Ether War

Ether War is a frenetic, hyperkinetic, pyrotechnic, almost epileptic whirlwind of a shooter. It's not a particularly complicated game, but it'll keep all of your senses quite busy.

You have a basic shooter setup -- WASD to move, mouse to shoot -- and your objective is to defend your space station from the enemy Brood Mother, which spawns all sorts of orb-shaped enemies to throw at you. Fortunately, your space station has weaponry of its own, and can also spawn allied ships to help you battle the Brood Mother. At the beginning of the game, you're primarily playing defense. But as you destroy enemies, you collect ether points, which allow you to upgrade your ship and your allies. Eventually, once you've gained enough power, you can start to take the fight back to the Brood Mother and eventually destroy her.

The game is very fast-paced; don't expect too much in the way of precision aiming, it's very much just spray and pray. You don't have any lives; rather, when you get destroyed, you're out of the action for ten seconds while your ship rebuilds. (Your ship is protected by a fast-recharging shield, so the only way to get destroyed is to take a large amount of damage in a short amount of time. This generally doesn't happen much, except when you're mounting the final assault on the Brood Mother, when it'll probably happen a bunch of times.) Because the action is so chaotic (although you can follow the general flow of things on the very useful radar display in the lower corner), it's often hard to tell how things are going. This is especially frustrating when you can't tell how your space station is doing -- the game will occasionally flash an alert when the station is taking heavy damage, but it's often hard to figure out exactly where and how much.

The graphics are very pyrotechnic. Any time an enemy (or friend, for that matter) is destroyed, it fills the area with a shower of brightly-colored sparkles, so although this is presumably set in space, it's actually quite bright most of the time. The bacgkround music is a pleasant techno which matches the feel of the game brightly, and it's long enough and unobtrusive enough that you won't get too sick of it. The sounds are pretty straightforward and add to the fireworks atmosphere of the game, as a ship blowing up sounds like of like fireworks going off.

Overall, Ether War is not a difficult game -- you might fail your first time through, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy to win -- but it's got enough action to keep you occupied throughout. It probably wouldn't fare too well if it were much longer, but as it is, it's just the right length to be a satisfying experience.

loops of zen

It is perhaps instructive to compare Loops of Zen with Hexiom Connect (review here). Both are puzzle games built on the basic concept of connecting things, but there the similarities end. Where Hexiom Connect has clever level design, Loops of Zen has no level design. Where Hexiom Connect has a quality interface, Loops of Zen has a terrible interface. And while Hexiom Connect manages to be challenging yet rewarding, Loops of Zen is simply tedious. If there weren't a badge for completing 50 levels, I can't believe anyone would voluntarily do it.

So the basic concept of Loops of Zen is pretty straightforward. You have a bunch of pieces on a rectangular grid. Each piece has either one, two, three, or four free ends leading into its neighbors. Clicking on a piece rotates it; the object is to line up all pieces so that all the ends are properly aligned.

So what's my complaint? Well, the main problem I have is that the quality of a puzzle game is, naturally, dependent on the quality of the puzzles. Most puzzle games, thus, at least try to have clever level design so that the solutions are interesting, clever, and rewarding. Loops of Zen does none of this. Rather, all of the levels are randomly generated. This means that there's never anything particularly interesting or clever; you just rotate pieces until you happen to be done. One thing working against Loops of Zen here is that because you can't move pieces to a different location -- merely rotate them where they stand -- the puzzle tends to be rather local. That is, pieces in one part of the board don't really have any influence on far-away areas of the board. Hence, larger puzzles don't really get much harder, they just get more tedious. And there's plenty of tedium to be had -- the random level generator has no problem cranking out ever-larger puzzles. And if you don't like a level, well, just restart! You'll get a brand-new one. Anyway, the level generator clearly makes no effort to enforce unique solutions (I have no idea if that would be even possible and still have a reasonable puzzle), so there are probably hundreds of ways to solve any given board. With a bit of trial and error, you should have no trouble finding one.

The interface is not particularly useful -- a way to lock a tile, or at least to indicate that you'd like it to remain in its current position, is completely absent. While the game does autosave your progress, it does so in a completely unintuitive way -- when you start the game again, you begin at level 0, and have to hit right-arrow to advance through the levels to the first one you haven't completed -- many of the commenters are apparently unaware a save feature exists at all, which doesn't speak well for the design.

The graphics are extremely spartan -- simply black curves against a white background. There's no sound effects, only some background music which treads the fine line between pleasantly atmospheric and incredibly annoying. It's actually not too bad, but of course, when it's the only thing you have to listen to, it's not going to fare too well.

Loops of Zen is not a difficult game -- a bit of persistence is all you need to get through any given puzzle, and the amount of logic involved is pretty minimal. But I can't understand the purpose of having so many levels when the levels don't have anything particularly interesting. It just makes the whole thing a dreary slog. If the levels were more cleverly designed, or indeed designed at all, it's not hard to imagine this game being much more enjoyable, but as it is, it is simply not a pleasure to play.

Sola Rola - The Gravity Maze

Sola Rola is kind of like Excit -- it's a pretty straightforward puzzle game, and likely you've seen the basic puzzle type before, but it still combines clever level design with a few additions to make it a fun game.

So, in Sola Rola, you have two balls -- well, actually they're spherically-shaped, uh, creatures, named Wiz and Waz. They're placed in a circular maze, and your goal is to get them to their respective destinations by rotating the maze. In nearly every level, this requires some degree of teamwork, as most levels feature colored switches and correspondingly-colored doors; often you'll find yourself needing to maneuver one of the pair onto a switch to open a door for the other. In most levels, the two balls move independently, but in some they're connected with a gravity beam, which basically serves as a rope which can pass through the maze walls. This requires somewhat different tactics, but the basic principle is still the same.

The level design is pretty solid -- the levels are generally not too difficult, but they generally require at least some care, thought, and cleverness. A few of the puzzles do require a bit of dexterity, but generally planning is much more important than quick action. None of the levels gets too complicated, but there are a few which require very careful maneuvering to get through.

The graphics are pretty simple, although Wiz and Waz have a nice amount of personality. (One small complaint I have is that the tutorial information, presented in the form of dialogue between Wiz and Waz, proceeds extremely slowly. A way to speed this up would be much appreciated.) The music is perhaps a bit on the overly cute side, but it actually stands up pretty well to many repeated listens, which is good, since you'll probably be hearing it a lot.

Overall, Sola Rola is not particularly revolutionary, but the game design and the level design are both quality, so this is a game you can easily enjoy. And, as an added bonus, unlike many of the puzzle games on Kongregate, you won't be going insane by the end.

Excit

Excit is a pretty straighforward puzzle game, with a basic principle that you've probably seen before. However, it does a very good job implementing the game, with interesting and tricky puzzles, and a very clever visual aesthetic, which overall make it a pretty solid game.

The basic gameplay is quite simple: you move on a rectangular grid, with some walls scattered around it, and the object is to move to the exit. However, the catch is, once you press the arrow key to start moving in a certain direction, you keep moving in that direction until you hit a wall. (If you should happen to fly off the screen, you fail and have to restart.) Like I said, you probably have seen this mechanic somewhere before, but Excit does a good job making solid puzzles with it. In addition to the basic walls, there's a variety of other elements -- curved blocks, one-way gates, teleporters, locks and keys, and so forth. You might think that you could solve these puzzles by logic, but actually working backwards is pretty unfruitful -- there's just too many possibilities too quickly. So there's a lot of trial and error involved. This can get frustrating in some of the more complicated later levels, especially when you make a fair amount of progress but then make a wrong step and have to start over again without quite remembering what you did. (Also, since many of the levels feature more locks than keys, or things that have to be done in a very specific order, it's relatively easy to get yourself into a corner even if you are careful about not going off the edge.) If just getting to the exit isn't enough of a challenge, you can also collect MIS logos (I thought this was just a reference to the IT feel of the game, but apparently it's the name of the company that makes the game, in a rather amusing coincidence) for an extra bonus; some of these are quite easy, but some are nearly impossible. (Fortunately, you don't have to collect all of them.)

The visual design of the game is very clever -- it looks nearly identical to an Excel spreadsheet, which gives the game a nice feel. The elements are also a little bit dynamic (you bounce a little bit when you hit walls, teleporters shimmer, and so forth), which also makes the game feel a lot better than if it were entirely static. There's no music, and the sounds are very basic indeed.

The game does have one very large flaw, though; if it had come out today, it probably wouldn't get badges because of it. The game doesn't have any intrinsic save ability, but it does give you passwords for each level. However, Kongregate clearly couldn't award you a badge based on that, since you could have gotten the password from somewhere else. Consequently, in order to get the hard badge, you have to play through all 30 levels (and collect 60 MIS logos, which fortunately is not all of them) in one sitting, which is not fun at all. The game would be vastly better with a true save feature so that you don't have to play it all at once. There's also one small additional flaw with being on Kongregate. In its native resolution, you see the full spreadsheet; this means that you can use the row numbers to tell if something is actually on the same row as you (a surprisingly difficult task for things far apart on the board). However, the Kongregate version is slightly clipped, so the row numbers on the left are eliminated. This makes it a little trickier to navigate.

Overall, Excit is a well-designed puzzle game; while it can certainly get frustrating at times, the levels are carefully crafted and challenging without being horribly unfair. Still, that lack of a save feature is a really frustrating omission; even without the consideration badges, a game which can save for itself is much preferable to a game where you have to write down a password all the time.

Kaleidoscope Reef

Kaleidoscope Reef is a simple, but relaxing, game. It's neither a complicated game nor a long game, but it's a clever enough concept to provide some fun action.

So, the basic concept is quite simple. An evil ship has caused your beautiful reef to become polluted. In order to restore it, you have to plant new polyps, and then feed them by dragging plankton to them to get them to bloom into beautiful new coral. Once you've restored enough of the reef, the game proceeds to a new section, until eventually you've eliminated the pollution and restored the whole reef. At the beginning, your polyps are omnivorous, but as the game progresses, you'll need to feed them the correct-colored plankton (and getting the correct plankton is not always easy, either). The environment isn't always friendly, either -- as your reef blooms, fish of all sorts will be attracted; some just look pretty, but others can hamper your progress by eating things that you'd rather remain uneaten. The pollution can also pose a hazard to your burgeoning reef, as well.

That's pretty much all there is to the game. Like I said, it's a simple game. The graphics are vibrant and a bit cartoony, but overall the game is quite pretty. The music and sound are both quiet and peaceful; the music does a good job alternating between different melodies, so you don't get too bored, and in any case, it's unobtrusive enough that it never is particularly annoying.

As far as I can tell, you can't really lose the game -- while you get bonus points for the speed with which you complete the level, there's no actual time limit, so you can take as long as you want. So this is really more of a relaxing, peaceful game than a challenging game. Still, it's a nice change of pace and a game you should find entertaining.

light-Bot

If you read my review of Bot Arena 3 (here), you'd know that I like games where you program robots to do things. And Light-Bot is very much a game where you program a robot to do things. In fact, despite being completely nonviolent, it's much closer to RoboWar, for instance, than Bot Arena 3 is. It is, however, much, much simpler, so don't go expecting any Robot Odyssey action. Rather, it'll provide a fun little diversion and an interesting tutorial on programming in very limited space.

The basic premise of Light-Bot is very simple. (Note: I capitalized the game exactly as it appears in the title of this post, but in the text I'm going to capitalize it more normally.) You have a robot on a tiled grid, which is initially two-dimensional but eventually has tiles that you'll need to jump up onto (or down from). The grid contains some blue tiles, and your goal is to light up all of the blue tiles. To do this, you give your robot instructions in a very simple programming language (move forward, turn left, turn right, jump, or light current tile; all of the programming is done by dragging little instruction icons into your program body, which is quite simple and intuitive but can be annoying when you want to insert an instruction in your current program) and then fire him up and watch him execute your program, hopefully successfully. If not, just reset, tinker as necessary, and try again until you achieve success.

If that were all there is to it, Light-Bot would be a very simple game indeed (and it would get pretty tedious very quickly). What makes Light-Bot intriguing is that your main program is limited to 12 instructions, which is far fewer than you'll need to solve many of the puzzles. Fortunately, in addition to your main program body, you have available two subroutines, so developing reusable chunks that reduce your total number of instructions is absolutely key. At first, this is pretty straightforward, but in the later levels (especially level 10), figuring out how to make reusable code out of segments that seem inevitably different is quite a tricky task. One thing that would help is a visual trace which shows you which instruction the robot is executing as he runs your program, but sadly there is no such feature.

The game features only 12 levels, most of which are quite short but a couple of which may take you a little bit. The graphics are quite spartan, although the robot is kind of cute; there's no sound effects, other than the music, which will drive you batty in nothing flat; in my opinion, it's just not very good, and it's horribly repetitive.

Overall this is a fun game, but it is a little too much on the simplistic side to be terribly engrossing. Still, it's a cute little challenge to try when you're feeling bored and in the mood for tackling some very elementary programming challenges.

Warlords: Heroes

Warlords: Heroes is another game by Ben Olding, which essentially is a combination of two of his previous games: it takes the battle engine of Achilles (review here) and sets it in the world of Warlords: Call to Arms (not reviewed yet). The result is a game which has the satisfying hack-'n'-slash action of Achilles, but with a vastly greater depth, variety, and overall interestingness.

The game is set on the Warlords: Call to Arms map, which has nine different races, each of which controls three or four regions. Unlike Warlords: Call to Arms, though, your goal isn't to conquer the map, but rather traverse it to reach a variety of destinations. (Fortunately, thanks to evil sorcery, all regions that you cross will be hostile to you. How convenient!) There are three main plotlines (or "episodes", as the game calls them), each of which puts you in the shoes of a different character with a different goal. In order to achieve this goal, you usually have to travel to a specific target region, then, when you reach it, you gain information which tells travel somewhere else; this process repeats a few more times. However, the game gives you a great deal of latitude in how to get from one region to another. You can take the shortest path, but sometimes this brings you through some very difficult regions, so you could try to go around then, taking a longer, but hopefully easier path, or possibly retrace your steps to get more money.

When you enter a region, you have to fight your way through it pretty much like in Achilles. You have your main weapon (each main character has his own specific weapon, with its own advantages and disadvantages, which means that they play fairly differently), and also a kick, which stuns enemies and hence is not very useful in regular combat (where the emphasis is killing enemies as quickly as possibly so you don't get swarmed and rapidly killed), but can be very useful in certain situations (for instance, against bosses). The range of enemy units has been expanded widely -- rather than three different enemy types, Warlords: Heroes boasts eighteen enemy types (all, as far as I can tell, borrowed from Warlords: Call to Arms), including mounted units (which were quite the surprise when I first encountered them), and some of them do require a little more subtle tactics than "hack away as fast as possible" to defeat. Each race also has a very distinctive appearance, which adds a nice touch of variety to the game.

Another new feature is that, as you progress across the map, you gain gold (sometimes dropped from defeated enemies, and also a bonus for completing a region) which you can use for a wide variety of purposes: you can buy equipment to protect you, acquire new fighting moves (special moves which you can execute with various special key combinations), replenish lost lives (quite a reasonable investment), or even hire henchmen to help you fight. (I ended up not using this last option very much, since they tended to get killed sooner or later, and usually sooner.) If you're really having trouble with a specific region, then, you can do a few easy regions to get some more equipment or fighting moves to help you out, which is a nice option.

While each of the individual plotlines gets you to explore most of the map as you criss-cross it in search of your goal, the plotlines are constructed so that the three of them intersect at their ends. This is very clever, but it also means that each of the three episodes tends to find you covering pretty much the same ground, so you may find it gets a little bit repetitive if you play all three one after the other. After you've finished all of the first three episodes, you can play the fourth episode, in which you have to (naturally) battle and destroy an ultimate evil, which you can do with any of the first three characters.

In addition to the normal mode, the game offers a survival mode (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like) and a gladiator mode, which you have to achieve a score of 13 on in order to get the game's impossible badge. The gladiator mode basically involves fighting a series of increasingly difficult bosses, with your health being replenished every fight. In the normal game, it's simplest to just plan to lose a life or two fighting bosses and then replace it afterwards, but the gladiator mode really requires you to hone your tactics sharply -- it's very much like classic NES boss fights, where you need to carefully observe your enemy's patterns and develop a well-executed strategy to attack his weak points. Definitely a good addition. (If you're going to get the impossible badge, you'll probably find the guide linked in the game description to be useful, though I found that the best strategy against the short sword and shield guy, who definitely gave me the most trouble, was to hit him as soon as he came in range, block immediately, and then use my retreating swipe to get out of range again.)

The graphics are simple, but (as mentioned earlier) there is a lot of care in setting up a lot of distinctive enemy looks, which is definitely a good feature of the game. And, of course, there's plenty of blood. The music is not bad, although, as is so often the case, you'll probably get tired of it somewhere around the fifth swarm of enemies you hack through. The sound effects are your standard assortment of clangs, stabbity noises, and so forth.

Overall, the basic action is not too much unchanged from Achilles -- it's simple, but satisfying, although it does get a little repetitive. Still, so much depth has been added to the game that it's considerably more enjoyable than Achilles, and is definitely worth playing. (Oh! One additional improvement from Achilles: bringing up the quick reference screen actually pauses the game, rather than just obstructing your view of the screen while your enemies disembowel you. Definitely a plus. Sorry, I just forgot to mention that earlier.)

The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 1

The somewhat-confusingly named The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 1 is, despite the "1" in the title, a sequel to the original The Several Journeys of Reemus (review here); apparently, they've decided to adopt the Half-Life 2 method of naming. (In all fairness, The Several Journeys of Reemus did bill itself as "Prologue", but you still get the feeling that this could have been handled more simply.)

Anyway, there's really not too much to say about Chapter 1, since it's pretty much identical to its predecessor -- it's your standard point-and-click adventure game. The puzzles are clever, but since they're always confined to a single screen, most of their difficulty stems from the struggle in trying to find the objects on that screen which can be manipulated, rather than complex interactions among the various items. This a little frustrating, at times, but the puzzles all make sense when you solve them; there's none of the "and why did that work, anyway?" feeling that you can get when playing poorer examples of the genre.

Unlike its predecessor, Chapter 1 is not big on killing you -- in fact, I don't think there's any point when you can actually manage to get yourself killed -- you just end up stuck until you figure out what you need to do. This is definitely a step forward. Like its predecessor, there are two endings, one of which is a great deal trickier than the other; fortunately, once you've finished the game, you can go back and replay any scene that you want, so you don't have to go through the whole game just to retry the last scene (not that it would take particularly long anyway).

The graphics are still very cartoony, and a little crudely animated, but it's a good, distinctive look (although, like other Zeebarf games, it can get a little graphic with the violence at points). The music varies from scene to scene, which is very nice -- some of the tunes are good, but some will drive you crazy after a little while (especially if you happen to be stuck on the puzzle).

Anyway, overall this is an enjoyable experience, and Zeebarf does do a good job crafting puzzles within the limitations of Flash, but this isn't a game which will leave me breathlessly awaiting Chapter 2. But I will be happy to play it when it does come out.

First, a general announcement. I've been trying to post reviews at the rate of one per day. Now, obviously, I don't actually finish one Kongregate game per day; rather, since I started playing Kongregate before I started writing these, I had a buffer to start with. Now, however, I've caught up, so I'll start writing a review when I finish a game. The advantage is that I can write the reviews quicker, since the game will still be fresh in my mind and I won't have to go back and replay it. The downside is, of course, that I won't be posting these every day. Anyway, on to today's review.

SandStorm Racing

Sandstorm Racing is, as you might be able to guess from the name, a racing game. As you might also be able to guess from the name, you're racing on sand, which means you'll be drifting like crazy. If you're already familiar with racing games which require a lot of drifting, then you'll be in good shape, but if not, you'll probably have a bit of an adjustment period. Sandstorm Racing is no Gran Turismo, though, so even if you're totally unfamiliar with the concept you should be able to win races in very little time. After all, the controls are only the four arrow keys, so that should give you an idea of how simple the game is.

The game features eight courses (plus one tutorial course), and you can play a given race (once it's been unlocked) as much as you want. In each race, you'll race usually two laps against five computer opponents. You get credits based on your finish, and finishing first or second (or possibly third? I don't think I ever finished exactly third) will unlock the next course. Credits can be used to upgrade your car, although it's not a matter of buying specific parts -- you just pay a number of credits and your car gets better, and that's that. Unfortunately, if you win a race on your first try, you won't get enough credits to upgrade your car, so you'll probably get slaughtered if you try the next race, so you'll have to repeat the race to get more credits.

The one particularly frustrating thing about the game is that, while there is a path marked, you don't have to stay on the path. Indeed, cutting corners is a very important strategy for victory. However, it's not really clear just how far you can stray from the path before your progress no longer registers, and even if you do reach this point, it's possible to go a long, long way before you get reset and put back on the track where you left. This can be very annoying -- you can be sailing along and doing great, and then just drift off the path a little bit, and by the time you've recovered, you're suddenly behind everyone.

The graphics are pretty simple, and there's no music (except during the level select screen, where it's exceedingly annoying very quickly), only the screech of tires and the occasional bump when a couple of cars collide. Overall, this is a cute little game, and it's definitely fast-paced enough that you won't have to spend a lot of time to completely beat it, but it just lacks the depth to make it interesting enough so that you'd want to come back to it after finishing.

The Necronomicon

The Necronomicon is a fairly simple card game based, as you might expect, on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. It does an excellent job of making a sufficiently spooky game -- so good that you can even overlook the occasionally annoying mechanics.

The basics of the game are quite straightforward. You have a hand of five cards, and on your turn you play (or, rarely, discard) one and then draw one. Each player has a given amount of life (the starting amount of life is 40 at the beginning, but rises gradually over the course of the game), and the object is to reduce your opponent's to zero before your own does the same. Cards fulfill the general range of functions -- attack your enemy, defend or heal yourself, and so forth. Creatures do exist, but they don't behave like they do in, say, Magic -- if you summon a creature (and you may only have one in play; summoning another will simply replace your existing creature), it won't attack on its own; rather, it will counterattack whenever your enemy does damage to you. (A creature also can absorb damage from your opponent's creature, when it is activated.) This means that creatures are really not that useful overall. There are four other attributes in play. Two are Elder Defense and Arcane Power, which reduce the amount of damage taken and increase the amont of damage done by your spells, respectively. There are a fair number of cards which increase these, but there are also lots of cards which let you zap your opponent's power or defense, so don't get too attached to them. The third is Taint, which acts as poison -- it does its damage every round. Taint can be useful in the early games when characters don't start out with much life, but in the later rounds it doesn't really have enough time to do too much damage. (It also can never finish off a player -- it disappears when a player is reduced to 1 life.) The final, and most intriguing, element is your sanity. Most cards cost sanity to deploy -- in general, the more powerful and arcane the forces you're summoning, the greater the sanity cost. A few sanity-restoring cards exist, and if you discard a card, you recover an amount of sanity equal to its cost. Still, you will generally find your sanity gradually slipping away over the course of the battle. Should your sanity go to zero, you go insane. Going insane brings you one of a variety of delightful effects; these effects will generally hinder your ability to win your struggle, though they certainly do not prevent it. The pool of cards is not particularly large -- there's 36 different cards (not all of which are present at the beginning); it's not clear whether your deck contains these in differing numbers, or if there's just a certain random chance every time, though at least anecdotally some cards seem to come up more frequently than others.

While there is some strategy involved (as evidenced by the fact that the AI isn't very good at it), the game often does boil down to drawing the right card at the right time, which can be frustrating. There are two modes of play: in the main mode, you must defeat 30 enemies of gradually increasing power. Fortunately, as you defeat the enemies, your own power also increases depending on how well you do. As a result, it's often a better strategy to lose rather than eke out a close victory, since the latter will give you very few points and can leave you at a disadvantage in your next battle, while trying again to get a more overwhelming win can give you a chance to go up a rank and maybe even two, giving you an advantage. The challenge mode features 21 different challenges where the rules of the game have been altered, sometimes subtly, often grossly, and always in favor of your opponent. The challenges range from entertainingly challenging to extremely frustrating, and here especially you can see just how much the game depends on random chance. To illustrate how tooth-grinding this can be, in one challenge, you have a stipulation that you lose if you go insane. However, the opponent has in his deck a card which makes you instantly go insane. So, if this card comes up, regardless of how well or poorly you might have been doing, it's an instant loss! This gets pretty tiring pretty quickly.

Atmospherically, though, the game is fantastic. The graphics are excellent, the background music lends just the right air of eeriness to the proceedings, the sound effects, although very understated, also fit in perfectly with the game; even the typography has just the right feel. Alas, the game does have to make a few compromises -- since it can't show all five of the cards in your hand in their lovely detail, for instance, you instead have to click on a card to magnify it and then click on the Necronomicon to actually play it, which gets a little clunky once you've reached the point where you do know what every card does.

Anyway, overall this is a well-crafted game, but unfortunately it's a little bit too long -- you will undoubtedly find yourself frustrated by the randomness more than once during the course of the game (and even more should you attempt all of the challenges, though at least you can get an impossible badge for it). Still, the game environment is good enough that you can still enjoy it, if you don't mind a little bit of creepiness.

Battalion: Nemesis

Battalion: Nemesis is not a game which is particularly coy about its origins. Indeed, the designer is quite upfront that he wanted to design a game which was very much like Advance Wars, and would hopefully improve upon it. I also enjoyed Advance Wars 2 very much, so I went in expecting to enjoy Battalion: Nemesis. While Battalion: Nemesis does deliver the fast-paced turn-based strategy action I expected, it sadly falls a little short of Advance Wars in the final analysis.

If you've played Advance Wars, you should be able to hop right in (with only a few aggravating differences to get used to); if you haven't, here's what to expect. Battalion: Nemesis is a simple turn-based strategy game, where you battle the enemy on land, at sea, and in the air with a variety of units, spanning pretty much what you would expect: some infantry, some tanks, some artillery, subs, battleships, fighters, bombers, and so forth. Most units are direct-fire units, which move next to an enemy and then attack them, after which the enemy (if it still exists) can return fire. Some units are indirect-fire units, which can attack enemies from a distance, but cannot fire and move in the same turn. Scattered across the map are oil refineries, which produce money, and factories, which produce different types of units; only infantry units (which are weak) can capture these properties, so careful coordination is required in a successful attack.

If you have played Advance Wars, you'll notice some differences right off. Many of these are simplifications: for instance, all logistic considerations (fuel and ammo) have been removed. This removes a dimension that many people find annoying, but I think is an important aspect of the game. Air power (possibly to compensate for the preceding) has been severely reduced; bombers especially are no longer close to the map-dominators they are in Advance Wars. (The elimination of fuel, though, is a great help to subs, which can now remain submerged full-time.) The COs have been eliminated, which I think is kind of a disappointment, since they're a nice touch. A bunch of unit types have been eliminated or their functions consolidated into other units, which results in a simplified but awfully sparse unit tree. There's no Fog of War, which I don't mind, since I never really liked it, although in the campaign the enemy will field stealth tanks against you (I guess they got them surplus from the Brotherhood of Nod). Finally, transport has also been simplified -- rather than requiring separate units, you can just summon a sea transport or air transport (at a cost) which will instantly appear to transport your unit. There are only a few things which aren't in Advance Wars -- there exist sea oil refineries, too, which can be captured by a new type of sea unit, there's (finally!) a sea unit which can engage in direct combat with other sea units, and you can repair units in the field rather than retreating to a city (properties don't, in fact, repair units any more). The most frustrating change, though, is that instead of moving a unit and then picking a target to attack (or undoing the move if you desire), as you do in Advance Wars, you move and attack all in one fell swoop. This resulted in a lot of missed moves for me, exacerbated by the fact that you can't undo. Probably this is less of a problem if you're not used to the Advance Wars format.

All of this combines to give the game an Advance Wars-lite feel, and the campaign just doesn't have the same sweep and scale that Advance Wars does. There's only ten missions in the campaign (plus six "boot camp" training missions and one bonus map), and since the first few of these are pretty easy, there's just not a lot of meat. Even in the later missions, the maps are still relatively small and often feel kind of cramped. (They do still take a while, though, especially since the AI runs really slowly on some of the last few missions -- sometimes it would take on the order of several minutes for the computer to move, which was really annoying.) All in all, the units just don't quite work as well together as in Advance Wars -- I found it more difficult to mount a good, large-scale assault. Maybe it's just because I didn't bother to learn the ins and outs of the different unit types as carefully (and there are a lot more things to keep track of), but it just doesn't feel quite as well-balanced as Advance Wars.

The graphics are not bad, employing the same slightly cartoony style as Advance Wars, although there aren't any combat animations -- just a "pow!" and a health bar decreasing, and then the same on the other side. The sound effects are not bad; at least they're nicely varied among the units. The music is decent -- there's not the variety that you see in Advance Wars, but at least you and the enemy have separate snippets to keep you from getting too bored.

In case it wasn't evident, I am a huge fan of Advance Wars, so there's no shame in falling slightly short of the target. And it may be simply a reflection of my familiarity with Advance Wars that I tend to favor it in the areas where it differs from Battalion: Nemesis. I did enjoy Battalion: Nemesis when I played it; it's just that it ends up being not quite as great as Advance Wars.

Vector Runner

Vector Runner is pretty much your classic dodger. You pilot some kind of squarish vehicle through a neverending path filled with pyramids, all rendered with the vector graphics technology that was new and exciting in 1980. Your craft can survive three hits; along the way, you can also pick up various cubes which give you points, temporary invincibility, or a shield recharge.

Um, that's pretty much all there is to say about the gameplay. The graphics are undeniably stylish, and the animation is very smooth, but this comes at a price -- unlike your typical Flash action game which is easier on slower computers, Vector Runner is best played on a faster computer -- on a slower computer, the controls become very mushy and the precision steering you need to survive just isn't attainable. The sounds fit the game well, and the music is excellent -- I especially like the way it shifts when you move into different zones of the track.

While this is a well-executed game, it's still just a dodger with nothing beyond the basic formula, so it didn't really hold my interest for a long time. (Though there was an impossible badge to get, which kept me playing for a while.)

(Since I've gone this far without mentioning a Mac game, I need to rant. How is it that my 8 MHz Mac SE can play Spectre just fine, but my current machine, which is at least three and probably closer to four orders of magnitude more powerful, still slows down in Vector Runner every time it adds a message to the chat window? I mean, OK, Spectre had the full system resources available, while Vector Runner is running as a plugin in a web browser in a very complex operating system, but still!)

Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy

Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy is another game by Ben Olding, creator of Achilles (review here; actually, Starfighter predates Achilles by quite a bit, but that's the order in which I played them), but the two games have essentially nothing in common -- unlike, say, a jmtb02 game, which you can pretty instantly recognize as a jmtb02 game regardless of what the game might actually be about, you'd never tell they were by the same person.

Well, enough about what Starfighter isn't, and perhaps a little more about what it is. Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy is a large-scale top-view 2D space action game, much in the tradition of classic games like Escape Velocity. You start out as a relatively minor participant in the apparently endless war between humans and aliens, flying missions throughout the galaxy and destroying enemies, which earns you money to buy more powerful weapons and ships. But, to be honest, I found myself comparing the game to Escape Velocity a lot of the time, and it definitely suffered from the comparison.

In Starfighter, the galaxy is divided into a 20x20 map of sectors. At the beginning of the game, you pick a faction to be allied with, and you will fight on that side forevermore; the factions are, functionally speaking, pretty much equivalent, so you're not going to be missing out on much regardless of which side you pick. The galaxy is, conveniently, linearly divided: the degree of human control ranges from 1 at the bottom row of the galaxy to 0 at the top row, and vice-versa for the aliens. At the beginning of the game, you'll tend to hang out at the bottom (or top), but as you get more powerful, you'll move closer to the middle. (Spending a prolonged amount of time in enemy territory is difficult, though.) Each sector is pretty sizeable. Some sectors contain friendly space stations where you can buy new weapons and upgrades, or even buy a new ship. Your ship has a certain amount of energy and shields; the former can be used to recharge the latter, and both naturally recharge over time. Combat is pretty straightforward -- you can fire your primary weapon (a laser cannon, which takes your energy) or one of your secondary weapons (how many secondary weapons you can carry depends on your ship). Some secondary weapons have a limited ammunition supply (which replenishes when you cross a sector boundary or dock at a friendly station), while others take energy to fire. Your laser cannon is a dumb weapon, but many secondary weapons have automatic targeting and need to be locked onto a target before firing. Should you die, you respawn somewhere else in your sector with full health and weapons, but minus one life. The game gives you ten lives to start with, and should you manage to lose all of them, your account will be reset. You can always buy more lives at a friendly station, though, so really only extreme carelessness can result in this happening. Overall, I kind of like this mechanic.

While I generally love this genre of game (the Escape Velocity series is one of my favorite series of games of all time), Starfighter has a few flaws that readily become apparent. The first is that the universe is a relatively boring place. All space stations are the same -- they've got some weapons, they've got some missions (which are always randomly generated), and that's about it. There's no flavor to any of the missions or locations. All of the missions are basically the same -- either transport some stuff to another station, kill a number of an enemy ship type, or kill all enemies in a given sector. As you advance along the game, some more types of missions become available, but they're all basically cut from the same cloth. There's no particular overarching plot behind any of the missions, nor do they ever really change. In fact, there's no particular plot at all. You're just a human and you destroy aliens, or vice versa, and that's just the way it is.

The second problem is that getting around is kind of slow. A sector is large, and getting from one end of it to another can take a while, even if there aren't any enemies to slow you down. Getting from sector to sector, then, is even slower, since you have to fly across the entirety of a sector. You can buy hyperspace capability, but it costs a lot of money for a single charge, so it's not really profitable, especially if you're just doing a dinky courier mission anyway. (There does exist an engine upgrade which gives you free hyperspaces, which is very convenient, but it's extremely expensive, and it means you can't buy the other engine upgrades which speed up your intra-sector travel, so it definitely comes at a cost.) So, ultimately, you'll spend a lot of time flying through space with nothing in particular to do.

The third problem is that the combat isn't well-balanced. First of all, there just isn't that much differentiation in ship quality. In Escape Velocity (sorry for repeatedly mentioning EV, but it really is my gold standard here -- I promise this is the last time), when you get a capital ship, you can feel the difference. Here, though, even the supposedly weaker ships can take down the ostensibly most powerful enemies without too much difficulty, given a little bit of skill, patience, and luck. Also, the secondary weapons are not at all equal in power, and the enemies seem to have them randomly, so oftentimes a combat will not be anywhere near as difficult as you thought it was. This just kind of reduces the rewards of getting one of the bigger ships, especially since, as you might expect, the bigger ships are slower, thus exacerbating the second problem.

I would be remiss not to mention the multiplayer, since this is one of the big selling points of Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy. I like the approach to multiplayer very much -- it's very simple and elegant. Certain sectors are multiplayer sectors, where you can enter and fight against enemies played by other players. There are also co-op multiplayer sectors, where your allies are other players but the enemies are still computer players, as normal. This allows people to easily avoid the multiplayer, if they prefer a solitary experience, or seek it out if they want to test their skills, and I like the co-op option as well. Well, at least I do in theory. The one big asterisk is that multiplayer doesn't work with the latest version of Flash, so I didn't actually have a chance to try it out firsthand.

The graphics are OK -- each ship has a very distinctive look, which is definitely a nice feature, but they're all pretty flat and 2D. The sounds are pretty standard, too. There are several different snippets of music, which appear to play on different occasions (returning to a station, getting caught in an ambush, etc.); the music is definitely nice, but it's not continuous, so most of the game you'll be playing in silence (except for weapons firing).

Overall Starfighter is a well-crafted game, and it's clearly the work of a competent programmer (despite its complexity, the game always ran smoothly and glitch-free), but the environment just isn't interesting enough. The fact that the only way to progress in the game is to just go around and kill a lot of enemies, and you don't even get all that much interesting stuff for reaching the various thresholds of killing, means that reaching the requisite 801 kills to receive the badge is kind of a dreary slog. It would be a lot better if there were more of a plot and interesting variety in the galaxy, but as it stands, it's just a game with unrealized potential.

(Footnote: After playing Starfighter and thinking how much better EV was, I realized that I had never actually gotten EV Nova, the third installment in the series, so I went out and bought it and played it. It really was much better.)

Bot Arena 3

Every time I see a game involving battling robots, I secretly hope it'll be something like RoboWar or RoboSport, which are two of my favorite games of that type. And certainly it's not too difficult to envision a vastly-improved version of either. Sadly, Bot Arena 3, while not a bad game, is a bit disappointing, in that it doesn't quite live up to either of those two.

The basic premise of Bot Arena is very simple. In career mode, you build a team of bots -- each bot has a chassis, armor, and a weapon. (Technically the weapon is optional -- you can send out unarmed bots as decoys -- but in practice this is never a useful tactic.) Every armor and weapon has a weight, and every chassis has a certain maximum capacity, so you can't necessarily load up your robot with the best of everything. Once you've built your team, you can enter them in an event. Most events have a weight limit, so you can't just continuously upgrade your robots -- you have to pick and choose how best to build a team within the weight limit. (You can have as many or as few robots as you'd like on your team, as long as you're within the weight limit, but in general you tend to end up with two or three bots.) As you win matches, more parts become available to you, and you can enter the correspondingly higher-level matches. (Not all weapons are weapons; some repair tools are available also, which allows you to, at least theoretically, build a team of robots that works well together.) The shop interface is a little unwieldy at times -- it would be nice if you could just drag and drop parts rather than the somewhat complicated mounting/unmounting system.

Once in the arena, however, the bots are largely out of your hands. They have a very basic AI, which can be very frustrating at times (often, one bot will wander out of the conflict for no apparent reason, leaving the rest of your bots to get pounded on). You can also issue direct orders by either commanding your bot to move to a specific location or to follow a specific bot. However, this task requires pretty much all of your attention for a single bot, so you're leaving the rest of your bots up to the AI, and your bots don't even necessarily follow your orders particularly well. So while there is a fair amount of randomness, and you can slightly improve your odds (in theory) with good ordering, in the vast majority of cases, the outcome of the battle is decided even before it begins, by the outfitting of the bots. And since this is not a particularly difficult task once you get the hang of it, this kind of limits the ceiling of interestingness of the game. The game also offers a challenge mode, in which you and your opponent have preselected teams, and you have to lead your team to victory; this mostly serves to highlight the inadequacy and annoyingness of the in-arena controls.

The graphics are not bad, but they're pretty basic. There's a nice variety of sound effects, which help to give each robot a distinctive feel, but they do get a little tiresome. The music is serviceable, although it's on a very short loop, so you don't want to spend too much time shopping or in the arena.

Overall, much though I like the idea of robot combat, there's just not quite enough in Bot Arena to make this a really interesting game. The career mode is not a bad way to spend a few minutes, and it definitely is fun to work your way up the ladder, but the weight limit actually kind of makes the strategy easier, since it's just a matter of figuring out how best to meet the limit exactly and going from there. The challenge mode is quite frustrating. It's not a terrible game, but it doesn't quite live up to what I hoped it could be.

Seven Deadly Sins

Seven Deadly Sins is a cute little adventure game where your character, an ordinary British fellow in a small Kentfield village, must complete the seven deadly sins within a fortnight (that's two weeks for you less-literary types) to win.

The game works with your basic point-and-click setup; there are also a few action-based minigames interspersed throughout the game. The difficulty of the sins ranges from very easy (I managed to get one sin entirely by accident) up to quite involved (the Lust sin has a very elaborate plotline, which requires quite a bit of effort invested to get a girl into bed with you). None of the puzzles is particularly difficult, but some of them can be tricky simply because things which are usable objects or locations are not always obvious, as is often the case in games of this genre. The game's logic is also very simple, and often ridiculously simplistic (for instance, you can just keep getting haircut after haircut to continuously improve your appearance), but it manages to get things done without tying you up too much in mechanics. The game, as you might expect from the title and goal, has a pretty light-hearted feel and a good sense of humor.

The art is pretty basic, but it has a nice hand-drawn feel. Surprisingly for a game of this simplicity, there is actual voice acting for the dialogue, which is a nice touch. While the music is probably not licensed, it's deployed well and not repetitively in the game, and also adds a nice feel to the game. The sound effects, while basic, are also used well.

Overall, Seven Deadly Sins is neither a particularly long nor a particularly difficult game, and it's by no means perfect, but it's still a fun and funny enough game that you should enjoy playing through it.

Hexiom Connect

Hexiom Connect is a very simple, but very elegant, puzzle game which manages to be very difficult without being unfair. The result is a game that (at least if you solve it honestly, like me) can keep you occupied for quite a long time and still remain interesting.

Hexiom Connect is kind of a successor to Hexiom (which, while I have played, I haven't yet reviewed here, and may never, since it's so difficult), but really the only thing the two have in common is that they're puzzle games played on a grid of hexagonal tiles. In Hexiom Connect, you have a bunch of tiles with colored paths on them, and the object is to place the tiles so that all of the paths link up with each other properly. Some levels have some tiles which are already fixed in place (which serve as a handy starting point for your deductions), but some have no fixed tiles. The game contains 30 levels, all of which are very well-designed, as well as a random level generator which lets you generate endless levels of your chosen size and other specifications.

A lot of the earlier, smaller levels can be done by trial and error, but when you get to the larger and harder levels, trial and error alone will not suffice (unless you're very lucky!). You'll need to use logic, which mostly consists of finding places on the grid where only one (or maybe two) tiles can fit, and then building outward from these known tiles. The interface helps to some degree -- you can use shift-click to lock a tile in place if you know it has to be there -- but I found myself really wishing for a couple of features. First, it would be really nice if there was some way to, say, control-click on a hex and it would show you all of the tiles that could be legally placed on that hex. It would also be nice if you could somehow drag tiles off the board so you could get a better view of what you knew and what you didn't.

The graphics are pretty basic -- the paths brighten up when they're connected properly, which is nice, but it also means that the color of the dimmed paths can occasionally be difficult to distinguish. The tiles also get awfully small on the bigger levels -- I spent a lot of time squinting at my monitor before discovering that you can make the game bigger by increasing the text size on the page (at least in Firefox; I can't speak for other browers). I really love the music; it's very beautiful and has just the right feel for the game. Unfortunately, there is only one track, so even though it's great, you will likely find yourself tiring of it on the longer levels.

Hexiom Connect is not an easy game -- some of the harder levels took me more than an hour and required me to keep a lot of notes about the possibilities and things that I'd already tried, but I was glad to complete it without having to rely on any walkthroughs (although I'm sure if you're lazy, you can easily find solutions -- you'll just have to live with your guilt). Overall, it was a very satisfying and enjoyable experience, so if you're looking for a good puzzle game, give Hexiom Connect a try.

Draw-Play 2

Draw-Play 2 is a clever idea which, unfortunately, is executed with all the skill and cleverness of the maiden voyage of the Titanic. If you're determined to get the badge (as I was), be prepared for quite a bit of frustration. (In Kongregate's defense, you can tell that this is a game from Kongregate's early era, when there were so few games on the site that pretty much anything got badges. There's no way a game this poor would get a badge today.)

So, the basic concept of Draw-Play 2 is really interesting. You have a pretty standard platformer environment, with walls, spikes, turrets, and whatnot, and your object is to get your character from his start point to the flag. But the catch is that there's a lot of things missing. Fortunately, you can draw on the level with your pen, and then your character can walk on what you've drawn, and voila, you're at the flag! What's wrong with Draw-Play 2, then? Probably the simplest way to answer this question is to walk through the first few levels.

"Okay, first level. Let's see, I'll just draw a big ramp. That wasn't too bad. Hmm, second level. OK, there's a wall in the middle, so I'll just draw ramp up to the wall. Now, I'm here, so I'll draw another ramp going back to the left. Wait, I can't jump up onto this new ramp that I just drew? Uh, well, let's draw a new ramp then. Okay, third level. Hmm, there's this really narrow space I have to climb up on. I guess I'll draw a series of platforms. Oops, this platform is a little too low and I can't jump past it. Well, I'll just erase it...wait, erasing erases everything that I've drawn? I guess I haven't lost that much. OK, this time I'll be really careful. Oops, I missed that jump and hit the spikes. Wait, now I can't even jump onto the first platform I drew. I have to restart again? Dammit, now I hit the spikes again! *SMASH SMASH*" And this is just level 3. There are 40 levels.

So, let's go over the sins of the game. As mentioned, there are 40 levels, and nearly every single one of them is frustrating. Also, you can't save, so you have to do this all in one sitting (which did not help my rage levels very much). The lack of selective erasing is incredibly annoying -- one minor mistake in either drawing or maneuvering can easily undo all of your work and force you to start all over from scratch. The collision detection is incredibly poor, so even getting near the spikes will result in your immediate demise. The game doesn't deal well with you being near your drawings, so sometimes you can jump through your lines, sometimes they block you, and sometimes you just get incredibly glitchy behavior. And the level design is consistently irritating -- rather than puzzles which delight you with their cleverness, you get instead spikes, rotating spikes, moving spikes, sideways spikes, and then the same but with the lights turning on and off during the level. It's a miserable experience.

There's no sound (I did manage to get a startling scream once when I managed to glitch my character offscreen, but that's about it), and there are four (unlicensed, I suspect) tracks available for music, none of which is particularly well-suited for the game feeling and all of which will drive you batty in short order. Anyway, you can finish this game, but be prepared to part with a fair amount of sanity if you do so. It's a shame because, like I said, I think there's a very interesting idea lurking underneath the game, but it's just such a bad implementation.

(If you're determined, despite reading this, to give it a try, at least heed these two tips. First, change your pen color from black. This makes it a lot easier to cover over spikes that you're walking on without accidentally getting killed by them. Second, more importantly, if you put your pen at your character's feet and draw upward, your character will move up. This is by far the least frustrating way to move up.)

Epic War

Epic War is a perfect case study in how just a few small features can make the difference between a successful game and an unsuccessful game. While the basic structure of Epic War is extremely similar to Age of War (review here), it gets right a few very important things which Age of War gets wrong, and as a result, while it's still clearly a flawed game, it's a game which is vastly more fun and interesting to play than Age of War.

So, if you've read my review of Age of War, you'll know the basic premise of Epic War. You have a castle at one side, your enemy has a castle at the other side. You build units, which march across the field and engage the enemy units. When you kill enemy units, you get mana which you can use to buy more units (you also gradually get more mana over time), with the ultimate goal of destroying the enemy castle. Epic War doesn't have the multiple-ages conceit of Age of War; rather, it's set in a clearly Tolkien-inspired landscape (as evidenced by the hobbits, dwarves, elves, and orcs, for instance, although it departs somewhat from the Tolkien formula in the higher-end units). At the end of the battle, you can use the XP you got during the battle for killing units to buy upgrades for your units, acquire new traps and features you can add to your castle, and unlock new, more powerful unit types.

What makes Epic War a better game than Age of War, then? Well, the first thing you notice is that it actually gives you something to do during the battle other than simply watch your troops go out and bash the enemy. Epic War places you in control of your castle's crossbow, which, if aimed properly, can be a very effective weapon against enemy troops. Unfortunately, this really only is an interesting challenge in the first couple of levels; as you progress, the enemy density rapidly becomes high enough that you can just keep it aimed at a fixed location, hold down the button(s) to fire arrows, and keep racking up the kills. Still, this is a nice feature to add interest to the first few levels, and it definitely reminds me of why I enjoyed Armor Alley so much -- it wasn't simply the strategy of sending out your troops, but the fact that you could directly influence the action yourself in your helicopter.

(As an aside, you might wonder why I'm always comparing Kong games to classic Mac games. Well, the reasons for this are twofold. First, those Mac games are the ones I remember most fondly from my childhood, so I'm naturally going to compare things tothem. The second, more worrisome, reason is that, while these Flash games undoubtedly have advanced quite a bit in graphics and sound from the Mac games I loved as a kid, the gameplay is rarely any better and is often less polished.)

The other thing that makes Epic War less of a tooth-grinding experience than Age of War is that your units aren't complete idiots. Rather than simply standing in single file and dutifully awaiting their turn to attack or be attacked, they advance sensibly. Shooter units stay behind melee units! Multiple melee units can attack in groups! It's practically a revelation! (Sadly, you can't retreat, even in cases where it would be eminently sensible, but even still, the troop intelligence in Epic War represents a quantum leap forward.)

This is not to say that Epic War is without its flaws, of course. Aside from the crossbow issue mentioned above, the most glaring is that the more advanced creatures are so much more powerful than the lower-level creatures that there's pretty much never any reason to buy the weaker creatures once you've unlocked the better creatures (except for the fact that there's a cooldown timer on buying creatures, so you might have to buy something lower level while waiting for one of your higher-level creatures to become available again). Also, the game isn't quite balanced -- the computer is always able to throw out more creatures, and higher-level creatures, than you can. However, you have the crossbow, as well as a super attack which rains a shower of arrows down on the whole field, so it's not quite as bad as I made it sound.

The graphics are pretty nice, although your units are tiny (well, at least at the beginning -- the highest-level units are pretty huge), and it's often surprisingly difficult to mouse over units on the battlefield to see their status. The sound effects are pretty uninteresting (arrows thunking, weapons clanking, etc.), and the music, while appropriately epic, gets pretty repetitive pretty fast. Overall, this is not a bad game, but I do feel that it dragged a little long -- there are 15 levels, but you've probably figured out pretty much all there is to figure out by level 9 or so. Still, it's engaging enough that you won't find it to be a waste of time to make it through to the end.

Thing-Thing 2

I was kind of hoping from the name and the promise of beating up lots of enemies that Thing-Thing would kind of be like Xiao Xiao (which, while technically not a game, is undeniably pretty awesome). Sadly, I was disappointed, as Thing-Thing 2 is a relatively straightforward and boring beat-'em-up.

So, there's you, and there's an infinite stream of enemies. You can walk, jump, or punch (pretty ineffectual), or shoot them with one of the wide variety of weapons in the game (point and click). The one thing that makes shooting enemies nontrival is that each weapon has its own recoil, which will pull your cursor away from where you want it to be if you're firing a bunch of shots in quick succession. (It is amazing to read all of the comments complaining about how terrible the aiming is. If you took away this feature, I can't even imagine how pointless the game would be.) Ammo can be annoyingly scarce. Since the enemies don't do very much damage even if you walk amidst their throngs, you might wonder why you need to bother killing them at all. The answer is that there are doors that require you to have killed a certain number of enemies before you can pass through and continue the level.

The game offers a couple of modes. There's the rather-misnamed Story Mode, which offers no story to speak of, but I guess Sequence of Seemingly Unrelated Levels Mode might be a little long to fit. (To be fair, you do gain weapons as you move from level to level, so it's not completely unconnected.) Survival Mode is pretty much what you'd expect.

The graphics are pretty basic -- all of the characters are just built out of spheres, although the game gets credit for making a lot of unique enemies. The sound is pretty much your average boring gun effects, while the music is OK -- it's at least somewhat less boring and repetitive than a lot of Flash games, but it's not great either. However, none of this changes the fact that the fundamental gameplay is simply pretty boring. I didn't really enjoy playing this game all the way through, so I'm glad it was short and I was able to earn the badge in a reasonable amount of time.

Scope: First Blood

Scope: First Blood is another assassination-based game, much in the style of the Tactical Assassin series (reviews here and here). The concept is pretty much the same -- find the target, shoot the target with your sniper rifle. There's no upgrades or anything between the levels, just seven missions.

Scope: First Blood has a couple of touches which make it a little nicer than the Tactical Assassin games, in my opinion. First, not all of the missions involve simply shooting your target in the head. (In fact, only two out of the seven missions require you to directly kill your target. The others are more subtle.) The game also has a bit of a sense of humor (albeit a bit sophomoric at times), which is a nice touch. Finally, the missions require somewhat more clever thinking to solve; this is not to say that any of them is particularly complex, but there are at least a couple of steps that you have to work through in most missions.

The graphics are the basic stick-figure style that seems to be standard for this genre. There's not much sound beyond the rifle sound and the computer blips at the end of a mission. The music is not bad, although perhaps a little overdramatic for a stick figure game. The game also includes six achievements, which give it a slight amount of replay value, although the game itself is so short that even replaying it a few times is not going to add up to a lot of time. Overall, it's not a bad game, but there's just not very much substance to it. Still, it's worth a playthrough.