The Last Canopy

The Last Canopy is, as you might be able to guess from the pattern so far, the last game in Kongregate's Buried Treasure Week, and it does a much better job of fulfilling the goal of the week than most of the other entrants -- it's got a very kind of indie feeling, and has a couple of interesting game mechanics which are worth looking at.

At its root, The Last Canopy is a standard old-school top-down shooter -- waves of enemies come at you, and you shoot them. In true old-school fashion, there's none of this being able to absorb multiple hits nonsense -- one hit destroys you. You can move with either the keyboard or the mouse, which is a nice touch. However, the one special feature that, in addition to your main ship (which is actually, I believe, a fairy), you also have five brightly colored spheres trailing you. Using your special power, you can absorb the powers of your enemies and store them in your spheres, which will then shoot back at your enemies with their own powers. With clever maneuvering, you can position yourself so that your spheres do the attacking while you stay out of harm's way. However, the charge on a sphere only lasts for a limited amount of time, so you can't just absorb some powerful attacks and then be done with things -- you have to be continuously acquiring new powers. (You can absorb anything -- even boss attacks -- but the more powerful attacks take longer to absorb.)

This is a difficult game -- there are lots of shots to be avoided, and even though the default allotment is 20 lives, you'll find them going pretty quickly. One thing which contributes to the difficulty is that when you die, you lose all of your stored powers, which means that it's very easy to get killed several times in rapid succession when you're weak. The game is not very long overall; there are 4 stages total, and none of them is particularly lengthy, although the obligatory boss fights generally do take a little while.

The game has a rather unique aesthetic -- as I mentioned, you seem to be playing a fairy, which is rather nonstandard for a game in this genre. (The enemies, though, are mostly your standard mechanical assemblies.) The graphics and sound play well into this feeling -- the graphics have kind of a soft pastel feel, and the sound is pleasantly environmental (although this varies in the different levels). The level 3 boss is actively painful, though -- my eyes really hurt after finally making my way through the fight, since it got kind of psychedelic.

Anyway, beating this game is definitely an accomplishment (unless you're playing on a really slow computer, in which case it shouldn't be terribly difficult). Overall, though, I ended up being a little disappointed. While the central mechanic is creative, it doesn't quite flow perfectly into a top-down shooter. I'd say this game is worth a look, but it didn't quite hook me in the way other Kongregate games have.

Jumpcat

Jumpcat is the fourth entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, and sadly, it's another mediocre dodger. You play the titular cat, and as the screen scrolls, a variety of obstacles comes at you, and you have to (surprise!) jump over them. The obstacles include rocks, trees, and a surprising number of low-altitude helicopters.

The game is not at all easy -- you have to hold down the jump key to charge up enough jump power to get over the higher obstacles, which often takes nearly all of the time you have. But you can't just hold down the jump button as soon as you land, either, because some obstacles are on both the top and bottom of the screen, so you have to jump through them. And, as if that weren't hard enough, fairly early in the game, another helicopter will start dropping bombs on you, which have a way of hitting you in places where you can't easily maneuver away from them.

The graphics and sounds are both very basic. The background music is kind of catchy, and I can imagine a lot of games it would be a good addition to, but this game is not one of them -- it seems completely inappropriate for a light game (bombs notwithstanding) like this. One nice feature of the game is that, at the end of the game, it tells you how many points you had at the end of each of your lives. This is kind of a neat way of showing your progress.

Overall, this is an exceedingly frustrating game; despite its short length, you'll still find the ease with which the game can kill you quite annoying. There's neither enough depth nor enough balance to make this a really entertaining game; it definitely ends up in the class of games which stopped being fun before I reached the final badge, which was very tricky to get and required a lot of luck (and some skill, admittedly). I'm not quite sure why this was selected for Buried Treasure Week, other than that it's got a cat -- it really doesn't have anything unique in it.

Parachute Retrospect

Parachute Retrospect is the third entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, and it's another jmtb02 production (man, that guy is prolific); like many other jmtb02 games, there's good graphics, a very silly premise, but one which provides solid gameplay, and not a lot of depth.

The basic premise is very simple: you have a helicopter, and below you, trucks pulling trailers full of hay (or possibly cotton) pass by. When you click, a person drops from the helicopter and hopefully lands in the load of hay. If this reminds you of the Mac classic StuntCopter, then you're not alone -- that was my first thought as well (and I was pleased to see in the comments that I wasn't the only one who recognized that premise, too). However, unlike StuntCopter, which adds difficulty by changing the wagon speed and gravity, Parachute Retrospect adds a much different degree of difficulty -- for every five people you save, a nasty anti-person measure is added; you'll have to deal with (among others) missiles, lasers, and trucks which have inconveniently decided to carry a load of spikes rather than soft hay; by the end of the game, you'll probably be killing more people than you save. Fortunately, the game is quite generous with lives, giving you 99 in all. (Another important difference is that you can drop multiple people at once, which is definitely helpful in the later game to make the most use of the often narrow windows you get. Of course, if you mistime, it's also a very quick way to lose a bunch of people at once.)

After you save 50 people, the game shifts to an entirely different mode -- now you're a helicopter which has to rescue people being dropped out of some...thing. This part of the game really doesn't make much sense, and it kind of feels tacked-on; I can't help but feel that the game would be better without it entirely.

The graphics are pretty simple (and, surprisingly, star-free), and the sounds are quite basic. The music is not bad, and definitely lends an air of excitement to the proceedings, although you'll probably get tired of it after a while. Overall, this is a silly little game, and it can be surprisingly frustrating -- in the later game, it's quite difficult and you'll have to do a lot of waiting for the few moments that the coast is clear. Still, it's short enough that you're going to finish it before you run out of fun.

Intrusion

Intrusion is a difficult game for me to review. There's a lot of things which are good about the game: it's clearly the work of a talented programmer, and it does an excellent job of creating a difficult challenge without being unfair or frustrating. And yet, it feels like there's something missing, like it's not quite the sum of its parts. There's something which is just, for lack of a better word, sterile about the game-playing experience. And the tough part is that I can't quite put my finger on what's missing. (But I do have a few theories.)

Intrusion is a straightforward shoot-'em-up sidescroller in the proud tradition of Contra, though it's a bit more modern in some aspects -- for instance, it uses the "keyboard to move, mouse to shoot" control scheme. Also, one bullet won't kill you; you have a life bar (and the occasional health pod to refill it), and you'll definitely need it. However, there are some old-school features, like save points -- you can always choose to continue at the beginning of any level you've opened, but the levels are long enough that you'll appreciate the need not to have to go all the way back to the beginning every time. You start the game with your pistol, which has infinite ammunition, and as the game progresses you acquire 3 other weapons, each of which has a limited amount of ammunition which you can replenish by looting your defeated enemies. Naturally, there's a number of bosses sprinkled throughout the game, including the particularly lethal final boss.

Anyway, technically the execution is quite solid. The graphics, especially the background graphics, are very high quality, and the game does a good job of creating a variety of interesting environments, from a mountain base to a moving train to a flying missile (not quite as insane as in Contra 2, but still pretty ridiculous). The ragdoll physics is also a step up from what you see in a Flash game, but it's a little loose -- enemies will tend to fly around an unreasonable amount after they've been killed, and they also have a tendency to land doing the splits, which makes them look faintly ridiculous. The sounds are pretty nondescript. There's a number of nice little graphic touches (watch the missile closely when it's taking off, for instance) which also make the game feel more well-crafted. (The graphic quality does come at a price, though; the game noticeably slows down on slower computers.) The comments complain about occasional glitches, but I didn't notice anything major; all I encountered was dropped ammo ending up in inaccessible places sometimes.

As I mentioned earlier, the game is definitely challenging. There are a few very simple puzzles, but they're quite obvious and quickly solved. Mostly the challenge is just in avoiding enemy bullets (and other things that can harm you), and since there's often a lot of them and they can move pretty fast, this is not an easy task. So you'll definitely get a feeling of accomplishment when (or if) you manage to beat the game; while there is a little bit of luck involved, largely this is going to be dependent on your skill. Still, with persistence I managed to beat it, and I certainly don't consider myself particularly good at this genre, so I don't think it's out of reach for anyone, either.

So what's missing from the game? First, it doesn't do a very good job of immersing you in its environment. For starters, there's no background music; I know it sounds shallow, but I think some good music would help draw you into the game more. Also, there's absolutely no plot or backstory -- you just start out arriving at the enemy base with no explanation, just the assumption that you're supposed to kill everything. Finally, the last thing that I noticed is that the pace is a little bit off. In Contra, for instance (sorry to keep going back to Contra, but it's a useful measuring stick, despite its age) there's pretty much always something to do. In Intrusion, though, there's a fair amount of dead time when you're moving from place to place, and this gives the game a kind of empty feel. I think that's what's missing most from the game, but like I said, it's hard to put my finger on it.

Anyway, there's clearly a lot of skill that went into Intrusion, and I think if the creator teamed up with a really good game writer, they could produce a truly excellent game. As it is, while this is a fun and well-crafted game, if you're like me, you'll walk away feeling like there could have been a little bit more.

Cirplosion

Cirplosion, the second entry in Kongregate's Buried Treasure week, is a game which manages to overcome its terrible name and be quite an interesting game, requiring both quick puzzle-solving skills and quite a bit of manual dexterity.

At first glance, Cirplosion looks very similar to filler (review here): you have a playfield with a bunch of orbs bouncing around, you click and hold to cause a circle to expand, and can move while the circle is expanding, but if the circle hits an enemy orb (or, in Cirplosion's case, a wall), it is destroyed. However, what happens after you let go of the mouse button is entirely different from filler -- once you let go of the mouse button, the circle becomes a targeting circle, which you can now move freely over the board; when you click, all orbs within the targeting circle are destroyed. (There are also large orbs, which are blown into three smaller orbs.) So the advantages of trying to get your circle as large as possible should be obvious. Whenever you set off a Cirplosion, orbs outside of the circle's radius are affected, too, in that they are blown with the force of the explosion. If you're careless, this can give orbs very large momentum, which makes them very annoying; however, you can also use it strategically to clear up some open space to give you some more room to operate in.

In each level, you'll have to clear all the orbs given a limited amount of time and total number of Cirplosions. (You don't have any lives, so getting your circle destroyed doesn't cost you anything directly, but it does cost you precious time.) Generally, both of these limits are pretty tight, so you'll need to be sharp in order to destroy all of the enemies without running out of one or more resources. Some levels also have freeze orbs, which will freeze all of the enemy orbs if your circle touches one when expanding (not when you shoot it, confusingly enough), which can be very useful in setting up good shots.

Cirplosion offers three modes: normal mode, which contains 20 levels of the typical frenetic action that you'd expect; challenge mode, which has 12 more puzzle-like levels which require very careful thinking; and finally, cirvival (sigh) mode, which is pretty much what you would expect. Somewhat irritatingly, normal mode doesn't have a save feature, so if you want to beat it, you'll have to do all 20 levels in one go. The challenges do save, so you can beat them piecemeal if you'd like. Neither normal nor challenge mode is easy, but they are quick; a given level may take a lot of tries (and some of the harder levels may get quite frustrating, since there is some element of chance involved), but since a single level only takes 20-30 seconds, you can still play the whole agme in one sitting without too much difficulty.

The graphics are pretty basic -- you have enemy orbs of one color and your circle; there's not much in the way of special effects. The background music is very ambient and lends a nice touch, but (like so many other Flash games) it does get rather repetitive eventually. The sounds are also pretty basic, but they're not bad, either.

Anyway, Cirplosion clearly does a much better job of fulfilling the Buried Treasure ideal -- it's definitely a game that's deserving of a look. It's by no means a perfect game, but it'll provide a half hour or so of interesting gameplay, so give it a try.

Duck: Think outside the flock

Duck: Think outside the flock is one of the few games on Kongregate that I played in its entirety without a badge to reward me. I saw it on the New Games list, and noticed that it was by the same designer as Factory Balls (review here), and hoped that it would be, like Factory Balls, a fun if somewhat insubstantial diversion. And indeed, that is exactly what it turned out to be.

Duck consists of 25 duck-based logic puzzles. Figuring out exactly what the puzzle is is part of the challenge, but generally the puzzle itself is pretty straightforward and self-evident. Some of the puzzles require a bit of careful mouse movements, while some require only brainpower, but none of them is particularly difficult -- you may get hung up on one (perhaps the last one) for a few minutes, but there aren't any particularly sneaky tricks that you need to employ.

The presentation is nothing special -- the ducks are cute, but they all look the same (or almost so). Similarly, the quacking that you get on a successful puzzle completion is cute but repetitive. The music is a selection of tunes from the Nutcracker (why not Swan Lake, I wonder?), which is definitely a step up from the typical Flash game music. Overall, this game is neither difficult nor long, and I wouldn't say it has a huge degree of replay value, but it is charming and fun enough that you should enjoy playing it through once.

Dog Eat Dog

Dog Eat Dog was the first game in Kongregate's Buried Treasure Week, a series during the week of August 11 created when Greg (the Kongregate person who creates badges for games) decided that it would be a good idea to shine the spotlight away from the highly-rated popular games which normally get the lion's share of badges, and give some less-popular games that were still interesting and deserving of attention a day in the sunshine. Apparently, though, Greg has a weakness for mediocre dodgers, since that's what Dog Eat Dog is (Tangerine Panic, which was also considered for the week, also fits into this category). By the reaction of people in chat, you'd think that he had picked Hitler's Bunker: The Game [*] as his selection; it's certainly not that bad, but aside from the silliness of the central concept, there's absolutely nothing that makes this game stand out.

Anyway, Dog Eat Dog is a very simple game -- you are a dog, and your job is to eat (i.e. run over) smaller dogs while avoiding being eaten by larger dogs. One plus for this game is a feature that I wish more dodgers would have: the choice of keyboard or mouse control. The dogs always move in horizontal or vertical straight lines, so avoiding them (or eating them, depending) is not exactly the world's hardest task; however, they can eat you even without coming into direct contact, which can be rather unpleasantly surprising the first time it happens. As the game progresses, your dog becomes larger, and eventually it becomes large enough to eat dogs that would have eaten it before; however, since there's not any clear visual indicator that you've now gotten bigger than other dogs, and trial and error is out of the question given that you only have one life, this feature is not as useful as it could be.

The graphics are pretty basic -- the dogs are not particularly detailed, and what I assume is the grassy field is pretty blah. There's only two sounds, a bark when you eat a smaller dog and a whine when you get consumed, and you'll get pretty tired of the first. The background music is a bit of techno which isn't bad intrinsically but which feels a little bit out of place in this setting -- it seems more suited to something involving clouds.

Anyway, you'll hopefully be glad to hear that the rest of Buried Treasure Week contained more interesting games, because this game simply didn't bring anything new to the table. Fortunately, getting the badge was pretty easy, because it meant I didn't have to play this game any more.

[*] I'm imagining a simple point-and-click adventure, where you have one room (the bunker, obviously, which shakes periodically as bombs and artillery impact above) and a few things you can click on: you can rant at your staff, draw up fancifully unrealistic battle plans, and canoodle with Eva. When each of those options loses its pall, you can click on the pistol in the corner, and then it's Game Over. Sounds like fun, huh?

Bubble Tanks 2

Bubble Tanks 2 is a sequel to Bubble Tanks (review here), in case the name didn't tip you off. The gameplay is nearly identical to its predecessor -- it's a pretty straightforward shooter (keyboard moves, mouse shoots) where you move from bubble to bubble defeating enemies and picking up their bubbles to add to your own tank to make it more powerful. Being hit, on the other hand, will cause you to lose bubbles.

As far as I can tell, Bubble Tanks 2 adds three features to the original. First, there's a map, which is quite convenient for telling where the heck you're going. Second, there's one huge overall boss (which is quite an epic battle), and then also four fairly powerful subbosses, which appear randomly from time to time, so that occasionally you'll get a pretty severe challenge (especially if you're just starting out; it seems like they can appear anywhere, although the boss doesn't seem to pop up until you've already upgraded your tank a fair amount). Also, the enemy bubble menagerie has been expanded somewhat, as there are now minelayers and enemy bullets which slow you, but they're still all basically built along the same lines. Third, instead of your tank just randomly gradually getting more powerful as you collect bubbles, you have a bubble progress bar at the bottom, and when it fills up, you can choose the next form for your tank. Generally you get two or three choices, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. This is a nice feature and adds a tangible feeling of accomplishment to your bubble conquest. Unfortunately, once you've chosen, you can never change your mind -- even if you lose enough bubbles to knock you back to your previous level, you still go back to the form you chose the first time around the next time you level up again. This is kind of a disappointment -- if you choose an upgrade and decide you don't like it, the only way to change is to restart the whole game.

The background music is is still very peaceful and unintrusive, and the sounds are still pretty basic. The graphics are just bubbles, though clearly whoever drew the tank models was having a lot of fun, since there's a lot of creativity in the tank designs -- as a practical matter, it doesn't affect the game much, though. Overall, this is a little more substantial than its predecessor, and it's fun to play for a little while, but I still feel like it's lacking a bit in the way of goals to encourage you to keep playing for longer.

Amorphous+

Amorphous+ is a game with much in common with Dino Run (review here). It's a game with relatively simple basic mechanics, but with those mechanics very well crafted, and with lots and lots for you to do, so that you can play for a very long time without getting bored. Like Dino Run, there's a huge set of achievements and an Impossible badge for getting them all; at first I thought there was no way I was going to remain interested long enough to get the badge, then I found myself continuing to play and accumulating more and more achivements, and then pretty soon I was almost there, so I went through and got the last few that I was missing, and it was an enjoyable experience all the way through.

Anyway, Amorphous+ is, at its base, a pretty simple game. You have a top-down view of yourself and a variety of nasty enemies (called "Glooples"). You also have an incredibly huge sword; clicking the mouse will swing the sword and splat most things in about a 120-degree arc in front of you. It's a pretty basic formula, but the first thing that makes Amorphous+ an engaging game is the bestiary. A game like this needs a variety of well-distinguished, interesting enemies, and Amorphous+ provides these in spades. (I tend to think of Crystal Quest as the gold standard for this, if you're curious for a reference point.) The enemies range from the simple green Glooples, which are almost entirely harmless -- if they bump into you, you can be knocked off-balance for a moment, which provides an entry for another, more harmful gloople to get you -- up to the fearsome Razor Queens, which are an incredibly challenging boss, but each enemy brings its own abilities and dangers to the table -- there aren't any thinly-disguised carbon copies of other enemies; each is quite unique.

The game modes are quite simple -- first is the single nest; nests come in three sizes, each with a certain fixed number of Glooples to kill. The smaller nests also don't include some of the most difficult Glooples. The other main play mode is the bounty mode, where the goal is simply to survive as long as possible and accumulate as many points as you can. There's also a practice mode, where you can face off against Glooples you've already seen; this is very useful for the Glooples that you encounter later in nests, so you can get some experience in fighting them so you don't always just die whenever you encounter them again. Again, though, what makes Amorphous+ engaging is that there's so much to do beyond simply try to beat the nest or survive. There's a total of 110 achievements (called "awards") for accomplishing tasks from the very simple (splat a single green gloople) to the silly (change the music five times in a level) to the quite difficult (clear an entire nest without being touched by anything). The variety of these awards mean that you'll always have something to do, and (with a few exceptions) they tend to be pretty tedium-free.

There's a tangible bonus for picking up awards, too -- for every 10 awards you accumulate, you earn a reward (the nomenclature is rather confusing), an item that you can take into battle with you to help you out on your quest. Indeed, to get some of the harder awards and beat some of the larger nests, these rewards are pretty much of a must-have. Once you reach 55 awards, you can take two rewards into battle with you, which is even more useful, and careful reward selection is obviously an important part of strategy in trying to accomplish a particular goal.

There are two and a half things that I find frustrating. First is the mouse control -- this is always a problem in a Flash game that involves fast movements, since it's very easy to click outside the Flash pane, and then you will almost certainly meet your demise while frantically trying to scroll back or hit your original tab (and God save you if your missed click happened to hit a link on the page). I'm not sure if the game would necessarily adapt well to keyboard control, but it would have been nice to at least have the possibility available. Second is the fact that the game doesn't tell you what the awards or rewards are until after you get them. For awards, this is not an uncommon practice, although it's one I kind of deplore -- why not tell people what they need to shoot for? It's true that a lot of the awards you'll get in the course of normal play anyway, but there are definitely some you simply won't get unless you know what to look for. But for the rewards -- they're hard enough to earn in the first place (the first few are easy, since there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the award list, but they get progressively much more difficult to earn); why should you be forced to pick your reward blind without any idea of whether it'll be good or not? Really, the only effect of this decision is to drive people to FAQs, and that's kind of pointless. The half complaint is that you only get one life (there is one reward which gives you a second chance, but only sometimes) -- it's frustrating when you're working your way through a long nest to make one small mistake and be dead in short order. I think the game would overall be less irritating if you had multiple lives (with presumably a corresponding increase in difficulty). This would represent a pretty major game change, though, so it's not something I would demand.

The graphics are pretty simple, but when you're just dealing with different shapes of blobs, it doesn't really matter all that much. The sound effects are not bad, although the sound for the box gun can get kind of grating after a while. The one thing that really sticks out like a sore thumb is that the author always uses "it's" even when "its" is required. This is extremely grating to me. The music is very good -- it's nice background music, and there's a variety of tunes (yay!), most of which are good, and you can always switch if you don't like the current music, so it does an excellent job of providing accompaniment.

Anyway, overall Amorphous+ is an excellent game -- it's a perfect illustration of how to get a lot of depth out of relatively simple gameplay concepts, and the bestiary is so well-crafted that there's rarely a dull moment while playing -- there's always a dangerous Gloople ready to spring out and cause trouble, and dealing with each kind will require you be on the top of your game and well-prepared. An entertaining game from top to bottom.

Tangerine Panic

Tangerine Panic is another very simple dodger where you play a man suddenly attacked by a shower of tangerines and have to avoid them as long as possible. The tangerines come out of a pipe at the top left of the screen and bounce entirely unlike tangerines -- more like solid orange balls (which, perhaps, not coincidentally, is also what they sound like when bouncing). In contrast to a normal dodger, you actually have multiple lives, which is kind of nice -- it makes the overall outcome of the game a little less random and more skill-dependent.

I find the mouse control to be a poor choice for a dodger like this -- I think keyboard control would have been better. The music is nice and peppy, while the sounds (as mentioned above) are a little incongruous with the alleged theme of tangerines. In a cute touch, your character will spout various phrases of exasperation while he's running around, complaining about the tangerines. This is mildly amusing for at least a little bit, although it wears off pretty quickly.

Anyway, this is a very silly game, and you should have no trouble quickly getting the badge, but like so many other dodgers on this site, there's really not enough substance to make you want to keep playing after acquiring your shiny prize.

Pandemic 2

Pandemic 2 is an interesting study in contrasts. As a sandbox, it's great fun -- who amongst you hasn't wanted to try to give everyone in Western Europe bloody vomit with some horrible new disease? But as a game, it's a miserable failure -- if you try to play to win, you'll be bashing your head against its design limitations in no time.

I'm going to digress a moment and talk about the original Pandemic, which I played long before I saw Kongregate (indeed, it's not on Kongregate even now). It was an interesting little germ (ha ha) of an idea -- you controlled a disease with the goal of wiping out humanity. You gained points by infecting more people, which you could use to increase your transmission (for instance, by making yourself airborne) or increasing your lethality (for instance, by adding hemorrhaging as a symptom). It was a cute little game, but very simplistic, egregiously so in its geography (there's a total of 8 regions, including an "Eastern Europe" which stretches from India to Burma), and the optimal strategy becomes blindingly obvious early on: don't develop any lethal symptoms until you've infected everyone, and then once you do, bring the hammer down with as much lethality as you can and patiently wait for everyone to die. (That's right -- once you develop new symptoms, everyone who already has the disease also gets them. Don't ask me how that makes sense.) Anyway, it was a neat idea, but a little too simple to be much of a real game.

Pandemic 2 attempts to address many of these shortcomings and make the basic idea into a more substantial game. The result is a product which is vastly improved in some areas, retains some of the flaws of its predecessor, and takes a very large step back in one respect. Let me talk about the last of those items first. In the original Pandemic, there wasn't that much that happened in the very early stages (when your disease had only infected a handful of people) and the very late stages (when you have already infected everyone and were just patiently waiting for humanity to hurry up and die). That was OK, because you could just hammer the "next day" button until something did happen. Pandemic 2 has basically the same dynamic, except that the designers decided to make it a real-time game. This means that you can see the airplanes and ships niftily flitting about the globe. Unfortunately, it also means that you spend an inordinate amount of time (even with the game speed set to its fastest) just sitting around and waiting for something interesting to happen. This is not fun at all.

So, in Pandemic 2, you have a relatively detailed world map, with 21 different regions. Many regions have one or more airports and seaports (although, realistically speaking, every region should have an airport and seaport, but I suppose the designers took some artistic liberties), which can very quickly spread your disease from region to region. The game seems to overemphasize these modes of travel as opposed to overland travel, though -- is it really the case that a disease is more likely to make it from the US to Mexico via an airplane than a car? I doubt it, somehow. Your disease can be a virus, bacterium, or parasite, each with its own advantages and disadvantages; as time goes on, you acquire "evolution points", which you can use to buy new symptoms, means of transmission, and resistances. (Somewhat perplexingly, you gain evolution points very quickly early on, when your disease has only infected a few people, but the rate decreases sharply as time goes on, which can leave you just sitting around waiting for points to accumulate in the late game.) The symptoms are a double-edged sword: they increase your infectiousness and lethality, but they also make your disease more visible to authorities who can take countermeasures. Some symptoms are, on a net basis, more trouble to your disease than they're worth, and it actually costs more evolution points to get rid of these symptoms than to acquire them. Your disease can also have some traits, which are generally entirely random and affect your disease in various ways. There's also a wide variety of natural disasters which can hit countries, which may speed or slow the progress of your disease.

Now, for the two big flaws in Pandemic 2. First of all, the aforementioned authorities have a dizzying array of countermeasures they can take to combat your disease, ranging from handing out bottled water to declaring martial law. As far as I can tell, none of these countermeasures matters one whit once you've infected a region. They may slow the progress of your disease, but I have never seen a case where a disease has gotten a toehold in a region and then been stopped by these countermeasures (with one exception, which I'll discuss below). Conversely, countries can close their borders, seaports, and airports, and these measures are 100% effective at keeping your disease out if it hasn't yet gotten in, which is just as unrealistic. If you're trying to kill everyone in the world, then as soon as Madagascar closes its seaport (which is the only way in), you might as well pack up and go home.

The other flaw arises from the fact that, to avoid the easy win strategy for the original Pandemic, countries will crazily overreact. You can have a virus which is entirely asymptomatic and nonlethal, and yet as soon as it's infected a few hundred million people, countries will start shutting their borders, declaring martial law, and so forth. This is obviously quite unrealistic; from a gameplay perspective, it arises from two basic issues: first, that lethality and transmissibility are completely decoupled, and second, that when your virus acquires more lethal symptoms, that everyone who already has the virus will get these symptoms too. The obvious solution from both a gameplay and realism perspective is to eliminate these -- if you have a virus that infects 200 million people, some of them are going to die from it regardless of how harmless your virus is. The symptoms having good and bad aspects is already a step in the right direction; the game just needs to take it a bit further. And maybe make it so that your virus acquiring new symptoms isn't retroactive? It would change the game greatly, but I can't say it would be for the worse.

OK, last complaint. After a while, the humans will start working on a vaccine. Usually, you kill people too rapidly for them to finish the vaccine in time, but occasionally they'll finish and deploy it. When this happens, you get a coin flip! Sometimes it works and you lose. Sometimes it doesn't work and they'll try again (almost certainly they won't have enough time, though). And sometimes your virus mutates and becomes invincible to all vaccines. This is a hugely random swing (it can be affected by your acquiring drug resistance, but there's still, as far as I can tell, a coin flip underneath), and adds another element of annoyance to the game.

On to the presentation. The graphics are clear and crisp, though the automatic messages displayed in the information panel (which could really use a scrollback bar) occasionally are kind of nonsensical; a little editing would have helped. The background music is pretty good, and makes for a nice complement to the game. The game offers two different modes, "realistic" and "relaxed", which in practice aren't terribly different; your disease appears to be faster in relaxed mode, and a few things aren't included, but most of the gameplay is entirely the same.

Anyway, if you're just messing around with the game, it can be fun to see how much of humanity you can kill. But when you're trying to beat the game, you'll get very, very frustrated when you play 20 times, Madagascar closes off every time, and then finally on the 21st time (without you changing your strategy at all) you manage to get in before the close and win. This amount of dependence on luck results in a very frustrating game. While Pandemic 2 is definitely an improvement on its predecessor, it still has a way to go to really turn its potential into an enjoyable challenge.

Johnny Rocketfingers

Johnny Rocketfingers is bad! He's got attitude! He's the Duke Nukem of stick figure, point-and-click adventures, and he wants you to know it! Indeed, pretty much every part of the game is devoted to telling you just how much of a badass Johnny Rocketfingers is. The result is a product which I'm sure is incredibly appealing to 15-year-old guys, but which as a game is really not that terribly interesting.

So, as I said before, this is pretty much your basic point-and-click adventure. The actual opportunities for player interaction are pretty limited -- you spend most of the time watching just how awesome Johnny is, or at least is supposed to be (some of the quips which I'm sure are supposed to be cool and witty come off more as terrible puns). When you are confronted with a puzzle, solving it is invariably pretty simple, since there's never more than about three things you can click on. As you might expect, there's plenty of sex, violence, and drugs, or at least as much as the designer could cram into the game given its length.

The artwork isn't bad, at least within the standard hand-drawn stick-figure constraints; on the other hand, the sound effects are pretty basic. The music fits well with the game, although somehow I doubt that Crystal Method, Fatboy Slim, etc. actually licensed their music for the game to use. The game itself is quite short -- assuming you don't deliberately do all of the wrong things (which you can do in the hopes of seeing more entertainment), you'll get through it quite quickly.

Anyway, overall, I don't find the extreme attitude enough to compensate for the fact that, as a game, this is really not that challenging or entertaining. It's short enough that getting the badge wasn't a horrible experience or anything, but there are so many better games out there.

Monster Master

For lack of a better term, I'll describe Monster Master as Magic for dummies. (The comments say that it's even more similar to Yu-Gi-Oh, but not being familiar with that, I can't comment.) And when I say "for dummies", I mean that War (the card game) is to real war as this game is to Magic. In fact, it's barely more sophisticated than War (the card game).

So, you have a deck, and every turn you draw one card and play some cards. You can not play more than one monster per turn, but you can play as many spells (which just do what they say) as you have and want to play. Monsters take a certain amount of time to summon (longer for more powerful monsters), and cannot attack during that time (though they can be attacked). To attack an enemy monster, just click on your own monster and click on the monster you want to attack, and then the most fun thing in the game happens: randomness! Each monster has an attack and a defense value, and a die is rolled from 0 to that value for each monster. Whoever is higher wins, and the other monster loses an amount of health equal to the difference. There's a reason that CCGs tend not to have randomness in them, and that's because there's already an amazing amount of randomness in the draws from the deck. Can you imagine how irritating Magic would be if, after crappy draws, you finally managed to get a Force of Nature out, and then some Llanowar Elves managed to kill it? Well, you can experience that feeling in Monster Master! I suppose that, since all monster combats are one-on-one, it's the simplest way to prevent the most powerful monsters from steamrolling everything, but it's still deeply unsatisfying and often frustrating.

The graphics are very basic -- the cards don't have anything special in their design; while there's a bit of character art, it's very small. There's no sounds or music at all. The AI is competent, but not great. The card selection is pretty limited -- there's about 20 different types of monsters, and about 30 different spells, so there's just not much opportunity for diversification.

Overall, this is a game which might be diverting for a couple of minutes, but there's just not enough strategy or tactics there -- it feels liks it's pretty much all luck, and the lack of polish doesn't really help this game, either.

Age of War

Age of War is a game which reminds me most of all of the Mac classic Armor Alley, except without the most important part -- the part where the main battle isn't totally boring. In Age of War, you and you enemy each send out units from your bases at opposite sides of the battlefield; they meet and fight it out in the middle. Killing your enemy's units brings you gold, which you can use to buy more units, which you can use to kill more enemy units, and so forth.

The twist in Age of War is that you progress through five ages over the course of the battle: you start out at the Stone Age, with clubs, slingshots, and somewhat-anachronistic "Dino Riders", progress through several ages up to the current age, and then finally to a futuristic age. You can advance after accumulating the appropriate number of experience points, which you get both by defeating units and losing your own units, so you and your opponent tend to advance at nearly equal rates. In each age, you have one type of melee unit, one type of shooter unit (which is slightly more expensive, but of course are weaker in direct melee), and one super-expensive unit, which is also melee. You can also build three types of turrets, which are attached to your base and fire on any approaching enemies. You also from time to time get special attacks, which usually rain destruction of some form on your enemy.

The two shortcomings of this design become apparent very quickly. First of all, your units march out single file and always engage the enemy singly. So even if you try to do the obvious clever thing and intersperse melee units with shooter units, the melee units won't really protect the shooter units; as soon as the front melee unit goes down, the shooter will bravely march forward to take his turn (rather than, oh, say, letting the melee unit behind him step forward). This makes it very difficult to get an advantage in the unit combat. However, eventually you'll probably show that you're at least slightly cleverer than your opponent, at which point the second problem becomes painfully obvious: turrets are way overpowered. The first time you get within range of your enemy base, you'll immediately become severely outgunned; since your units and the enemy units tend to be pretty closely matched already, adding the turret makes the odds very strong against you. This makes it essentially impossible to mount a successful assault on the enemy base using your units alone in the early game -- with careful timing of your special attack and excellent unit selection, you might manage to do some damage, but killing the enemy base before you reach the last age is almost impossible.

This, naturally, opens up the degenerate strategy where you don't build any units at all, but just build a bunch of turrets, go off and have a cup of coffee, and return with hundreds of thousands of dollars in your coffer. And unless you manage to get lucky by sneaking into an age ahead of your opponent (which I did manage to pull off my first time through), this is the only way to win. (In the last age, you can build vastly more powerful super soldiers, and by building up your cash reserves you can finally overwhelm your enemy with these.) Needless to say, this is rather unsatisfying.

The graphics are average, but nothing special, as are the sounds. On the other hand, the music is excellent -- I really liked it. It had a very appropriate feel. On the other hand, the choice of units is quite ridiculous. The most egregious is in the "current" age, where the tanks are the super-powerful melee unit. This means that your tanks will roll straight up to an enemy and, apparently, attempt to poke them with their turret. Meanwhile, the enemy unit will most likely be attempting to attack the tank by stabbing it. (Or, more precisely, stabbing the air below the turret.) This doesn't quite make sense. The futuristic units are also a little disappointing -- where's the jet packs and laser rifles?

Anyway, this game has some fun features, and the trip through time is definitely a nice touch, but the basic strategy is so fundamentally flawed and unsatisfying that this really just isn't a very good game.

Dark Cut

Are you tired of all those medical dramas with all of their fancy-shmancy technology? Do you long for a return to the days when bonesaws and leeches were principal players in the medical practitioner's toolkit? Well, if that's the case, then Dark Cut is the game for you. Here, you have to heal three patients using the best medicine the 14th century has to offer.

The game itself is very straightforward -- it tells you what you need to do at each step; most tasks are very simple timing or precision positioning tasks, and it's generally pretty clear how to reach your objective (there are a couple exceptions -- it's not at all clear during the sawing that you don't want the saw to go too far either way, for instance). The procedures themselves feel at least somewhat realistic, though I'm sure a liberal amount of poetic license has been applied, until you reach the third patient, which is a vampire that you have to kill (so much for the Hippocratic Oath, I guess).

This game is a jmtb02 production, which means the usual high production values (and stars!), but it's definitely, well, much darker than the typical jmtb02 game. There's plenty of blood and gore, so this game is certainly not for the squeamish; there aren't any sound effects (which is probably for the better, all things considered), but the background music is very ominous and foreboding. Overall, I felt a little queasy playing through this game the first time, thanks to the combination of the graphicness of the operating table and the spooky music.

The most frustrating thing about the game is that if you should fail, you have to go all the way back to the beginning, which is no fun, especially if you fail on the third and final patient. Other than that, it's definitely a very creative game, but the core gameplay principles are pretty basic, so it doesn't require any particularly creative thinking, just exacting execution. Overall, I would say this is a solid game, but not necessarily one you'll have fun playing, simply because it can be so unpleasant at times.

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.