall, while I generally enjoy the minigame concept, the fact that I really don't get to enjoy the whole game but just end up playing the same few minigames repeatedly is kind of a disappointment, so I wouldn't rank this quite as highly as Four Second Frenzy.

IndestructoTank! AE

As you might be able to guess from the name, IndestructoTank! AE is a sequel to the previous game in the IndestructoTank series, Indestruct2Tank (review here), reprising the preposterous premise of previous IndestructoTanks with new, spruced-up graphics. (No matter how much I want the "AE" to stand for "After Earth", it only actually stands for "Anniversary Edition", however.)

Anyway, the gameplay is basically the same as in Indestruct2Tank: you have this invincible tank, but it will eventually run out of fuel, so you have to get passing enemies to drop bombs on you, which you can then use to boost yourself into the air and destroy them. Graphically, clearly a lot of effort has been put into the game to make it look much slicker -- the somewhat simplistic style of Indestruct2Tank is completely gone, replaced by an attempt to make it look more realistic. I don't really have a strong preference either way. Somewhat inexplicably, though, the screen size is smaller (maybe the more realistic models didn't scale up well?), which is kind of annoying. Also, enemy aircraft now fall to the ground when you destroy them, rather than just blowing up in midair, which is nice but can clutter up an often already confused screen. The music and sounds are the same as previously, though. The game also feels somewhat faster, which can be frustrating -- it's a lot easier to miss enemies -- but definitely helps to reduce the dead spots that plagued Indestruct2Tank.

IndestructoTank AE actually eliminates several of the gameplay modes from Indestruct2Tank. The story mode is entirely gone, which is a shame, because even though the plot was ridiculously terrible, it was still a nice contrast to the sameness of regular mode. The ability to select different difficulty levels for the regular mode is also gone, which is also kind of disappointing. In its place, there is "quick mode", which appears to be pretty much the same as regular mode except that you start with more enemies. The one new addition is a co-op mode, where the enemy has missiles that can destroy the IndestructoTank (hey, wait a minute...) and the other player has to use the mouse to shoot them down before the IndestructoTank is killed. This is kind of a neat idea (you can also play both roles yourself, but it's not easy), but the problem is that the balance is totally off -- in the later levels, you get so many points for shooting missiles that you don't need to really do anything with the tank except not get shot by the missiles. So, points for the idea, but it could really benefit from better execution. Speaking of points, the point formula has been changed radically from Indestruct2Tank -- in Indestruct2Tank, a combo of length n was worth 10n + n² points, meaning that long combos could bring in huge numbers of points. However, in IndestructoTank AE, they're only worth 11n + n²/5 points, so the larger combos are worth a lot less (and hence there's less incentive to try to go for them). I'm not quite sure what the point of this change was.

Overall, while the central gameplay theme is still entertaining for a while, the limited play modes mean that this game occupied me for less time than Indestruct2Tank. Still, I was glad to play it -- I actually played and finished it before badges came out, so when they did come out, I instantly got badges. Always a rewarding feeling.

The Visitor

(See the note below about the timing of this post.)

The Visitor is another point-and-click adventure game from Zeebarf, the oddly-named designer behind The Several Journeys of Reemus (review here). Like The Several Journeys of Reemus, it's a pretty standard point-and-click adventure game where you have to solve various puzzles. (Also, like the situation in yesterday's review, it actually came out before Reemus, but I don't think this is terribly important in this case.)

So, The Visitor follows the standard point-and-click adventure formula pretty closely. Unlike Reemus, but like the LucasArts classics I tend to think of as the archetype of the genre, you can't die or do anything that would get you permanently stuck, which is definitely welcome. The game, however, is fantastically gory and not for the squeamish -- you play an alien ... worm-thing, I guess, and as you consume various critters, you become larger and more powerful. The game isn't light on the blood when this consumption happens. Most of the puzzles just require careful thought, but there are a couple which require precision timing as well.

Anyway, most of the things I said about Reemus are pretty much true here. Because each part of the environment is only a single screen, there's simply not that much complexity or depth to the puzzles. Fortunately, I didn't have any problems finding clickable objects, which tend to be the bane of games of this genre. Also like Reemus, there are two different endings, and despite the fact that they're both worth a 15-point badge, one is much easier than the other. However, getting the harder one is kind of annoying, because should you happen to fail, then you will get the easier ending and have to watch the end credits before trying again (the game does considerately include a "replay last scene" button, so points for that, but it's still a few seconds, which gets more annoying each time).

The animation is not bad (more precisely, the drawing is decent, and the animation, while sparse, is serviceable); the first couple of screens are quiet, but then creepy background music is also added. The sound effects are solid; overall, I would say the presentation is solid, if not great.

Overall, this is not a difficult game if you're just trying to finish it, but getting the harder ending is annoying enough that I looked up the key step so I didn't have to keep retrying. While I generally enjoy this genre of game, and this is not a badly executed version of it, I did find the goriness a bit of a turnoff. Still, if you wouldn't mind, you could do a lot worse than this game.

Ragdoll Avalanche 2

(If you've actually been following this blog -- and I know you haven't -- then you know that the date at the top of this post isn't actually the date it was posted. Indeed, this whole week I skipped, for obvious reasons, and I'm just backfilling it in now.)

Ragdoll Avalanche 2 marks the return of the ragdoll character that you saw in Ragdoll Invaders (review here). Well, technically, Ragdoll Avalanche 2 came first, but it's second to me, so to me, it's a return.

So, Ragdoll Avalanche 2 is a very simple game -- spikes fall from the ceiling, and you have to dodge as many of them as possible. The ragdoll nature of your character means that sometimes your limbs may go where you don't quite want them to go, but on the other hand, like in Ragdoll Invaders, your ragdoll's extremities are expendable (at least to some extent; you can lose your lower legs and forearms without any ill effects; indeed, to the extent that it makes your ragdoll smaller, it can even help a little bit, but any more than that will kill your poor ragdoll).

The graphics are very simple -- you've got a stick figure, and some spikes. The music is some techno that is not bad for lending an air of intensity to the proceedings. Since the average length of a game is so short, it doesn't really have too much time to get boring.

Anyway, it's moderately entertaining for a little bit, but the hard badge requires some really good reflexes and a lot of luck (sometimes the spikes will just come in a clump from which you can't escape, and then you're, well, out of luck), which can be kind of frustrating. It's a good diversion for a few minutes, but not something that you'd want to play for hours and hours.

Factory Balls

The somewhat-unfortunately named Factory Balls reminds me of one of my favorite Sunburst education games when I was growing up, The Factory. Like The Factory, you have to perform a sequence of simple actions in the correct order to produce a desired result, which often requires some clever thinking and backwards reasoning.

Factory Balls isn't quite as good as The Factory, though. As you might expect from the title, you're operating on spheres, which opens up a few opportunities for particularly clever actions exploiting their three-dimensionality. However, it seems like the total number of possibilities is pretty limited, and it's frustratingly unclear what some of the devices actually do (I don't think I ever did figure out what that air gizmo in level 8 actually was), since the interface is singularly unhelpful. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if it weren't for my larger complaint. Namely, experimenting is half the fun of this kind of game, but the lives system doesn't afford you much room to make mistakes -- while sometimes you can (literally) paint over your errors, sometimes you just have to throw the ball away, and if you run out of balls you'll lose.

Anyway, it's a cute little puzzle, but with only 14 puzzles, you'll end up feeling that there was a lot of territory that could be explored which was left vacant, in favor of introducing some devices which feel awfully gimmicky and are only used once or twice. The graphics are pretty basic, and the background music is ambient enough not to be too annoying despite its extreme repetitiveness; the sound effects are solid. A neat concept, but not quite reaching the level of a great game.

colorfill

This game provides a nice contrast to Aliens Must Die, since it also takes an old idea, but it adds enough new and interesting features to make it a joy to play again. Like Filler, it's very much like JezzBall and Barrack. In fact, it's much more like those games than Filler, and...what's that? I never actually explained what JezzBall and Barrack are? Well, let's start there.

So, JezzBall is an old Windows game. You have a playfield with a bunch of balls bouncing across it, and your cursor controls a gun which can shoot lines either horizontally or vertically. When you click your button, two lines start from your cursor's present position outwards. If a ball happens to hit your lines while they're still moving, then they're destroyed and you lose a life. If both your lines reach the wall safely, then your line becomes solid. If the space on either side of your line is empty, it gets filled in. If both sides still have balls, then your line is at least still useful as a closer wall for future lines. Your goal is to fill up a given percentage of the playfield. Barrack is a classic Ambrosia game for the Mac, with the same basic concept but a few additional twists.

Anyway, colorfill is basically the same formula as described above, with a few twists. First of all, instead of only balls (which are actually colorful triangles), there are two other kinds of enemies: gears which roll along the walls, and long-tailed snakelike objects, both of which have uncanny talents for reaching your line just as it's about to complete. Also, the playing field is not necessarily rectangular. Second, as the name might imply, your lines are brightly colored in a variety of hues; your cursor changes color after every successful shot. This might not seem like a substantial gameplay difference, but the third difference makes it important. In JezzBall, as I mentioned, the empty half of space created by your line (if there is an empty half) is filled. It is thus possible (but very difficult, of course) with a well-timed shot to fill up a very large percentage of space with one shot. In colorfill, however, it's always the smaller half of the two halves created by your line which is filled. This means that, unlike JezzBall, where balls can never be killed, only hemmed into ever-smaller regions, you can destroy enemy objects by trapping them. But wait, there's a catch! If you happen to destroy an enemy object of the same color as your current fill color, two new ones will spawn in your empty space! This can prove particularly challenging when two objects of the same color as your cursor simply insist on staying on opposite sides of the screen.

Anyway, the level design is solid -- there's enough nooks even in the more difficult levels to give you a fighting chance, and overall the game is difficult but not too difficult. The game gets many positive points for not making you replay from the beginning when you die, but allowing you to pick up where you left off. The graphics are, as mentioned earlier, brightly colored and pretty. The music is terrific -- it's bouncy, fun, and truly enjoyable to listen to.

Overall, this is a tremendously entertaining game. It shouldn't take you too long to complete the 21 basic levels, but the 3 bonus levels (where your line moves more slowly) are quite difficult. I also approve of having a badge for doing the wrong thing (intentionally duplicating shapes), which adds a cute little wrinkle.

Aliens Must Die: The Jupiter Wars

In a moment of perfect timing, I had been reading (just out of curiosity) Kongregate's information about premium sponsorship, where they talked about wanting games which weren't just tired rehashes of the same old concept, but new and innovative takes on existing genres, or new genres entirely. Then, I clicked back to the Kongregate home page, and found that this game (which is, indeed, sponsored by Kongregate, but not premium sponsorship, I would assume) was the latest to have badges. I had actually tried it earlier, but it failed to hold my interest for a couple of minutes, because it was a tired rehash of an old concept. Now, I had a reason to play it for more than a few minutes, but it didn't really impress in a longer trial, either.

Anyway, Aliens Must Die: The Jupiter Wars (and let me digress for a moment to mention how awful that title is; with just the title, it has a nice camp quality, but the subtitle makes it sound overly serious and ruins the whole quality; also, as it probably won't surprise you to learn, Jupiter plays no part in the game, other than serving as the backdrop, so really, what's the point?) is a very generic space shooter, in the old classic Asteroids tradition. Actually, in some ways this game has more in common with the survival shooters I discussed in my last post, since you use the keyboard to move and the mouse to shoot, while I think of shooting in the direction that you move as a hallmark of Asteroids and Crystal Quest.

So, enemies come in (some inert, like asteroids and comets, and some which will shoot back), and, using the aforementioned control scheme, you shoot them. They release debris, which you can collect to (very gradually) upgrade your weapons. That's about it. From time to time you'll get health, which you'll need, and shields, which make you temporarily invincible. Also, in a savvy bit of marketing, the artwork prominently features a cute anime girl, who is allegedly your co-pilot. However, instead of, oh, perhaps manning the turrets while you're trying to steer, or vice-versa, or some other kind of co-piloty task, her sole duty seems to be to announce various events in a very strange voice. I can't tell whether it's synthesized, or just with a very peculiar accent, but either way it's slightly distracting.

The graphics are of good quality, and the sound effects are decent. The music I have to give props for recognizing and using the old Asteroids theme as their base, but to be honest, it does feel a little dated. Overall, though, the game feels pretty easy -- I don't consider myself particularly proficient in this genre (years of Crystal Quest notwithstanding). The hard badge requires you to defeat the alien mothership on wave 29 (although, if it's the mothership, why does the game continue after that? Oh well), which I guess is supposed to be a hard task. I had relatively little difficulty reaching wave 29, and when the mothership appeared, I happened to get a shield, so I just rammed it and that was that.

Anyway, this is not a badly produced game, but fundamentally there's nothing to add juice to what is by now a pretty old concept, so it really didn't succeed in holding my interest for any significant amount of time.

The Endless Zombie Rampage

The Endless Zombie Rampage is the first game that I've reviewed here that's in a genre which is quite popular on Kongregate. I don't know if that genre has an official name, so I'll call it "survival shooter". There are several minor variations on the theme, but they're all basically the same -- an endless stream of enemies comes at you, and you have to shoot them by clicking on them. Sometimes you have a movable character, and sometimes you have a fixed turret; sometimes the perspective is top-down and sometimes it's a side view; and sometimes you have to defend your base, while sometimes all you have to defend is yourself. By shooting enemies, you gain points, which you can use to upgrade the terrible pistol that you start with (and it's always, and I mean always, a pistol) to a dizzying array of increasingly powerful weaponry, usually based on real weapons and often rendered to a lovingly precise degree, and yet somehow differing only in their damage, rate of fire, ammo capacity, and reload time.

Anyway, The Endless Zombie Rampage exhibits all of the characteristics of your typical survival shooter; it's a top-down shooter where you can move around, but have to defend your base as well as yourself. And, just to make it even more unbelievably generic, your enemies are the incredibly-popular zombies. (There are also zombified...well, things; they're not human, but it's not at all clear what they are.)

I tend to not be a huge fan of this genre (or maybe it's just that all of the games in this genre are so similar); it's really just mindless clicking, and there's not that much strategy or even all that much in the way of reflexes involved, and the fact that everything in The Endless Zombie Rampage is so plain vanilla -- there's absolutely nothing which innovates on the basic formula -- means that there's really not much to make you say, "Oh yeah, I really want to play this game!"

The graphics are pretty average. Like most games of this genre, it doesn't skimp on the blood, so pretty soon most of the ground is going to be red. There's not any music, just moaning and the sounds of your trusty weapon, which I guess is supposed to make the game feel more atmospheric. Anyway, like most of the rest of the game, the presentation is pretty average.

All in all, this ended up being a very generic experience. I went through it to get the badge, but found nothing interesting in it to make the experience at all memorable.

Platform Racing

Imagine Mario Kart, which I hope we can all agree is a fine game. Now, take everything out of it that makes it a fun game. You've now got a pretty good idea of what playing Platform Racing is like. It gave me a horrible feeling that I had just wasted three hours of my life and all I got to show for it was 50 points in badges.

The basic concept of Platform Racing is, hopefully, conveyed by its title -- it's like a platformer, except you have many characters racing to get to the finish first. There's not much in the way of variety -- you have ordinary blocks, arrow blocks, which give you a boost in the direction the arrow is pointing (either sideways or upwards), mines, which give your little stick figure a nasty jolt, and the obligatory item blocks, which will give you one potentially-useful item.

So, what makes this such an uninteresting game? Well, first of all is the pace. Your characters are fairly slow to begin with, and in matches with multiple players (more on this later), you're constantly being lightninged or shot at or simply stomped on; like Mario Brothers, stomping on someone's head will stun them for several seconds, which is excruciating when you have characters all grouped in an area trying to make a jump and they all end up jumping on each other. This means that, even though the individual courses are relatively short, they still take what seems like forever to complete. You can customize your racer by allotting 100 points among speed, acceleration, and traction, but even when I weighted my racer heavily towards speed, he still seemed aggravatingly slow.

But the area where this is really a spectacular letdown is the level design. As in any racing game, the quality of the tracks is really what makes or breaks the experience, and the levels are simply not interesting. Part of this is undeniably a consequence of there simply being so few elements to work with, but the game seems to have only one trick in its toolbox for adding difficulty, and that's to have you jump from single block to single block over bottomless pits. This gets tired and annoying fast. Even worse is when the single blocks are up-arrow blocks, so that you get boosted up and you can't even see the block that you're trying to land on. This results in you plummeting to your demise approximately 10 million times on average, which is simply not fun. There's nothing particularly creative or interesting in the level design; the one attempt to make an unorthodox level, in which, instead of racing, you fall down and have to avoid various obstacles as you fall, I thought was pretty clever until I realized you could just go off to one side past all of the obstacles, fall almost the whole length of the level, and then come back in just in time for the finish. Brilliant, huh?

The items are also horribly unbalanced. (One thing which I will give the game credit for -- unlike Mario Kart, where it's possible for the lead driver to hog all of the items, in Platform Racing, each player can hit each block precisely once, so everyone has a chance at items.) Some items are ridiculously powerful, and some are very weak, and unlike Mario Kart, there's no attempt to balance them with your current position, so you can easily get lightning while leading the race. In one of the levels, if you get a certain item you're basically guaranteed to beat anyone who doesn't get that item -- in fact, I don't think in all my playing, I ever managed to even finish that level within the time limit without getting the item. Other levels have similar, if not quite as serious, problems.

The graphics are very bland -- the racers themselves are stick figures, with the parts not even connected, and the animation consists solely of your feet moving back and forth. You can "customize" your appearance, which only consists of changing colors. The levels themselves are similarly uninteresting in their appearance. The music is also solidly subpar, although at least there are multiple mediocre melodies, so you don't have to listen to the same thing the whole time. The sound effects are OK.

Now, on to the multiplayer. This is a racing game, after all, so while you can race by yourself, the entire point is to race against other people, so I was unable to avoid multiplayer play, as is my preference. The game is hosted on many non-Kongregate locations, so everyone connects to one of three central servers; there's also a chat room inside the game, which is the usual cesspool of awfulness that nearly any unmoderated chat room devolves into. (It also appeared that most of the people playing the game were about 14, which made me wonder if I would enjoy the game more if I were that age. I don't think so, though. There were better games around even when I was 14.) The matchmaking system is pretty terrible (and not at all intuitive); basically, you click on an open slot and hit "play" when you're ready. The game starts 15 seconds after the first person clicks "play", or when all players currently in the game have clicked "play"; this means that oftentimes you end up waiting 15 seconds for the fourth person to hit the button, they don't, and so you end up playing with three. This is important, because the more people you beat in a race, the more rank you get, and rank is important to unlock the last levels so you can get the badge and stop playing the game already. The game is also not so good at keeping players synced -- I'll often see a player behind me jump ahead thanks to lag, and cheats are also rampant, judging by the number of players I saw with over 20000 rank who were magically able to finish any level in 10 seconds. Also, you have to wait until everyone has finished the level to get your points, which just adds insult to injury.

Anyway, if you haven't guessed yet, I found playing Platform Racing to be a thoroughly unenjoyable experience, and I was quite happy when I finally finished grinding my way up the rank ladder to unlock the last level so I could finally earn the last badge. It's not even particularly hard, just very, very tedious.

TBA 2

(TBA 2 is one of the few games I've played a substantial amount of without there being a badge for it. Actually, if I were sticking to schedule I would have written this review a while ago, but I missed it before for that reason. Fortunately, the timing works out well, for reasons you'll see at the end of the review.)

TBA 2 (which is also called TBA++ in some of its documentation; I don't know which is the preferred title, so I'm using what Kongregate calls it) is a one-button game -- all you ever have to do is press Space. The trick, of course, is pressing Space at the right time.

You have a playing field with a bunch of ports, and when you press Space, the ball will launch from its current port in some direction, and hopefully land in another port. The goal in each level is to reach the red exit port. Some ports just sit there, and indeed to beat the easiest levels all you have to do is hit Space repeatedly. However, most of the ports do something -- rotate, move back and forth, move around a track, etc. -- so getting your timing right is tricky. Each level also has a par time (dying does nothing particularly bad to you; you just restart and the timer keeps running) set as a target to beat, as well as a star you can collect; collecting stars allows you to unlock new worlds.

Simply beating a level is very easy; getting the stars and beating the par scores requires a bit more effort, but is not terribly hard by all means. There are some additional achievements which require some more careful play (for instance, beat all levels in a world without dying), which means that the game will remain interesting for a little while longer, but it's still not a long game by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it's entertaining for a little while. TBA 2 is another jmtb02 production, which means lots of stars and sparkles in the graphics. The music is very good (somewhat reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball), the backgrounds are very nice, and the sound effects are decent.

Now, it's time for me to rant a little. Like GemCraft (and many other games I've reviewed here), TBA 2 is distributed (produced? sponsored? I'm not quite sure what the right word is here) by Armor Games. Armor Games sponsors a lot of quality games, but recently they've started making it so that when their games appear on other sites, one feature is removed. This is presumably to encourage people to play games on their site instead, but it's incredibly frustrating to me to have to choose between getting badges and experiencing all of the content in the game (and I will choose the former, but I am annoyed by it). In GemCraft, this is just one skill, and not a particularly important skill, so it's no big loss. But in TBA 2, one (possibly two? it's unclear) entire areas are removed in the Kongregate version, which means that some of the achievements it's not even possible for me to get (this is also, allegedly, part or possibly all of the reason that it doesn't have badges on Kongregate). I find this very unsatisfying, and hope that this practice doesn't continue to persist.

Anyway, with that rant off of my chest, like I said, TBA 2 is not a particularly deep or challenging game, but it is a well-put-together game which should provide entertainment for a little while.

GemCraft

GemCraft is, at its base, Just Another Tower Defense game, but it's so pretty and well-executed that it manages to remain interesting for longer than you might expect.

The basic layout of GemCraft should be familiar to anyone who's ever played a tower defense game. There's a path, with plenty of twists and turns, and enemies walk along the path. The object is to destroy them before they reach the end of the path by building various defensive structures. Now, one interesting twist to GemCraft is that these structures aren't fixed. Well, you build towers along the sides of the path, and those are stationary; but, by themselves, the towers don't do anything. You create gems and put those in the towers, and then they can fire on enemies. You can also throw gems as bombs directly as enemies; I tend to prefer using my gems towers, but there are apparently some people who use strategies which involve almost exclusively throwing gems (which makes it quite a different kind of game, I suppose).

As befits its fantasy nature, there's no cash in the game; rather, your currency is mana. You gain mana both over time and by killing enemies; summoning gems is, naturally, the main way of spending mana, though you can also build more towers (you generally start out with a few, but you may wish to place your towers more strategically) or moats along the path to slow down enemies. One other unusual feature of GemCraft is that, as you might expect, various types of gems have various special abilities (eight in all), which correspond to eight possible gem colors, but when you create a gem, you don't get to pick the color -- it's randomly chosen. This can be a source of great frustration. (However, in a typical map, only a subset of the eight possible colors is available -- all eight appear only in the epic boss levels.) You can also combine gems to create more powerful gems -- you can create gems of levels 1 through 6 (with ever-increasing costs, naturally), but you can also combine two level n gems to create a level n+1 gem. Combining gems of two different colors yields a dual gem, which has some of the special powers of both, but these tend to be slightly weaker than a pure gem of the same grade. (You can similarly create tricolor gems or gems with even more combinations, but these are even more strongly disfavored.) Trying to combine two gems of different grades will just yield another gem with the higher grade of the two combined, so there's usually not much point.

As in many tower defense games, though, the real strategy comes in managing your money supply. You have one spell, Mana Pool, which increases your mana total and mana gain rate; thus, it is essentially equivalent to interest in a normal money-based game. Not casting enough Mana Pools is the prime cause of defeat for beginning players -- if you don't do it enough in the early part of a map, you'll never have enough mana to build the more powerful gems you'll need in the later part of the map. Conversely, if you do well enough in the beginning, often you'll find yourself swimming in mana by the end of the map, so that the later waves are a cakewalk. If enemies reach the end of the path, some amount of mana is deducted and they return to the beginning; if you should run out, you lose that map. This usually happens only due to carelessness, or due to the epic bosses.

The game is huge -- there are a total of 48 maps, including 5 epic boss levels and 8 hidden levels, which are revealed by getting a "glowing frame" on other maps (obtained by attaining a sufficiently high score). The overall layout is not entirely linear, so you don't have to play all of the levels, although you of course have to beat the epic boss levels. Being a completionist (and since you need to beat them all to get the hidden levels, which are required for the last badge), I naturally played them all anyway, which took a fair amount of time. Each individual map has somewhere between 8 and 50 waves (following the normal pattern of normal creatures interspersed with the occasional boss wave), with typical maps probably being somewhere around 30. Fortunately, each wave is relatively short; 20 creatures is a pretty large wave, and even non-boss waves can have as few as 3 creatures, so an individual map goes by pretty quickly. The game does a good job of avoiding the dead time which plagues games of this genre; you can quickly send new waves if you've already defeated the existing one, and you can also speed up time if things are going slowly in general, so you don't have that much time sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

As you clear maps, your wizard gains experience, which can in turn be used to improve skills which help various aspects of your gemcraftery. This brings me to the first complaint about the game: the difficulty is very uneven. The first few levels are very easy, and you don't really need to develop much strategy or learn much about careful play, and then you hit the first epic boss, which is quite difficult. You'll need to become much more proficient at carefully managing your mana (and much more aggressive in using Mana Pool) in order to beat it. (Looking at the comments, I'm far from the only person who hit a difficulty jump at the first epic boss.) Then, once you've developed your proficiency, the game goes back to being pretty easy (although no longer completely trivial), until your wizard accumulates enough experience that you can reach the really high-level skills, at which point the game becomes embarassingly easy. After I reached that point, the rest of the game was more time-consuming and not challenging at all, so I wish the designers had found a way to alleviate this boredom somewhat (possibly by not making the high-level skills so powerful to begin with). My second complaint is somewhat more trivial: with eight colors, it's of course going to be hard to keep them all distinct, but still, that's no excuse for having two of the colors be "lime" and "green", which are nearly indistinguishable to my eye. The blue and purple also look awfully similar, and it's very easy to get confused in the heat of battle.

The presentation of the game is absolutely gorgeous -- the graphics are excellent, and the sound is also well-done. (There is no background music, however.) But what really makes this game stand out is the attention to the interface -- buttons make a little click when you highlight them, tabs slide out, information is always easily accessible; it's very well put together and makes it feel like a much more professional game.

Overall, this game felt a little longer than it needed to be (especially since the final ending was a little anticlimactic), but it's definitely a game that's worth playing. Even though it's an old formula, this is so expertly executed that you can have a fun time playing it.

Hedgehog Launch

Hedgehog Launch is a very simple game -- you have a hedgehog, and using a rubber band launcher, you launch him into the air. While he's in the air, you can maneuver him from side to side using a rocket pack (but you have a limited amount of fuel; once it runs out, you're just dead weight). Your goal is to build a rubber band and launcher so powerful, you can launch your hedgehog into space (where "space" is defined as approximately 4500 feet high). And how do you do that? Well, conveniently, the air into which you're launching the hedgehog isn't like the air around my place -- it's filled with coins which you can collect for money (there are three denominations, 25 cents, 1 dollar, and 5 dollars), and also filled with launchpads which not only give you a cash boost (1, 5, or 10 dollars) but also propel you higher into the air. Your amount of money for a round is determined by the amount of cash collected times a bonus for your highest elevation reached times a bonus for your time of flight. These multiplicative bonuses mean that in later rounds, when your launcher is already pretty good, collecting even a relatively modest amount of money can lead to huge amounts of swag. This money you can use to build various upgrades to your setup; not only can you improve your launcher, but you can fit your hedgehog with a parachute, radar, goggles, or booster rocket, or improve his maneuvering rockets.

Naturally, there's a very strong positive feedback component in the game, in that making money makes making more money easier. And indeed, the one constant complaints in the comments is that reaching space in 5 days (which is the prerequisite for the hard badge) is very heavily dependent on luck on the first day -- if you happen to hit a couple of the yellow 10-dollar launchpads, your odds are a lot better, and (especially on the first day, where you don't have much gear on your hedgehog) whether or not you hit those launchpads is pretty much a matter of luck, since their location is entirely random. This complaint is true; sometimes, especially in the early days, you'll just end up with a terrible launch and end up wasting a day, and there's not much you can do about it other than try again. Still, the game is hardly boring, so as long as you're not worrying too much about the badge, it's not a big deal.

Being a jmtb02 production, the game is very flashy; the sound effects are good, the music is very entertaining and breezy, and the graphics are full of stars and sparkles. Overall, this is a cute little game; because of the randomess, it's not High Strategy or anything like that, but it's an entertaining little diversion for a little while.

Dino Run

Dino Run is a perfect example of how to create a game with lots of interesting content that will keep you playing for a long while around a very simple gameplay concept. It's also where I earned my very first (and to date only) Impossible badge, so you can tell I liked it enough to stick it through all the way to the end.

The basic concept is based around an entertaining, if scientifically dubious, thought: what if the dinosaurs had been able to outrun the wall of lava kicked up by the asteroid impact? Maybe they would have been able to survive then! So your goal is, quite simply, to run as fast as you possibly can, over hills, through valleys, and with all sorts of obstacles running the gamut from annoying to irritating. (If this reminds you of Danger Swamps, I'm not surprised, but rest assured that this is a vastly better game.) Should you stumble and slow down, fiery doom awaits you, but if you make it to the end of the level, you'll find sanctuary in a cave (or, if you manage to beat challenge mode in the highest difficulty level, a spaceship, but perhaps I shouldn't give that part away...). You're not the only creature running for its survival, though; there are hundreds of other dinosaurs, nearly all of which are also trying to similarly escape their fate, some smaller, which you can eat, some bigger, which get in your way, and some faster, which you can hitch a ride on. There are also pterodactyls flying overhead, which you can grab onto to fly above the fray for a short period of time, but beware the wrong-way pterodactyls, which give the legendary unbeatable(?) pterodactyl a run for its money as the most annoying video game pterodactyl.

The game offers a wide variety of game modes. In challenge mode, you run through a course of 7 levels, beginning with a bright, sunny field and ending in a scorched, blacked, magma-filled Apocalypse level. You can gain more lives by collecting eggs (and hence saving more members of your species), but should you run out, it's game over. There are also "speedruns", which are really just single levels, usually with one feature that makes them stand out (for instance, a large valley, or lots of pterodactyls). Interestingly, no level will be the same twice -- each is randomly generated. It seems that the map is generated from a certain fixed set of chunks of terrain, some which may be large and some which may be small, and certain large features are likely to appear in certain levels, but nothing is guaranteed. For instance, there's a large waterfall that usually shows up in Level 4 of the challenge mode, but it could show up anywhere in the level, and it might not show up at all. This means that practicing a speedrun, while helpful to some degree, won't really help you learn the course (though you can learn to recognize signs of some of the larger terrain features, and some of the chunks are pretty large, so learning them can be useful).

There are four difficulty levels, but starting out on the hardest ("Insane") is literally impossible. Your dinosaur starts out puny and slow; in order to be able to handle the harder difficulty levels, you have to increase his power (just like tuning your car in Gran Turismo, for instance). This is accomplished by collecting DNA, which can either be obtained by collecting eggs, munching critters, or accomplishing various milestones. These milestones represent various degrees of achievement, and often reward you with hefty chunks of DNA or bones (which are used to unlock additional content). Some of these milestones are awarded for various difficult stunts (e.g., "doomsurfing", or staying just barely ahead of the wall of doom, for a given amount of time), while others are awarded for cumulative achivements (e.g. saving a certain number of eggs total). The latter can be kind of frustrating at the end of the game when you're trying to reach all of the milestones -- after finally beating the challenge mode and all of the speedruns on Insane, I still had to go through and collect more eggs and eat more birds. You'd think I'd have already proved I could do that.

The presentation is suitably retro -- the art is very pixelated and 8-bit, and the music similarly so. The sound effects are not bad; the music (as is so often the case) gets a little repetitive, but there are enough different themes to prevent it from being totally boring. The interface is a little odd (sometimes relying on the keyboard and sometimes on the mouse), but when you're playing it's all keyboard. There are also lots of cute little touches -- for instance, you unlock additional colors as you progress through the game, which allows you to customize your dinosaur; donating also gives you access to various amusing hats your dinosaur can wear.

Dino Run provided hours of enthralling gameplay for me, because it has such a large source of generally interesting challenges. While it is by no means an easy game, you'll get better as you play, and there's quite a feeling of accomplishment for making it through to the end, whether it's your first time surviving or your first time on Insane mode. Overall, it's a thoroughly enjoyable game.

Music Catch

Music Catch isn't a game so much as it is a Flash relaxation device. The gameplay, such as it is, is very simple: a piano piece plays, and as it plays, shapes will appear from a continuously rotating line on screen. You move your mouse to catch the shapes with your own shape. Yellow shapes will increase your score multiplier and make your own shape larger, making it easier to catch more shapes both good and bad; red shapes will decrease the multiplier. Purple shapes activate "purple power", which draws all non-red shapes towards your shape for a limited amount of time. And, well, that's about it. You play for the length of the song, and then see what your score is.

The music is a pretty little piece, although the number of comments saying something like "I don't normally like classical music, but this is the best ever!" makes me despair a little, since there definitely is a lot better out there. Still, it's a lot better than your typical Flash game music. The graphics are pretty and colorful, albeit not particularly fancy. As a game, it's not perfect -- some times, you might get lucky and get a lot of yellows and purples early, which helps to bring up your overall score a lot. Also, while each yellow increases your multiplier by 1, a red can cut your total multiplier in half, which can be awfully frustrating, especially in the late game when your multiplier has gotten very large.

Anyway, that's mostly nitpicking; overall, this game is quite successful in providing a lovely interlude from the more stressful, action-packed games on Kongregate.

PlanetDefender

What do you get when you cross Missile Command with tower defense? Hopefully, a better game than PlanetDefender. PlanetDefender tries to vary the tried-and-true tower defense formula somewhat, but unfortunately the game that results is somewhat less interesting than the sum of its parts.

Like a tower defense game, you face a number of waves of malignant, increasingly powerful enemy ships bent on wreaking destruction on your peaceful planet, and you have to build various things to blast them out of the sky before they can do too much damage. However, unlike your typical tower defense game, the enemy ships can and will shoot back at you. They can either damage (and possibly even destroy) your defensive structures, or kill your population, which is bad news, because your population is your tax base. Unlike your typical tower defense game, where you get money for every enemy killed, here you get money over time based on your current population. In turn, you can build the usual array of weaponry, economic centers (which increase the money gain from your population), or bunkers to protect your population, as well as research some additional technologies.

Now, on to the flaws of the game. First of all, there's no strategy (at least none that I can see) to placing your units, unlike in a typical tower defense game. You just place them somewhere on the planet and they shoot at the enemy. This takes out one rather large chunk of strategy. Secondly, the pacing of the game is terrible. At the beginning of the game, you end up waiting for very long periods of time for enough money to accumulate in order to buy the next thing you want to buy. (This is, to a greater or lesser extent, an issue in any tower defense game, but PlanetDefender does not do a good job regulating the pace.) At the end of the game, when everything is maximally upgraded, you also just end up sitting around twiddling your thumbs while watching the alien fleets bravely float into the meat grinder. Thirdly, the interface is really annoying -- when your mouse isn't over the planet, all of your buildings fade away, presumably so you can see -- well, it's not actually clear what the purpose of this is. I suppose you can enjoy the majestic beauty of Earth's oceans and clouds, but this feature doesn't bring any useful information to your fingertips; in fact, it takes it away.

But the most unforgivable sin is very simple. As I mentioned earlier, a key to building a successful tower defense game is feedback -- the player needs to be able to understand what's working and what's not working, so he can adjust his strategy accordingly. PlanetDefender provides almost none of that -- you can't look at the enemy ships' health bars, so you have no idea how close you may or may not be to destroying them. You also can't see where on the planet you're taking the most damage, which might be useful if you were thinking of, say, placing one of those fortified bunkers. The only thing you can see is if your defensive structures are taking damage, since there's a little bar which gradually increases (not that it's at all clear to the novice player what that bar is). Even here, though, when a structure gets destroyed, there's no notification, so if your notice happens to be elsewhere on the battlefield, you can be blissfully unaware that a key component of your defenses has suddenly disappeared (though if this happens, you're screwed anyway, in all likelihood).

PlanetDefender also exhibits the hump in difficulty common to tower defense games. That is, since your income is dependent on your population, if you make a mistake which causes more of your population to die, then you have less income, which means you'll be able to build fewer defensive structures, which means more of your population to die, etc. That is, there's a strong positive feedback. As a result, small improvements in skill can result in large differences in the outcome. Like I said, this is common to many tower defense games (especially those with interest), but it seems to be especially problematic in PlanetDefender.

The graphics are decent, although small; the music gets boring fast, and the sound effects are nothing special. Overall, I was very glad to finish this game and get the badge, and was annoyed that it took as long as it did.

Castle Crashing "The Beard"

Like Newgrounds Rumble, I don't quite understand why this game is on Kongregate. OK, it doesn't announce its origin right in its title, but the whole thing is essentially an extended Newgrounds joke -- apparently, Tom Fulp (the creator of Newgrounds) took a vow not to shave his beard until he finished his newest game, and so in this game, you have to battle a fearsomely enbearded Fulp for, uh, some reason.

The gameplay itself is like any boss fight from any 2-D platformer: you're tiny, and have a small weapon (which gradually powers up as the battle goes on), and Fulp is huge and has a wide variety of devastating attacks; defeating him requires learning his attack patterns and reacting accordingly, along with some degree of dexterity.

The presentation is high-quality: the art, sound, and music are all above-average, and the programming in the game is very solid. Still, there's just not much game here, and if you're not one to appreciate the joke, you won't get much value from that source, either. It's a fun little tidbit, though.