Campaign Game: General Election

As a big fan of President Elect, I naturally assumed Campaign Game would be something similar: you have to choose how to allocate your advertising budget, campaign appearances and so forth in critical states to give you the edge in electoral votes over your opponent. Imagine my surprise in discovering, then, that Campaign Game isn't really anything like that -- it's a pretty traditional turn-based strategy game, except that instead of elves and magicians, you have fundraisers and John McCain.

At the beginning of the game, you select three staff members; your staff can be either hatchetmen, operatives, spinmeisters, or fundraisers. Your candidate is also a unit on the board. (In the General Election game, you can only play Obama or McCain; apparently earlier versions allowed you to play with a wider range of candidates. I was rather disappointed that this feature got taken out; it would be nice to have a larger selection.) Anyway, as you move your units around the map, each unit has a "control radius" that flips control of nearby squares to your side. If you control all of the squares in a region, you take control of that region, and it provides a ready source of cash. Your units can also attack enemy units, which reduces their HP, or enemy regions, which reduces their control; if you totally defeat an enemy region, it reverts to neutral and has to be recaptured all over again. At the beginning of each turn, you get cash for each region you hold; since you need cash to power your units' special abilities (each unit has one unique ability, and your candidates have several), this can make a large difference. You can recruit new units to replace destroyed ones, but this takes a lot of cash.

Unfortunately, the AI is just not very good; beating the game, even on the hard difficulty, is not much of a challenge. The graphics are kind of cute, though the music (which is also one of the Monster's Den: Book of Dread battle themes) gets very repetitive after a while (it's fine in small doses, but having it playing throughout the whole game gets boring quick). The sound effects are decent, but nothing to write home about. There's also multiplayer, which I didn't try.

Anyway, while this isn't a bad strategy game, there's not really much which makes it particularly noteworthy, either. It's a fun play once or twice, but doesn't really have much lasting replay value.

Open Doors

Open Doors is a fairly straightforward Flash puzzle game -- not very heavy on frills and fancy things, but there's an interesting enough concept to keep you entertained throughout its 25 levels.

The puzzle is quite simple: you have to move your character (represented by a box) to the exit of each level. Each level is set on a square blueprint-like grid. There are, of course, walls and doors, the latter of which (as you might be able to guess from the title) are the main source of trickiness in solving the puzzles. The doors follow very simple rules -- each door has two possible positions. If you're directly in front of a door, there are two possibilities for how you can move it: if it opens away from you, you can walk through it, pushing the door to its other position. If it opens towards you, moving away from the door in the direction parallel to the door towards the hinge will pull it to its other position. This probably sounds more complicated than it actually is; once you try you'll pretty readily pick up the rules. It's possible for two doors to occupy the same edge, if they're hinged on opposite corners. If two (or three) doors are hinged on the same corner, then attempting to move one into the edge occupied by the other will cause the other door to also move. This can set up some pretty tricky chain reactions in later levels.

I'm going to go off on a seeming tangent here and talk about how much I hate Sokoban. Sokoban is probably my least favorite widespread puzzle game (unless you count Sudoku in that category, which I don't). Why, you ask? Because it requires so many layers of precise planning ahead. You do an incredibly long sequence of moves to get a bunch of stuff done, and then once you get to the end you realize that no, actually, you had to move that block one space left at the beginning, and so you have to start all over again. (And that assumes you can do everything perfectly every time! It's even more fun when you've finally figured out exactly what you need to do [for real this time], and then two-thirds of the way through your finger slips and you move that one box one square too far and you're completely screwed!) That's why I don't enjoy playing Sokoban -- the cost of failed experiments or wrong guesses is so punitively high. Anyway, around level 12 (I forget exactly where) Open Doors showed signs of drifting into that territory -- you would go one way, through a pretty complicated sequence of doors, and then you'd get to a point where you realized you actually had to go the other way and open one door first and then do all of the things you just did. This made me sad and afraid that the rest of the game would be a horrible slog. Much to my relief, however, it didn't continue to develop those tendencies -- the rest of the levels remained reasonable and manageable.

The blueprint graphic theme is a nice look, although it is pretty basic. There's no music, and the sound effects are also pretty simple. The game also falls prey to one of my pet peeves for puzzle games, in that it marches relentlessly onward -- once you've completed a level, you can't go back and look at it again (short of resetting the whole game). Beating all 25 levels unlocks a special new mode where you have the same puzzles but only a limited number of moves to solve them; since trial and error was my most popular method of solving, I suspect this would rapidly drive me crazy.

Anyway, this isn't a bad puzzle game, but there's not really anything special about it, either. It will definitely provide a challenge for a little bit, but there's better puzzle games out there.

Newgrounds Rumble

Newgrounds Rumble is a fairly straightforward brawler in the classic tradition. However, it doesn't seem to be particularly demanding of its players; while there probably are layers and layers of strategy, I was able to get through the game mostly just by mashing buttons (and some persistence in the more difficult challenges). I don't even know if the characters have special moves; though there are two only kinds of attack ("quick" and "fierce"), your characters do have different moves while in the air and you can put together some pretty impressive chains.

Overall, the game is well-crafted; there's a fair number of characters each with their own distinct personalities, and there's a wide variety of arenas. The game handles up to 4 players, and some of the challenge modes include both 2v2 and 1v3 play, which is nice. There's also a lot of game modes -- the obligatory "story" mode (which is pretty skeletal, both in story and length), challenge mode, ordinary versus mode, and an unlockable survival mode. The powerups available are pretty standard for a Super Smash Brothers-like setup.

There's a fair amount of different music in the game, and while none of it is great, it's all decent. The sound effects are pretty limited but not bad. But really, the most baffling thing about this game is simple -- why is it on Kongregate? The game is clearly packed full of Newgrounds in-jokes and references, and as someone who hasn't spent too much time on Newgrounds, most of these flew completely over my head. I'm sure it would be more entertaining for someone who knows all the backstory behind all of these characters and the various references in the game, but to me, it ends up as just another fighting game. Not a bad fighting game, mind you, but just not one which is interesting enough to keep me playing.

A three-parter for today!

ButtonHunt

ButtonHunt is a game with a very simple premise -- there are 30 levels. In each of them, there is a red button. You must push the button to advance to the next level. In some levels, this is as simple as locating the button and clicking it; in other levels, you have to solve various puzzles to reveal the button. None of the puzzles is particularly hard, so this shouldn't take you very long.

The sound effects are pretty minimal, and the drawing is not particularly great. But my one complaint is that the interface is not particularly consistent. Sometimes you have to click and drag objects, while sometimes you click to pick up an object and then you just have to move it. This can be pretty frustrating when it's obvious what you want to do but not at all obvious what you need to click to get it to happen. Also, sometimes when you've picked up an object, it's not at all clear how to put it down -- this was a source of frustration more than once. Most of the puzzles just require thought, but there are a few which require quick reflexes.

Overall, this was a cute little diversion, but really not challenging or interesting enough to be a great game.

ButtonHunt 2

ButtonHunt 2 is pretty much more of the same. 30 more levels, 30 more buttons. There's a timer now, to measure your overall progress, so you can have high scores. Overall the puzzles feel a little meatier, but the annoying interface problems are still present (though the problem of dropping things doesn't seem to be present in this one). The last puzzle is also extremely annoying, unless you look at the description which says to hold down the mouse button, which makes it somewhat less annoying. Like the first game, for each ten levels you complete, you unlock a small little secret.

ButtonHunt 3

ButtonHunt 3 is pretty much more of the same. By now, a lot of the puzzles will look pretty familiar; in fact, the notes admit that at least one of the puzzles is a direct remake of a puzzles from ButtonHunt 1, but even leaving this aside, there's a lot of concepts and ideas repeated from the first two. The game now tracks both your overall time and number of clicks, and you can receive achievements for meeting certain standards on both. There's also a very simple hint system, which I suppose is useful if you're having difficulty with a particular puzzle, although once again the difficulty level is pretty low. The interface is still as frustrating as ever -- sometimes you click, sometimes you click and move, sometimes you click and drag, and it's never clear which you need to use. (In one level, it even switches between "click and drag" and "click to pick up and then move" for the same object!) Thankfully, there are no reflex-based ones in this one.

Once again, this is kind of entertaining, but it's really pretty light fare.

Doeo

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

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

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

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

Ragdoll Invaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WetDike

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

Balance Balls 2

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

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

Understanding Games: Episode 1

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

Understanding Games: Episode 2

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

Understanding Games: Episode 3

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

Understanding Games: Episode 4

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

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

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

ELEPHANT RAVE

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

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

- Music in Motion -

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

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

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

Monster's Den: Book of Dread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Particles

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

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

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

Mr. Bounce

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

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

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

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

Castlewars

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

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

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

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

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


Kongregate Chat

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

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

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

3D Logic 2: Stronghold of Sage

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

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

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

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

Dungeon Defender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filler

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

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

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

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

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

Micro Olympics

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

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

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

Tactics 100 Live

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHIFT 2

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

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

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

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