Achilles

Achilles is a very simple beat-'em-up in the classic tradition of such games as Final Fight. You play the titular Greek hero, and move along an endless beach featuring a plentiful quantity of people to stab and slash. You begin armed with a spear, which you can poke at enemies or throw at them; once you've thrown your spear, you start using your sword. You can pick up more spears (only one at a time, though) from fallen spearmen. You can also kick enemies to stun them, and you have a shield which can block most of most blows. A single enemy is generally not much of a threat (although if you give him an opening, he can do a fair amount of damage), but if multiple enemies jump you simultaneously (especially since they can approach from both directions), you can very quickly be overwhelmed.

Your character's attacks are somewhat unpredictable. Pressing forward + attack yields a different attack than simply pressing the attack button, but each has several different possible attacks which can happen seemingly at random, and the damage that these attacks do ranges from minimal to instant decapitation, so there's a lot of randomness in how quickly you can dispatch an opponent, and since this speed is critical to surviving, you'll end up with a fair amount of randomness in your outcomes.

The game offers two modes: in the story mode, you face a finite number of enemies per level; at the end of every stage (each stage contains three levels), there is a boss. In survival mode, you simply face an infinite number of the three basic types of enemies (swordsman, spearman, and archer). Since the basic gameplay is exactly thes same (as you pass through the five levels of story mode, the appearance of the opposing soldiers changes, but that's about it), this doesn't add that much to the game.

The graphics are pretty basic, with lots and lots of blood spurting from your enemies as they are impaled with spears, decapitated, or suffer other gruesome deaths. The sounds are also pretty basic, and the background music (during the levels) is just drums, which gets awfully repetitive and wearying pretty quickly.

Anyway, Achilles is a fun way to enjoy hacking up people for maybe a minute or so, but the repetitive and very limited gameplay coupled with the extreme randomness mean that this just isn't a terribly interesting game in the long run.

Brute Wars

Brute Wars is a tough game to categorize. It's part RPG and part turn-based strategy, I suppose. The result is not a bad game, but it's very simple -- it's much less complex than your typical example of either genre, and consequently you'll find it doesn't have quite enough depth to be able to sustain your interest all the way through.

So, the basic principle of Beast Wars is pretty simple. You move along an overland map consisting of a number of linked circles. Most points are simply combat, but a few circles have item shops (some which offer basic healing items, and some which offer various upgrades), and each screen has one castle fight. Once a combat circle has been cleared, moving back onto it is still not entirely safe -- there's still a chance (although not 100%) that you'll be thrown into another fight if you try to move back through that circle, so you can never move around the map completely freely.

Fights are quite straightforward. You have six creatures arrayed in a three-wide, two-deep formation, and your enemy has the same. Each creature is characterized by five properties -- its HP, its power (the amount of damage it does per attack), its counter (the amount of damage it does to enemies who attack it), the number of actions per turn it has, and its attack range. A creature can either attack or switch places with another creature using an action. Creatures with only one action per turn, then, are less flexible since they can't both move and attack (at the outset of the battle, of course, there'll be plenty of creatures to attack, but as the battle progresses and creatures get knocked out, you'll have to move them around), but their attack power tends to be stronger appropriately to compensate. The attack range is probably the trickiest point -- some can only attack the creature directly ahead of them, others can attack all three creatures in front of them, and some can attack two spaces away (useful for your back row). Some creatures even attack randomly. There's also a magic system -- as the battle progresses, you gain magic points, which you can then later use for spells. Most battles don't even last long enough for you to accumulate enough points to use the most powerful spells (and the points don't keep from battle to battle), so I ended up not using the magic very much (just an occasional heal).

At the end of battle (assuming you win), creatures that survived gain a level, while creatures that got knocked out lose a level. This provides an irritating kind of feedback -- your weak creatures are more likely to get knocked out and stay weak, while your strong creatures get stronger. (Note, however, that "gaining a level" doesn't mean that every level you get more HP or power. You gain HP or power only very gradually. When you reach level 50, which is the maximum, you generally gain another action, which can be extremely powerful.) You then have the opportunity to heal up and revive downed monsters, which requires the items you bought at the item shop, so make sure not to run out when you're far away from the shop, because then you might have to engage in some fights on the way back. Usually you'll want to rearrange your forces back to their starting lineup at this stage; irritatingly, you can't rearrange your creatures before battle, only after, so if you forget you'll have to start out with a suboptimal arrangement.

You can also switch out your creatures, if one of them just isn't working for you. This requires you to buy randomizers from an item shop, which (as the name suggests) replace your creature with another random creature (its level is kept, though). I don't understand the purpose of this mechanic -- it just forces you to keep clicking until you get the creature you want. (I suppose it gives you a chance to look at some creatures you wouldn't otherwise.)

As is so often the case with games of this nature, the beginning is entertainingly challenging -- not only do you want to win a battle, but you want to take as few casualties as possible, and your HP replenishing resources are scarce, so you have to fight carefully. Unfortunately, as time goes on and your creatures become more and more powerful, the battles become easier and easier, so that by the end of the game, its length definitely becomes somewhat of a drag. (Though I should say that Brute Wars is not really terrible as far as length goes -- there are certainly far worse offenders -- but it does drag towards the end.)

The sound is very basic, and the music also has a very generic RPG feel -- it's not great, but it's not terrible, and it does a good job of keeping itself unobtrusive so you're not heartily sick of it by the end of the game. The interface could use a little work -- I often found myself switching creatures and then hitting the "end turn" button instead of the "go back to attacking" button, which was awfully annoying. The game also does not autosave, so you have to remember to save frequently. This is kind of unusual in a Flash game, and it definitely is a minor irritant.

Overall, Beast Wars is an interesting little concept -- there's definitely a lot of fun to be had at the beginning of the game. However, the lack of depth means that you'll probably finish all of the excitement to be had before reaching the end of the game.

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.