Friday Free Game: Auditorium Friday, December 05, 2008

Auditorium is a beautiful mixture of game and toy, sight and sound, puzzle and exploration, serene in a way that reminds me of Boomshine, in a way, with its sweet, dreamy melodies and abstract, colorful gameplay. The idea is to conduct the stream of light, filtered by rings of color, to "fill" the squares. If you think it sounds a little awkward and requires some getting used to, you're right. But before long, you're entranced by the beauty of a full-screen Flash experience.

Boomshine is one of my favorite Friday Free Games of all-time, and even making a comparison to it should tell you I think pretty highly of the game for delivering a remarkable and challenging overall user experience. I find the interface to be a bit uncomfortable, if acceptable, but the level design is good with a steady challenge ramp-up rate.

On the whole, Auditorium certainly is a fun and engrossing game, but it's a bit too puzzley for my taste, and I grew bored of it after 45 minutes. But that's already thrice as much as I ever ask out of my Friday Free Games. It also auto-saves your game so you can stop at any time and lose no progress. I could go on, or I could say, Play Auditorium.

Friday Free Game: QWOP Friday, November 21, 2008

I like QWOP: it's one of the most frustrating games I've ever played, but if there is a virtue to be ascribed to video games, it is in being maddening and yet addicting. You always win when you play QWOP, because, as it tells us smugly, everyone's a winner.

Just go ahead and try to make this guy run. I dare you. I fell on my face for 4m after a half an hour of trying. It's a compelling enough game, in that it feels solvable, but damned if I know how to make that man stay on his feet.

The story is you're a hapless guy from the tiny nation of QWOP (as a man of Maltese heritage, I feel for him already) who's been sent to the Olympics with - how shall we say - inadequate training. Your QWOP keys control your thighs and calves, supposedly, but they don't seem to work very well. The only solid thing I figured out in the half hour I gave the game was that I should start with "Q".

I can't decide whether I'm having fun, but yet I keep playing. It's a perfect Friday Free Game for masochist achievers. Like me. Play QWOP.

Friday Free Game: Kung-Fu Election Friday, October 24, 2008

Just for shits and giggles, try out Kung Fu Election, a Flash-based Mortal Kombat clone where you can fight as Barack Obama or John McCain. I played this one about five times, losing to Sarah Palin as Barack (who sort of loks and fights like Mitsurugi... oh and he throws a flight of white doves as his missile attack) and then losing to Joe Biden as McCain, but then suddenly something clicked (maybe because McCain fights a little like me favorite Soul Calibur character, Kilik), and I started climbing the ladder. I literally laughed out loud when I fought Hillary (who carries fans like MK's Kitana) and she threw a projectile at me that had Bill Clinton appear and punch me in the face three times. You have to play this game just for that.

Friday Free Game: Bloons Tower Defense 3 Friday, September 19, 2008

It's been about two years since I recommended a tower defense game, and in that time, it has surprisingly become a genre in its own right. There are a hoarde of these games, now, primarily since they're very simple to build, and relatively easy to balance. If you've never played one of these games, it's really just a twist on the RPG grind: kill stuff, get stuff, kill bigger stuff, get better stuff, ad infinitum. As a matter of fact, the main difference between a tower defense game and a dungeon crawl is that in a dungeon crawl, you find the monsters and in tower defense, the monsters come to you.

But don't listen to me, because I'm sitting here telling you how banal these games are and yet I can't stop playing them. Much like the old RPG grind, there is something very satisfying about the power-up cycle. My latest tower defense obsession is called Bloons Tower Defense 3, and is the inheritor of the name of a clever little game about a monkey popping b(a)lloons by throwing darts. So, not surprisingly, this game is about positioning various types of monkeys around the board so that they can pop balloons.

But it's not just darts. It's spiked balls thrown by catapults, spinning blades, ice balls, cannons, and superhero monkeys with plasma beams that shoot out of their eyes. Okay, so it may not be particularly coherent, but the game is a lot of fun, mainly because the difficulty curve is really well-designed. Several times, I was humming along, kicking butt, and then all of the sudden, the stupid metal balloons would show up and ruin my game. I'd try it again, this time with a rocket launcher in place, only to have the MOAB – a nigh-indestructible blimp carrying tons of other balloons – show up and ruin it all again. My best advice is to ramp up gradually, starting with a monkey, then adding tack-throwers, then saving up for cannons. The super monkey is definitely worth it!

Sur this isn't the prettiest game around, and there are more original tower defense titles, but the playability and variety kept me coming back, and I'm sure it will do the same for you. Go on. Touch the monkey. You know you wanna.

Friday Free Game: Monkey Island Friday, September 05, 2008

This week's Friday Free Game is called Monkey Island. No, not that Monkey Island – this is a simple Flash game with a clever central mechanic that's sure to engage as you navigate the Japanimated world of an island-hopping simian.

The controls are very simple: rotate the monkey using your mouse and then click and release to control your jumps. Make your way from island to island to collect all of the bananas. But careful: some of them shift, and some will even sink underneath you! By the way: the game is all in Japanese, so click on the red button on the opening screen to start the game. Happy hopping!

Friday Free Game: Nano War Friday, August 08, 2008

I've been playing a lot of games and haven't liked all that many, but this week's Friday Free Game is something pretty special: it's simple, it's challenging, and it offers pretty unique gameplay. The game is Nano War by Benoît Frelson. I ran across the game when I played it on Kongregate, the game-sharing web community driven by shared ad revenue where I recently posted S3QUENC3R.

Nano War is called a prototype by its creator, and there is a certain unfinished quality to the game, the core gameplay feels solid and tested, and even if it's a bit unusual.

The board consists of round cells with numbers in them. You are the red "entity" and the computer is green. The number in every red or green cell is slowly incrementing. You can select a cell by clicking on it (or dragging a box around several) and then click on another cell to fire off half the value of each selected cell in a little floating particle at the destination. It's an odd mechanic, and the interface felt pretty clunky, but it's not too hard once you get the hang of it. The level design is very nice. There's a solid, steady difficulty curve and you will have to start over a few times to be sure, but the tension this very simple game manages with such a bare-bones scheme is pretty remarkable. By level 10 or so, you're starting every board with a major disadvantage. You have to be quick, be persistent, and be aggressive to stay ahead of the computer.

Also, the designer has promised a multiplayer version at some point in the future, and I think that could be the best thing since KDice. I heartily recommend Nano War as a unique challenge.

The First Rule of Chessboxing Sunday, July 06, 2008

...is that you do not talk about Chessboxing.

You play chess with timed moves for four minutes, then box three minutes, then sit back down, and continue your game. There are six rounds of chess and five rounds in the ring, but you can win early with a knockout or checkmate.

This has got to be one of the greatest ideas ever. I love the idea that you have to best your opponent both physically and mentally. Winning that match must be thoroughly satisfying. Concentrating on chess after being smacked in the head many times can't be easy.

The loser said he was simply too punch drunk to fend off checkmate.

"I took a lot of body-blows in the fourth round and that affected my concentration. That's why I made a big mistake in the fifth round: I did not see him coming for my king," he said.

We may have finally found the definitive way to separate the weak from the strong.

Friday Free Game: Go Go Plant Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Posted early in observance of Independence Day in the States.

Go Go Plant scratches the specifically twitch-gamer itch, sort of like Dino Run (the last Friday Free Game from late May(!)), and it's a great candidate for this week's twenty-minute casual distraction. It's a bizarre concept that somehow works. You're a plant, see. And you're grabbin' money. Why? Doesn't matter; it's fun.

The controls are a marvel of perfect design: up to fly, down to dig, forward to punch, back to grab. Somehow it all gels seamlessly in your brain in .3 seconds, and you're off finding Zen-like flow with this game almost equally as fast.

I think the fact that the boards are scripted adds to the addictiveness of the game, because the controls are natural and responsive (but, of course, not too responsive) and the timing they throw at you is always a little tricky. I found myself playing the beginning several times and enjoying each time. There was a good amount of playtesting done on this game.

But don't get me started on the soundtrack. This has got to be one of the most truly random and insane couplings of sounds and visuals ever seen in a Flash game, and that is saying something. The music is this eerily poor recording of some man singing in some language that could be Italian but fucked if I'd know if it was Swahili. And your little green hero is a potted plant with an elastic fist and a butterfly net. And I am not making that up. It's pretty damn strange.

But, like I said, fun. Play Go Go Plant.

Diablo III Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Via Intelligent Artifice: Behold! Diablo III!

Sane Scientists Need Not Apply Sunday, June 08, 2008

Not much of a game per se, but I know some of you will enjoy this game intended to help you learn about neurons: Make a Mad, Mad, Mad Neuron!

Friday Free Game: Vector Wars Friday, May 09, 2008

Vector Wars certainly isn't the best space shooter around, but it's a perfect candidate for the Friday Free Game. It's a fun 15-minute time-waster with fast-and-furious gameplay and cool, trippy visuals, including some pain-in-the-butt enemies that look like they're the light cycles from Tron. They keep killing me and taking me away my double-shot!

And by the way, if you're a Tron geek like me: GLTron is a downloadable, fun and very faithful rendering of the light cycle action in full, glorious OpenGL 3D. The board looks just like it did in the movie, and there's even a Recognizer floating menacingly above you as you race. It takes a little bit of time to get used to the first-person perspective, but I've been playing this one a bit obsessively. But alas, since it's not an instant-play experience, I can't recommend it for the Friday Free Game, but you should do yourself a favor and download this extra-bonus game.

Maze Design Tuesday, February 26, 2008

I never thought about it, but I guess maze design is a subset of game design. A maze is a sort of game: it's an interactive space governed by rules (no crossing lines) and with variable outcomes (you either make it out or you don't). The University of Waterloo has a collection of papers on maze design and Walter Pullen's "Think Labyrinth!" page has a host of maze-related resources, including software to create and solve mazes. He also includes links to some truly bad-ass mazes featured, such as a link to the largest maze on the Internet (ZIP file).

Friday Free Game: Bomb Chain Friday, February 08, 2008

Bomb Chain is a fun little puzzler that I have recently revisited. The idea is to start a chain reaction of explosions that clears all of the bombs off of the grid. Bombs come in several varieties: some explode diagonally, some orthogonally, some both, and they can be either weak or strong, meaning their range is either 1 or 2 spaces.

Each level presents a different arrangement of bombs already on the board and then gives you a small number to place yourself. Combine two weak diagonal bombs to create a strong one; you can combine a diagonal and a straight to create a combined bomb that explodes in all directions.

I'm happy to report that I'm playing this game again after being stuck on Stage 22. There are 40 levels to play, and they're all pretty interesting. Good level design and a sound if simple core mechanic makes Bomb Chain a great game to obsess you over the weekend. Try it out. I know you'll like it.

Bulletball Monday, February 04, 2008

Bulletball is a game by inventor Marc Griffin. Griffin gained notoriety by appearing on a Reality TV show called American Inventor. When Griffin told the judges he had sold his wife's wedding ring, was now living out of his car and had dedicated 26 years of his life to promoting his game, the judges were harsh in their judgment: "You told us that you’ve given twenty-six years of your life to this game. I think that’s more of a life than a man can give to a dream. Please get your life back." I almost cried watching this.

Griffin's website sells Bulletball tables for $399.99.

Friday Free Game: Buggle Friday, January 25, 2008

It's been a while since I featured a multiplayer gaming experience for the Friday Free Game. As a matter of fact, the last multiplayer game I recommended was KDice in December of 2006. So much has changed since then...! But one thing that hasn't changed is my love for games that are cleverly designed, and the need to share them with my faithful, if somewhat limited audience. And today I bring you Buggle, a very simple but surprisingly challenging game of area control and psychology.

At first glance, you might think that Buggle is like last week's game, Boomshine. When the game begins, you are presented with a field of sixty floating little Buggle-guys. After a few seconds, the motion stops and you have to click somewhere on the screen. Once all of the players have clicked, the motion resumes and those that float within a certain distance of the point you clicked will be stopped and linked to it. This can set up a chain reaction that links others nearby, and eventually, all of the little dudes are claimed for one of the players. Then, you must click again, and once again the Buggles are reclaimed. Players get points for each of the little critters they nabbed, and then play moves on to the next round. After ten rounds, the game is over, and if you're me, you curse your inability to ever win.

Buggles lacks some of the poetry that Boomshine has, but it has much more interesting gameplay because it's multiplayer. The way to rack up points is to click in a place that is far away from where everyone clicked. So then the game becomes about psychology... where will that anonymous person sitting elsewhere in front of his computer click? Should I try to click at that tempting cluster in the corner or try to hedge my bet by sticking closer to the middle? Honestly, I have yet to figure out the exact mechanics that determines who gets which buggle when two or more people are competing for them, but it's mostly as simple as picking the better strategic position on the field such that you limit the opportunities for your opponents while maximizing your own chances to create a large chain.

One thing to note is that in order to play the game, you first have to set up an account at the Casual Collective, the site that hosts the game. And you may have to wait around a bit to find players, but in my experience, one or two show up within a few minutes, so it's no big deal. Click here to play Buggle.

Friday Free Game: Boomshine Friday, January 18, 2008

Boomshine is one of those rare games that has stripped away everything unnecessary, leaving just the undistilled essence of gameplay intact. The field of play is filled with floating, multicolored dots. Your job is to click – just once! – and start a chain reaction that will touch as many of the dots as possible. Each level gives you more dots and asks you to clear a higher proportion of them. Those last four or five levels will take you several tries each to beat.

Level	Min	Total	Pct
1	1	5	20%
2	2	10	20%
3	3	15	20%
4	5	20	25%
5	7	25	28%
6	10	30	33%
7	15	35	43%
8	21	40	53%
9	27	45	60%
10	33	50	66%
11	44	55	80%
12	55	60	92%

It's a well-designed and addictive little game and you find yourself trying all sorts of different tactics. At first I clicked when I saw a cluster of dots, then I clicked towards the middle. Then I started trying to track the overall "flow" of them to see what was going to collide with what. The fact that I was performing these strange (futile?) mental acrobatics to track fifty random dots is a testament to this obviously well-tested game's achievement of near-perfect balance. Check it out.

Friday Free Game: Dark Cut 2 Friday, January 11, 2008

With a recommendation from jayisgames, I am pleased to share with you Dark Cut 2 a game that casts you as a civil war surgeon who works on the front lines. Clean the wound with alcohol, remove bullets with a pair of forceps, sew up your patient, using whiskey as your only anesthesia. The atmosphere is as dark and chaotic as you could want, and the visuals are certainly grisly — I'd recommend the game for mature audiences only. But it's one of the most interesting and original flash games I've ever played. I won't spoil it by telling you too much, but remember, you're better off operating on a patient that is drunk... very drunk.

Friday Free Game: The Traveler IQ Challenge Friday, November 30, 2007

For mainly philosophical reasons that I am developing into a separate post, I do not like trivia games very much. I am a big believer in games being self-contained systems of rules, and trivia games rely on knowledge outside of the game system itself. This doesn't mean trivia games aren't fun, but they're a different sort of thing than what I would rightly call a game in the sense that Chess or San Juan is a game.

But the Friday Free Game isn't about philosophical purism. It's about sharing games that are quick to pick up and hard to put down. And while The Traveler IQ Challenge is a kind of trivia game, it's so well done and I had so much fun playing it that I felt compelled to recommend it as this week's game. A big shout-out to Miz Salem-Shadow for sharing the link.

The game presents a map of the world with different colors denoting different countries. The game then asks you the names of various places around the world and asks you to click as close to the exact spot named as possible. Speed and accuracy both count. Sure, you may know that Melbourne is in Australia, but Australia's a big place! Is it on the east coast or the west coast? Guess wrong and it'll cost you points. If you score well enough, you will move on to successively harder levels, asking you to locate such exotic places as Valletta and Rapa Nui.

This is the kind of game that anyone at all can enjoy. On my second game, the game informed me that I had, in fact, "Kicked Butt!" See if you can beat my score of 289,836. Enjoy!

Friday Free Game: Dead of Night Friday, November 16, 2007

Dead of Night is an isometric tactical game about surviving an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies. It's just you, your high-powered sniper rifle, and a few buddies against the never-ending tide of undead bent on devouring your brains.

The board is a simple rectangle. You begin the game with two special characters that you must protect: a medic, who will heal your men each day if he is alive, and a scientist, who will increase your damage while he's around. When the night comes, the zombies rise from the ground in a great swarm, slowly advancing towards your avatar. You can use your sniper rifle that can pick off zombies anywhere on the board, but it reloads very slowly and its damage is often not enough to take out an enemy in a single shot, so this can become a frustrating part of the game as you watch the zombies shamble inexorably through and around your defenses.

Of course, you can upgrade your reload speed and damage on your sniper rifle, but you can only stay ahead of the brutal damage curve for so long. Placement of barricades follow strange rules, so don't assume you can just hide. The land mines are cool but ultimately pretty useless. Lose either your medic or your scientist and you're on an express train to painsville, because you're pretty much out of luck trying to fight off the zombies in the later stages without them.

I only made it so far as the fifth night (10.03 minutes); five gunmen fighting in loose formation out in front seemed to work pretty well, but then they somehow managed to just avoid my defenses and swarm my sniper.

This isn't a very fast-moving game, but this just makes it more cerebral than twitchy. The slow gameplay manages to build tension instead of creating frustration. Ultimately, the game is a a turn-based resource-management game masquerading as a real-time action/tactical game, as the primary challenge is maximizing overall damage over time, balancing your expenditures between rifle upgrades, extra gunmen and strategically-placed barriers. But the design manages to achieve a nice balance between the two styles of play. Perfect for a half-hour free game fix. Play Dead of Night.

Friday Free Game: Sushi Go Round Friday, November 09, 2007

This week's Friday Free Game reminds me an awful lot of Tapper, the classic arcade game the featured a beer tap beside your joystick. You'd have to run from counter to counter, filling frosty mugs and flinging them at customers, but the tricky part was catching the glasses as they threw them back. I personally don't think Tapper gets nearly the respect it deserves. In 1983 it had in-game advertising (Budweiser and Mountain Dew have prominent logos in-game) and compelling casual gameplay, including a mini-game bonus round. It's one of my favorite of the classic arcade games.

This modern-day, Flash equivalent is called Sushi Go Round. Customers appear and demand different kinds of sushi. You have to assemble the rolls from the proper ingredients and send them down the conveyor belt to them. Just to make your life difficult, this sushi bar is a one-man show: you are the production-line sushi chef slinging the fish, the beleaguered manager re-ordering fish eggs to stay ahead of customer demand, and you're even the busboy. You have to click on the plates to clear them for new customers.

Each round introduces a new kind of sushi that you have to remember how to make, but remembering the sushi recipes is the easy part. The game gets hard as you juggle the making and ordering, and it generates that same kind of tension that Tapper did as you find yourself going back and forth, barely keeping up as the game throws obstacles at you. The game is a lot of fun for a few plays, but I found myself wishing they had simplified the sushi-reordering part a bit more. But the system hangs together nicely, and Sushi Go Round is liable to keep you busy for a few hours if you're not careful.