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.