Class My Ass

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and all that. Wanted to throw in a shameless plug for a new game site of mine, ClassMyAss.net (yes, as so often happens, .com was taken by one of those companies that just buys up all combinations of common words - and I'm sure not going to pay $500 dollars to get it, thereby encouraging their squatting!). It's an experiment in the use of AJAX, which means that all the games and listings load from a single page. Basically, for you, that means no waiting for extra graphics to load and whatnot, you can simply browse around through the games and play them without much hassle.

A few games I'd recommend:

• Puppy Invaders - This one's a Java game (that's why the delay happens, your JVM is starting up) that I've been playing a lot lately. It's real simple, but I find it strangely compelling.
• A.L.I.A.S. 2 - Another one of those WASD+mouse click shooters. I dunno, these get boring to me after a while, but I like this one. It's got a nice simple angular aesthetic, and a pretty good feel (I particularly like how the player gets blown back a bit every time you shoot - it's these little touches that make a game).
• Fancy Pants Adventure - I'm not going to say much about this one, but trust me, you'll like it. It's one of the most well produced Flash games I've seen to date. The only negative is that the game is unfinished, but I'm still glad that they released this level.
• Tanks - A well done version of a classic game. The one I remember playing was called "Howitzer," and was an MS-DOS game that, alas, was tied to the speed of the computer it ran on (back in those days, a 286 was a 286 was a 286, so if you wrote a game for a 286, you knew it would run at the same speed no matter where it was, more or less - now, you have to make sure to use timers to synchronize to real time). Shoot stuff back and forth at each other, buy better weapons, and don't get pwned - all the usual goodies.

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.

Nun Gunner

Click the picture to be offended. Brian Mung is a twisted dude. Nun Gunner is one of his more recent offerings, and the objective is simple: shoot the nuns before they get you. Sick, but amusing.

If you like nun games, check out Nun Lander, another of Brian's games:



On the chance that you're scared of nuns but in the mood to shoot David Blaine, Brian's got you covered:



Wow.

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.

Madness Interactive

This is an offshoot of a wildly popular animation series, Madness Combat, and it's quite a lot of fun to play. There are lots of weapons, and it's very bloody, you know, all that good stuff that the kids today like.

First, the bad news about this game: the mouse controls get a little crappy when you play it inside your browser. You'll notice that sometimes while you're right in the middle of pwning a n00|3 your mouse will be outside of the Flash area and the controls will not work right. This is a problem with Flash and games - for very good reasons, Adobe/Macromedia decided that it's not a good idea to let a Flash game move your cursor for you, so you can't constrain a cursor to a particular piece of the screen. This is, actually, the primary reason you don't see first person shooters in web-games, as these generally hide your cursor and allow you full 360 degree motion. In a Flash game, your mouse would leave the game and the game would have no idea that you were still moving it.

The good news: there is a downloadable version of the game on Flecko.net that purports to have better controls. I say "purports" because it is Windows only and at the moment I'm trying to detach myself from the Windows nipple by switching to Linux (Kubuntu, to be specific) - so far I love Linux except for

1. The fact that the most recent Flash player is 7, whereas the Windows and Mac users are already at version 9. [Update: I just discovered that a beta version of Flash 9 does exist for Linux, and I'm trying to install it right now...use at your own risk!]
2. The lack of decent games available on the platform
3. Various minor hangups like the fact that wmv files won't play in my browser

But I digress. The other good news is that this is one of the very few Flash games out there that makes the source available! You'll still need some sort of Flash authoring environment to use it, but still, it's pretty cool. As expected of any popular open source game, there are tons of mods for you to play with.

Thing Thing 3

This is a screen shot from Thing Thing 3, the newest installment of the popular series from Diseased Productions. I'm not big on the shooting games, but this one is actually decent (if bloody). It's simple, just WASD to control, and point and click to shoot.

Might also want to check out the other games in the series:

• Thing Thing
• Thing Thing 2
• Thing Thing Arena
• Thing Thing Arena 2

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.

Flow

Wow! This game is a demonstration of Jenova Chen's Master's thesis topic, "Flow in Games" - the short version is that games should adapt their difficulty to the player so that they stay in the "zone" where players are engaged but not frustrated. Whether or not that purpose was achieved (to me it seems pretty good), this game is lots of fun, and very aesthetically pleasing. Things get darker as you go deeper, and the enemies get harder - basically, your mission is to eat or be eaten. The red "pings" lead you deeper, and that's about all you need to know.

If you enjoy Flow, you'll also want to check out a downloadable game that Chen made, called Cloud:
I don't usually suggest non-browser games, but this one is incredibly interesting and well worth the download time. I hope and expect to see many more great games from Chen in the future. From his bio page:

One of Jenova's greatest dreams is to bring the best things and messages to the world. Like what Hayao Miyazaki did to anime, Jenova wants to be one of the heroes who can make video game a more mature and adorable treasure shared by every human beings.

I would say he's well on his way - these offerings are among the most interesting games that I've seen in a while, right up there in my book with Katamari Damacy (although on a less grand scale - but hey, they're free games, I'm sure if you put hundreds of thousand dollars into the guy's war chest you'd end up with something even more ambitious and compelling). Enjoy!

Infinite Mario Bros.

This is a pretty faithful Super Mario clone, and apparently you can keep playing forever and it just keeps generating new levels! I haven't tested that theory, but I played the first few and it seems pretty close to the original. A little sluggish on the buttons, and there are a few glitches (only 2 fireballs on screen at a time, for example), but definitely worth checking out.

Drag The Dot

This game has very simple controls: it's all in the name, you drag the dot to the goal. You just have to make sure you don't touch anything along the way. It gets hard pretty quickly.

I'm generally somewhat opposed to games that rely on precise machinations of the mouse pointer, but this one is pretty well done. It's more about planning a course than following a single pixel wide path, and that's a good thing. There are some pretty interesting level designs, check it out.

POS game of the day: Bush Aerobics

Miniclip is responsible for some real crappy games - however, this series is by far one of their worst creations yet.

Oh, and if Bush Aerobics isn't enough for you, don't worry, there's more! Head over to Miniclip's Dancing and Shows section for such treats as:

• Blair the Motivator
  
• Dancing Hilary
  
• Dancing Blair
  
• Kerry Workout
  
• And what would any crappy political dancefest be without Hip Hop Debate?
  

Someone should really be punished for this type of thing...

Playing Field 2

This is an interesting sequel to an interesting game - you play God, and you punish people for...well, nothing in particular, you just punish them! The original game was crude but fun, and the new one looks a bit more polished; honestly, I think people like these types of games because they are generally sick and like to inflict pain.

More morally bankrupt gaming here:

• Interactive Buddy
  
• Kitten Cannon
  
• Wrath
  

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!

Zombie 4

This game is sweet - make sure you've got a Java Runtime Environment installed. This is one of the few 3-D shooters available as a web game, and it doesn't disappoint. Okay, it's not Half Life 2, but it's got a simple charm and great gameplay. This was developed by a guy named John G in Processing (you can find him in the forums if you have suggestions for the next game), which is a fantastic environment to write Java games in because it makes Java graphics effortless; for anyone that has ever struggled with Swing/AWT, this is an awesome achievement, and it even does 3D! If you're interested in making web games, you should definitely check it out. It's more flexible than Flash, and as free open source software, the price is right!

Chaos Faction

From Dissolute Productions, the creators: "29 weapons, 18 characters, 15 levels, 14 months in the making... this is Dissolute Production's biggest project yet!"

This game is similar to Super Smash Bros., except you beat the piss out of cute little furballs. Enjoy!

Teagames Motocross 2

If you haven't yet been to Teagames, do yourself a favor and check this game out right now. While you're at it, take a look at the other great stuff on that site. These guys really make fantastic webgames - these games are without exception original, challenging, and polished. Make sure to take a turn at BMX Star, Extreme Climbing, and Funky Truck Arizona. Someone over there has a real touch for game physics!

Java SnakeJump

Watch out, this is an incredibly addictive game! I've gotten to about 40,000, but it gets really hard from there on. This is a remake of a game called PapiJump by SunFlat:
There are many other great games at SunFlat's homepage, as well as Necrosaro's. Also well worth checking out is NecroCave: