Gamma Bros.

Oops, it's been almost a week...sorry, I've been busy lately. But I'm back, and I'll be better from now on, I promise! Anyways, I guess I've been feeling in a retro mood lately as far as gaming goes; last time I suggested you play Zork, which was actually an old game, and this entry I suggest you play Gamma Bros, which only seems like an old game. The folks over at Pixeljam Games have decided to take the graphically challenged space shooter thing and run with it, and they've miraculously put together quite a great game!

You know that I really like simple games that are just about the gameplay, and Gamma Bros delivers - the controls are merely the arrow pad and WASD. It's a vanilla space shooter, with the usual assortment of bad guys, powerups, and weapons, but it's strangely compelling, I don't know why. Give it a shot, you'll probably spend far more time on it than you intended to! Just a warning - it does start off a little slow, but trust me, if you hold on for a few minutes you'll really start to like it.

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.

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.

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.

Blob Game - Liquid2

Liquid2 is something that I hacked together in Processing as I was testing a spatial partitioning algorithm for another game I'm working on. I got the algorithm working (without it, you couldn't have nearly as many particles on screen), and the thing looked pretty cool so I fashioned a simple little (demo of a) game out of it. Check it out, it might amuse you. Source code is available on that page, too - follow the links under the game.

You have to accept a security dialogue before you can play - this just lets your browser use OpenGL for faster graphics display. It's safe, signed by Sun Microsystems (the dudes that made Java), so I hope that doesn't discourage you from giving it a play.

Controls are simple - just hold the mouse button to repel particles. Particles "eat" each other in a way, and the goal is to not let all your particles get eaten by another color. Pay attention at the beginning of each round, it will tell you which color you are supposed to protect. As time goes on, things get crazier, so be careful. Be aware, the "goopiness" of the blobs changes randomly round to round, so some will be easier than others.

There are certainly some problems with this game, but hey, let's pull a Google and call it beta. Worst comes to worst, think of it as a lava lamp on your screen! Suggestions are welcome, although I can't promise I'll have time to implement them for a little while!

Draw Stuff Then Play

First, a plea: if you're using Internet Explorer, please strongly consider upgrading to Firefox. Firefox is just a much better browser than IE: it's more secure, it's free, it's supported by the community, and it's got sweet extensions that you can add to it. Best part: the more people switch to Firefox, the more Microsoft panics. And it's oh so sweet to see them panic.

Seriously, though, you actually should switch to Firefox. We've also got a few games to cover today, all variations on a theme. First up:



Draw Play, and its brother Draw Play 2, are both pretty interesting games. You've got to draw a path for your character to take to the finish. Both games are a bit weird with some of the hit detection sometimes, but they're pretty fun.

Along the same lines (sorry, bad pun), check out LineArena:



I would be surprised if you hadn't seen LineRider before, but in any case, it's worth checking out if you haven't. There's a little drama in the LineRider world, over some copyright stuff or something - it appears the original designers of the game got a "real" deal offered to them, and thus had to swing the heavy hammer of justice at anyone who would dare improve or alter their game. One group that did this was ZadaRider, which mainly added things like an eraser (duh!) to the first version of the game, and stuff got crazy from there. Now it looks like Zada is developing their own game, but the fans are pissy because it took so long to come out (they put a countdown timer on their site and everything, and it's now been weeks since it ran down to zero). It's unclear if they couldn't get around using copyrighted code, or got in trouble for graphic-snatching, or what, but something's up.

Not ZadaRider (but also not playable yet):



More to come.

By the way, Carlos Mencia sucks, in case you didn't already know.

Four Second Firestorm

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Four Second Frenzy and Four Second Fury. Four Second Firestorm is the latest installment.

The basic idea: a bunch of different game developers throw together 4 second long minigames, and a crapload of them are put together and played in sequence. It's an interesting trick, because each game is very different, so you've got to be on your toes to even figure out how to win within four seconds.

Now, I don't know how much staying power these games will have. I'm not sure that after, say, four more installments people will still be interested in these games, but in the meantime, it's a breath of fresh air in the Flash scene, so I welcome it. Check it out.

Starry Night and Orisinal

Starry Night is only one of many great games designed by Ferry Halim at Orisinal. To be honest, I could have easily chosen any of the 58 games on the homepage there - they are all of fantastic artistic quality, and many of them have great gameplay on top of that! This is simple stuff; rarely do you need to do more than move your mouse around and maybe click, but all of these games are highly enjoyable. This is really a one of a kind site.

In Starry Night, your mission is to bounce the star around by using the bubble - just move the mouse. It's intuitive, play around with it and you'll get the hang of it.

Double Wires

As you can probably tell by now, my tastes run towards simple games with original gameplay (interesting physics doesn't hurt either - hey, I'm a physics major, forgive me). This is certainly one of those games. The graphics are nothing to write home about, and I can't promise that you'll play this thing for hours, but it's certainly worthy of a few minutes of your lunch break!

Just click the mouse and you'll shoot wires out of your hand like Spiderman. If you screw up, you fall and die. Check it out.

While we're on the topic of game physics, I should make a shameless plug for another blog I have, devoted to the actual development of web games. Things are just starting up; I'm currently working on a game called RGB1 (perhaps the start of a series?). A brief technical demo is online, although it's not much of a game yet.

You may want to check out this demo to get a better idea what gameplay will be like. Controls are real simple: r, g, b, and drag the mouse in circles around the thing to control your rotation.

Red

Can't show you a screenshot for this one because I'm writing from a friend's computer, but I can give you a link to the game. You shoot bullets at incoming rocks to try and deflect them from hitting you. Sound simple? It is, and it's lots of fun. Check it out.

From the programmer:

My name is Case. I made Storm the House 1 and 2. Both are on ArmorGames.com. The song playing in the background is called 'Absolute Space(Jazzanova Remix)' by Koop.

Don't be surprised if you see games entitled 'Orange, Green, Blue, Black, etc start popping up. They're all in the works. Visit mypersonal website @ http://ivorydrive.deviantart.com. Have fun!!

Storm The House and Storm The House 2 are also worth checking out. Enjoy!