Tower Defense

Okay, so this one has already been all over Digg and everywhere else, but somehow I missed it until recently - I may have passed it over because the graphics looked kind of cheesy and the gameplay didn't seem very exciting. But...well, I actually kind of like this game. It's very simple, you just place these towers and they stay still shooting at the line of baddies that are trying to get you. You get gold, which you obviously use to build more towers. It gets hard after a long stretch of easy - perfect lunch break game, you'll probably finish your second attempt at the game right about the time you need to go punch back in or go to class.

By the way, there is also a sequel to the pictured game, called Flash Circle TD, which looks pretty cool. Have fun!

Ellipsis

Ellipsis: great fun for a few minutes. Not anything too surprising, but this is a nice point-click-destroy game that will entertain you for your lunchbreak. Here's a tip - whenever you clear the field, click a few extra times, because the new enemies tend to spawn right under your mouse, and if you can get rid of them before they scatter it makes things much easier.

As far as these types of games go, this one is pretty well done. I really like the shrapnel effects, although they're a little processor heavy. I'm not sure I'm such a fan of the overall genre - I mean, basically, the difficulty here is that the little squares are kind of small and mouses suck as fine motion instruments - but it amused me enough to load up my screenshot taker and write up a blog entry, so it's worth a play at least.

Fancy Pants Adventure

Fancy Pants Adventure is not a new game, but I haven't mentioned it yet, and it's definitely worth playing. It reminds me a bit of the Sonic the Hedgehog flash game, in that it has very nice graphics, similar gameplay, and (unfortunately for both) is a bit slower than it should be - in these types of platformer games, you don't want to have to wait too long for each jump to happen after you hit the button, or it really bogs down gameplay. Nevertheless, Fancy Pants is really one of the highest quality Flash games out there; I only wish the author would write another level or two!

Slime Games

The Slime games are a set of fun, basic (= graphically challenged) Java games, the original version of which was written by Quin Pendragon several years ago. Since then, they have been modded, rewritten, and altered in many different ways. Slime volleyball is the classic (here I've linked to the one player mod, by Wedgey - the original was two player only, and thus not that much fun if you're alone...), and you should also check out Slime soccer, Slime basketball, and Slime hackeysack (full disclosure - Slime hackeysack is a Flash game that I wrote to test out a more realistic physics engine for these games).

I'm considering creating some more of these games if I ever get a chance or someone shows any interest. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any ideas that you'd like to see come to life!

Neon

Neon is a simple, retro space shooter, using just the mouse to control. I've often had serious problems with these kinds of controls, just because it's a bit difficult when you're forced to always move the ship if you want it to aim in a certain direction, but hey, that's the game. And it's quite fun - Gprime bills it as "a flash version of Geometry Wars" - to be honest, I've never played Geometry Wars, so I have no idea if this is hyperbole or not. Probably, if I had to guess. But it's still worth a few minutes of your lunchbreak, so head on over and check it out.

Tanks

Okay, I felt bad not giving any sort of game content along with my Jack Thompson dig, so here's the game Tanks, a fun turn-based shooter game that is a dead ringer for the old classic Howitzer (which is at that link for download, though it's an old DOS game - if I had to guess, I'd say it might run a bit fast on your machine). IMO, Tanks is actually a little lower in quality than Howitzer, but to each his own - Howitzer ain't on the web, so Tanks wins by default! Not quite by default - there are certainly other versions of this type of game, such as the penguin shooter one, which is quite inferior in my estimation, though if the penguin thing is a Tux shout-out I approve.

The setup is familiar if you've ever played Worms: move, aim, and shoot. Hopefully you pwn before you are pwned. You know how it goes - you can see a screenshot of me cleaning up the playing field above. Hopefully you'll do as masterful a job as I have. Good luck!

If you like this, you might also like TurboTanks, which is totally different but...um, also involves tanks. Yeah.

Winterbells

Orisinal is always the place to go for very simple, well put together games. Almost every one is just played by moving your mouse and clicking, but they manage to grab you so much stronger than many games with a lot more going on in them. The fantastic quality of art probably doesn't hurt, nor does the calm, soothing music that's always playing.

And they've provided us with another hit with Winterbells. You control a cute little bunny rabbit by moving your mouse left and right - that's it. Okay, you have to click to make the first jump. You'll figure it out - one of the best parts about these games is that the instructions are usually completely unnecessary because it's so obvious what to do. Anyways, you just need to keep bouncing on the bells and make sure that you don't fall. Good luck! I spent way more time than I'm comfortable admitting on this one!

On the topic of Orisinal, I have no idea how this site manages to win me over every time. All the games are cute, and often have fuzzy little animals. But I hate cute games. AND I ESPECIALLY HATE GAMES THAT FEATURE FUZZY LITTLE FREAKING ANIMALS! AAAARGH! Yet when I visit this site, my cold heart thaws just a little bit every time (though this is easily fixed with a quick round of Kitten Cannon, or better - Pingu Baseball). It's utterly confusing, but oh well...

Lastly, I wanted to mention that Winterbells definitely reminds me of SnakeJump, the subject of this blog's first post. Two completely different implementations (three if you count PapiJump, which is actually closer to Winterbells) of the exact same gameplay idea. Each one still has its own charm, though - this is what I love about casual games, even the same idea ends up expressed in seriously different ways depending who's doing the expressing. I'm not going to go as far as calling game-making as a whole an art (Madden Football #47, anyone?), but in some cases, it certainly seems to edge closer than one would expect.

Puki 3d

As if to punctuate my rant yesterday about 3D Shockwave games being generally sub-par, I happened to stumble upon (literally, in this case)Puki 3D, a 3D Flash game that I had played a while ago but couldn't remember the name of. You get to shoot angry babies or something like that, which is quite satisfying until they bite you - they're pretty scary when they leap. Now, doing 3D in Flash is quite difficult, as there is no native support. Yet to me, this game is of higher quality than most of the Shockwave 3D games I've played, despite its simplicity and pseudo-3D rendering.

Perhaps I'm just enjoying the similarity to The Missile Game, though, and I happen to like that aesthetic:



Whatever. I've got a beef with Shockwave, maybe it's just because I don't know how to use it, I'll leave it at that...either way, both of these games are fun tunnel games, so enjoy. I'm told that the missile game is incredibly enjoyable on the Wii, so you may want to give it a go if you've installed the Opera browser on yours (and if you have one yet, which I sadly don't...I borrowed a friend's, though, and it's lots of fun - I had a great time with Elebits and wasted almost a whole week devouring Zelda).

On the topic of 3D in Flash, by the way, check this out - the link requires Flash 9, so if you don't have it, head over to Macromedia's site and upgrade your player (might as well do it anyways, because it's reaching the penetration point and games are going to start relying on it exclusively because it's so much faster than the previous version - I just upgraded today). It appears that some serious 3D rendering is going to be possible with this new version of the player, since the language that underlies Flash has undergone some serious performance boosts since Flash 8 (Actionscript has finally leveled up to 3.0, adding a whole slew of useful features).