21 articles Tag flash

Indie game: Fat Slice

June 10, 2009, 1 comment

Fat Slice

Aaron Neugebauer of Chew On Glass is your new best friend. And then your most hated arch-nemesis. And then your best friend again and possibly something more. Because his new game Fat Slice is great, then really annoying, then pretty special and funny. It’s a neat concept: swoosh your mouse to slice chunks off an on-screen shape — the catch being you can only do it when all the bouncing balls are grouped together on one side or the other. Challenging, satisfying… until it turns into a lot of waiting, endlessly, for balls to move into the right place and burning your eyeballs through staring. But THEN, just when you think it’s done, it has a few cute tricks up its sleeve. Give it a go. Play Fat Slice (Flash)

Little Wheel

June 10, 2009, 0 comments

Little Wheel

Created in Slovakia by OneClickDog, Little Wheel is a lovely little thing. The aim’s to restore the electricity to a switched-off robot planet. It’s technically a point-and-click adventure, but only in the way that, say, a car park pay-and-display machine is a point-and-click adventure — the puzzles aren’t really puzzles, and clickable things have big throbbing ‘click me!’ circles over them. But that’s fine, because Little Wheel’s world of silhouette and sunset is a joy to behold. It’s far too short, inevitably, and it’s nearly scuppered by a terrible ‘puzzle’ near the end. But it’s very affecting, and it reminds me a bit of Wall-E. Play Little Wheel (Flash)

The Pretender – Part One

June 9, 2009, 1 comment

The Pretender

Hmm. I try to be nice, I really do. But the first part of The Pretender by Launching Pad Games just doesn’t seem to justify the attention it’s getting. It’s one of those puzzle-games-in-a-platformer thingies. You play some sort of Victorian conjuror who opens up a magic portal and has to rescue his trapped audience members from an alternate universe or something. And people complain about stories with plumbers and princesses, eh? In visuals, and music, and atmosphere, The Pretender has the desperation to be Braid written all over it. And the puzzles — which, inexplicably, mainly involve the conjuror transforming into The Incredible Hulk to push rocks about — aren’t quite as clever or compulsive as they think they are. I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that people want to like this because the main character wears a top hat. Play The Pretender – Part One (Flash)

Spacetacular Voyage

June 6, 2009, 0 comments

Spacetacular Voyage

Wait, come back! Spacetacular Voyage by Sash MacKinnon might be cursed with a teeth-clenchingly awful name. And some equally bad puns, eg “It’s a sine”. BUT it plays a blinder. Your spaceship’s just a glorified mouse cursor, and to survive you have to dodge, push past or blast through a waterfall of falling geometric shapes. It just works, and it’s not short on ideas: one minute you’re using brute force to wade through a hailstorm of clonking great balls, the next you’re negotiating a twisting path of innocent-looking squares. One of the few games of late that has the decency to weave physics into its play, rather than half-heartedly sellotape some gravity algorithms to its head and saunter off for a coffee and biscuit. I like it. Play Spacetacular Voyage (Flash)

RepliCat

May 26, 2009, 0 comments

RepliCatRepliCat is a bit like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Enterprise stumbles across a time-shifted doppelganger of itself. Yes, I know — wasn’t that EVERY episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Forget that for now: just focus on this very clever, very compulsive little game. All you have to do is fly from planet to planet, dodging the ghostly shadows of your own past — who have the really annoying tendency of doing exactly what you were doing, three seconds ago.

RepliCat is, curiously, both fast-paced and brain-frazzingly cerebral, and the mouse-only ship control really works. The music (Chaoz Fantasy by alextheDJ) is terrific, too. More of this kind of thing please. Play RepliCat (Flash)