Afternoon Snack: Waiting for Godot

“Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” We’re waiting for Godot.” “Ah!”

Let the parade of videogame adaptations of classics march on!

Have you ever read or seen Waiting for Godot and thought, “Well, shit, I could do that. Wait for some dude I barely know for eternity? And my friend can wait with me? Piece of cake.”

The comic site VectorBelly’s Waiting for Godot: the Game gives you that opportunity. Set on a barren road with barely a tree for scenery, WfG:tG follows Didi and Gogo as they wait for the eponymous Godot’s arrival. You can walk around, wait, walk around, and wait some more.

Programmer and animator Jeff Rosenthal designed the game for VectorBelly, and I’m impressed by how he adapted Beckett’s famous tragicomedy to a game. The graphics are suitably Atari-like, stressing the simplicity of Beckett’s vision. Just as you start to get bored with nothing happening, the screen declares “Boss Battle,” and you fight…nothing. The boredom itself is the boss battle.

There is a lone cloud on the left side of the sky that tracks your progress. At least I think it’s alone. No word yet on the inclusion of Pozzo and Lucky. I’ve only made it to Level Five.

The most insidious (and sort of genius) thing about Waiting for Godot: the Game is how it pauses itself if you click out of the screen or open another window. Being a 21st-century surfer of the web, I generally keep multiple tabs open at time. I caught myself flitting over to other pages as I waited for Godot to progress. I checked back: the cloud hadn’t moved. The game won’t let you pass time unless you’re actually playing it. Now that’s clever.

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Midnight Snack: The Great Gatsby

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since…” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

High school English students rejoice! You needn’t stumble through the labyrinth of misinformation that is CliffNotes anymore. Now you can digest The Great Gatsby in under an hour with this NES adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Hurl your hat at demonic butlers and foxy flappers out to ruin the party! Dodge the laser-hot gaze of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg! Collect the gold Gatsby’s left all around New York!

Wait, what?

Actually, Gatsby is a Flash game developed by a small team of talented individuals made to look like a shameless videogame recapitulation of this great American novel. You play as Nick Carraway, who is on a quest to find the elusive Gatsby. It’s an action-platformer in the mold of pretty much every licensed game on the NES (think Duck Tales, the Mickey Games, etc.). There’s even a train level!

After you beat Gatsby (or die so many times at the hands of sewer gators that you finally decide to get upset by the epic departures from the novel and quit), be sure to head over to the game’s About page. The developers have cooked up a hilarious little mythos around the game that includes some outstanding artwork. The crass, flimsy relationship to the novel is a wonderful little jab at the storied history of bad licensed games.

Did I mention that it’s also fun?

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Midnight Snack: Poto & Cabenga

I like games named after pairs of protagonists.  Pocky & Rocky, ToeJam & Earl, Sonic & Knuckles – okay, maybe not Sonic & Knuckles.  I like the dual protagonist formula not only because of how it affected 8- and 16-bit co-op gaming, but for the unique opportunities it creates for single-player games.

Poto & Cabenga is a choice morsel of dual protagonist gaming.  It’s also a stand-out entry in the Gamma IV One Button Games contest from this year’s Game Developer’s Conference.  The obvious stipulation for developers was that input be confined to one button. 

What sets Poto & Cabenga apart from other notable one-button games is that the button affects each character in different ways simultaneously.  Holding down the space bar allows Cabenga (I think) to run and letting it go causes him to jump.  His buddy Poto (I think), trapped in the belly of a beast, starts to run whenever you’re not holding the space bar and jumps whenever you press it.  As Newton said, for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It’s a conniption-inducing game of companionship.  You must time each protagonist’s jumps and dashes perfectly to keep the two alive.  It’s a delicate, mind-bending balance.  And I love it.

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Afternoon Snack: Super Mario Bros. Crossover

I love mashups. Well-executed ones, anyway.  And while most of these mashups are confined to the realm of music, I’ve found a video game one that hits all the high notes. It’s called Super Mario Bros. Crossover, it’s by Jay “Exploding Rabbit” Pavlina, and it’s a great way to spend an hour or two.

Crossover is a painstaking recreation of the original Super Mario Bros. with a twist – other classic NES game characters are now playable, with most of their signature moves intact. Blowing up Bowser with Mega Man’s (titular) charge shot (!!!) is surprisingly gratifying.

The game wouldn’t be noteworthy if it didn’t play as well as it does – all the characters and their power-ups fit surprisingly well into the classic Mario levels, and the level of polish that has gone into making the game feel so organic is evident from the outset.

This is Pavlina’s first game. Please make more.

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Midnight Snack: (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors

Last night I dreamed I was an immense beast, floating in darkness.  I knew nothing of the surface until I fell in love with the majesty of colors.

So opens (I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors, a “pixel-horror” game from Gregory Weir.  In it, you control a three-eyed, tentacled aquatic beast who, upon seeing balloons floating above his domain, falls in love Little Mermaid-style with the world up above.

Ariel, however, didn’t have to decide between eating mankind or aiding it.  The Majesty of Colors presents scenario after scenario in which your adorably curious Cthulu monster attempts to understand the mysterious surface dwellers.  Will you help the fishermen catch their lot?  Or will you pull them beneath the waves for further inspection?  Every choice has its ramifications, and the game’s brevity encourages multiple playthroughs, allowing you to seek out each of the five different endings.

Your only means of interacting with the world above the sea is your lone tentacle, controlled by mouse.  This elegant design choice reinforces the game’s beautiful simplicity.  A simple balloon can warm a giant’s heart.  A simple game can brighten a snowed-in evening.

Warning: If you don’t want the solutions to the endings ruined for you, refrain from scrolling down to the comments section of the game’s Kongregate page.

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Midnight Snack: Every Day The Same Dream

Get up.  Get dressed.  Go to work.  Go home.  Repeat.

This post-industrial hamster wheel of a routine has been endlessly explored in pop culture – from Mike Judge’s hilarious Office Space to Sam Mendes’ quite-less-hilarious American Beauty to the somewhere-in-the-middle The Office.  Few games, however, have delved into issues of middle-class ennui.  That’s probably because most gamers would rather be a space marine then act out their boring lives in something that’s supposed to be a “game.”

If I’ve just described you, you may want to steer away from Every Day the Same Dream.  But if you don’t mind the occasional game that makes you think, give this piece on the workplace grind a try.

Set to a haunting, Moby-like loop, Every Day the Same Dream tasks the player with mundane activities like getting dressed, driving to work in heavy traffic, and weathering a tongue-lashing from the boss before settling into your desk beside the other drones.  The only clue that something else is out there is a mysterious elevator lady who promises that in “five steps you will be a new person.”  My first time through, I treated her like a crazy, sidewalk-inhabiting hobo: I pretended not to hear her and continued on.

But progress hinges on heeding her advice.  Changing up your routine – not getting dressed, walking from right to left instead of the conventional left to right – will impact the world around you.  The game starts to feel like a Charlie Kaufman movie.  Reality bends to the will of the individual, but perhaps not always to his liking.

Molleindustria, the game’s developer, describes it as “a short existential game about alienation and refusal of labor.  Or, if you prefer, a playable music video.”  I can verify that it functions as both, though you’d do well to treat it as the former.

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Midnight Snack: Canabalt

I’ve tried to write about Canabalt at least five times now.  Every time I sit down to write my recommendation, I end up playing it to refresh my memory.  Thirty minutes later, I’ve been so busy outrunning certain doom that I’ve completely forgotten my plans to write.  Not this time!

You control a man trying to escape an alien/robot-invasion apocalypse.  You must help him navigate the randomly-generated rooftops whilst avoiding crumbling towers, trashcans and boxes, and crash-landing robots.  It’s all extremely epic, lent gravity by the silhouetted devastation occurring in the background.

Canabalt was recently developed as part of the Experimental Gameplay Project, which I believe is where developer Adam Atomic got his idea for a one-button control scheme.  Seriously, you’ve only got one button: Jump.  The running is handled entirely by the little man.  He picks up speed as he goes, but eventually he’ll get unmanageable so it’s best to occasionally let him collide with some boxes and slow him down.

It walks (or runs along, I suppose) that fine line between immense frustration and satisfaction.  Individual playthroughs can last mere seconds if you time a jump poorly or get squished by a flying mech.  But the randomized levels help break things up.  Plus, the driving techno soundtrack never stops playing once you’ve started, which makes it all feel like one seamless session.  One you just can’t run away from.

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Mid-Morning Snack: You Only Live Once

More than once, Rob and I have talked about permadeath.  He believes that there may be merit in a game that, upon your character’s death, refuses to let you keep playing.  Think Mission Impossible-style self-terminating messages. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to play You Only Live Once, published by Kongregate.  It’s a story about a boy whose girlfriend is kidnapped by a giant lizard.  He embarks on a quest to save her and…let’s just say things don’t turn out so well.  At least, not for most people playing it.

Should you perish, I recommend clicking the continue button as many times as it will let you.  It serves as kind of an epilogue to the game.  Then, you should refresh the page.  And then try playing the game in a different browser.  And then try loading it on Newgrounds.  Believe me, it’s worth it.

Just remember, you only live once.

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Afternoon Snack: This Is The Only Level

If there’s one thing browser games do well, it’s turn quirkiness into fun.  Weirdness may not be sustainable over hours and hours of play (see all the Katamari sequels) but can be delightful in five-minute spurts.

Today’s offbeat recommendation comes courtesy of  Armor Games.  The title of This Is The Only Level is kind of a lie.  In reality, it’s one level divided up into a number of stages.  The goal of each stage is the same: navigate your little elephant to the exit pipe.  And each stage looks identical to the one before it.  All of the similarities are purposefully deceiving.

What makes it interesting are the metagame wrinkles that change with each stage.  Your only clues as to what’s changed is the stage’s title and occasionally changes in the level’s color scheme.  You may be asked to use a different control scheme or even manipulate your web browser.  It’s all underscored by a goofy music track that fits perfectly with the little elephant’s travails. 

I completed the game in just under ten minutes, which is just about how long I wanted to play it anyway.  I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t give this one even a few minutes of your afternoon.

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Late Morning Snack: The Competitor

Have you ever played Galaga or Space Invaders and wondered what it would be like to play as the oncoming swarms instead of the lone fighter?  Joey Betz clearly has.  His new game The Competitor (hosted by Armor Games) ingeniously inverts the classic shoot-em-up structure, putting you in control of the invaders.

Your mission in each level is to eliminate the lone fighter at the bottom of the screen, reducing his health bar to zero.  He, in turn, will be pelting the top of your screen with bullets, trying to kill you.  You can stop him by drawing lines of ink on the empty playfield, which become paths for your invading troops.  Your units are specialized for offense and defense, and the more powerful ones require more of your slowly-refilling well of ink. 

It’s simple-yet-slick graphics (each unit is a different simple shape: squares, triangles, etc.) highlight this ink-based play mechanic.  I really enjoy the sandbox-style of gameplay.  Each time I play, I find myself trying new tactics: hurling offensive units at the bottom of the screen or constructing defensive walls before bringing in the big guns.  For this reason, replayability is pretty high, though I’ve gotten stuck on Level 6 every time.

I’ll close this one with a Pro Tip.  Definitely use a real mouse for this one.  Rapid unit-switching on the number keys is a must in the later levels, and rapid deployment on a laptop’s touchpad is only feasible with two hands.  That said, I still had fun unwinding with this one on the lappy before bed.

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Midnight Snack: Castle Corp

To be honest, I had a hard time not writing about Nitrome’s Twin Shot 2: Good & Evil.  But I’d be doing you a disservice having already gushed about the original (and TW2 is more of the same – in the good way).  So today I’ll recommend another of Nitrome’s gems: Castle Corp.

As is the case with a lot of browser titles, the story’s a little sketchy.  You operate some sort of castle corporation (duh), and a competitor has ousted you, capturing some of your workers (knights) and booby-trapping your castle.  You must use your limited crew of knights to defeat the enemies and restore profitability (seriously, many of the level’s start with your boss feeding you goofy corporate jargon).

Castle Corp mixes elements of the puzzle genre with real-time action.  You place your knights one at a time on predetermined spawn points, which sets them marching along the two-dimensional path.  If they run into an enemy knight, they’ll hack at each other until one falls.  The main mechanic, however, is aiming your knights Bust-a-Move-style with the mouse and sending them flying, taking out any in their path.  They’ll ricochet off pipes and collect money along the way, so precision aiming is often required.

There are weapon upgrades, of course, which can get you out of a jam by making your knights tougher or arming them with crossbows.  New enemies are introduced at regular intervals, spicing up the already varied level design.  The game doesn’t move quickly, however, so replaying failed levels can be a chore (I got stuck on Level 14 and had to take a break). 

What else can I say?  It’s a fun, unique game that stretches both the puzzle- and reflex-oriented parts of your brain.  And there’s a gun that shoots swords.  Do I need to say that twice? (In case I do: there’s a gun that shoots swords.)

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Midnight Snack: Tower of Greed

Years and years ago, I took a class called Microeconomics.  My teacher, let’s call him Jay, was fantastic; he regularly employed “real-life" examples: the fluctuating price of PBR, the negative demand relationship between Cotton Candy and Pokes in the Eye, and how much would I pay (literally right then and there) out of pocket for a Milano Cookie.

However, I can’t recall how much he taught me about the Risk/Reward ratios.  I’m sure he discussed it.  Maybe if he’d used Epic Shadow’s Tower of Greed (hosted by King.com) as an example, I’d remember.

In ToG, your pasty avatar (a mix of Glover and a Ninji) is tasked with collecting as many gems as he wants in the ever-vertically-scrolling Tower.  However, he can only exit on every fifth floor.  If he gets stuck offscreen, he (presumably) perishes.

Risk: you might squished by the moving screen.  Reward: $$$.  Could it get any simpler?  Not really, and that’s part of the charm.  The aesthetic is 8-bit.  Colorful sprites bounce around to catchy, NES-style music.  Items and enemies factor in occasionally, but most of the tension will arise when your desire for that extra blue gem overtakes your desire to continue moving up the Tower.

I could nitpick about the marginal difference between the game’s two modes (Arcade just seems like a less interesting version of Survival).  Or I could talk about how, after a handful of attempts, the “random” individual floors start to repeat.  But I won’t.  It’s a fun game.  Fun for an afternoon or an unwinding evening.  Plus, it’s got one of the best Game Over phrases I’ve seen in a while: A winner isn’t you.  Maybe a winner isn’t me, but I did learn something about Econ.

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Midnight Snack: Spewer

Spewer is a bluntly-titled puzzle platformer from Edmund McMillen, currently hosted by Newgrounds.

You take control of an adorable little sprite blob presumably named Spewer (dubbed so in a way similar to Slimer being called Slimer).  He’s a test subject in some lab where they breed vomiting blobs, feed them random shit, and then see what happens.

Did I say vomiting blobs?  Of course I did, as retching is the primary mechanic of Spewer.  Sure, your blob can wiggle left and right and jump through the air.  But if you want to make it past those spikes or get an extra few feet off the ground, you’ll have to puke your way to success. 

Assuming you can figure them out, the individual levels go by quick (good thing there are tons of them).  If you can’t quite get grasp them or execute correctly, the levels crawl by (bad thing there are tons of them).  However, you have only your ineptitude to blame if it feels stale.  Spewer mixes up its own formula by changing your puking abilities depending on what items or food you consume.  I won’t ruin anything for you (and I must confess I’ve only scratched the surface of this one), but let’s just say your vomit’s properties change as quickly as the wind.

You can try it in browser if you like, but sputtering PCs (like mine) may benefit from actually downloading the executable.  I’m sure that will make Mr. McMillen feel all warm and fuzzy, too.

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Midnight Snack: Paper Moon

The Snack is back!  And we’ve got another entry from the boys at Blurst.  Sometimes I feel bad going to the same sources for snacks.  I guess it’s like having a favorite restaurant.  I mean, I haven’t had everything on the Sullivan’s Steakhouse menu, but I trust the chef.

But what about when your chef collaborates? 

Blurst recently teamed up with the Infinite Ammo team to bring us Paper Moon, a 2D platformer in a cardboard cutout popup book.  Its art is primarily black and white, with demented character models that look influenced by but not purely derivative of Tim Burton.

You have a fixed amount of time (five minutes at start, I think) to progress as far as you can in the world, picking up fruit along the way for points.  Reminds me of any number of old NES games.  But what keeps this from being a simple, delightful-looking platformer is the popup mechanic.

Certain elements of the background (or extreme foreground) can be popped in and out of the character’s 2D plane.  You’ll spend a lot of time popping platforms mid-jump to assure yourself a safe landing.  At first, it felt a little shallow:  “You mean I just move forward and pop these rocks in and out?”  But then enemies showed up.  Creepy bats and crabs that can’t be stomped in traditional Mario-style platforming.  You defeat them by popping them out of the book.  It all clicked when I realized I could use my environmental manipulation as a weapon.  The game instantly became ten times more fun.

As we’ve seen in previous snacks, games can live or die by their music, especially in games designed for short bursts with repetitive soundtracks.  Paper Moon does not succumb to this browser-game weakness.  The solo piano score is, frankly, amazing.  It ebbs and flows nicely with the level and picks up as you start running out of time.

I haven’t finished it yet, as I reached the limit before I could find a clock to extend my time.  But I’m diving back in.  Popping those damn bats out of the book is just too much fun.

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Midnight Snack: Indestructo Tank AE

I’ve been playing a lot of games about superpowered tanks lately.  Well, maybe just two.  I’ll probably write about PopCap’s Heavy Weapon at some length later, so for now I want to talk about another tank game I’ve been playing.

Indestructo Tank AE puts you in control of an impervious tank with a penchant for flying into the air when struck by an air-to-surface missile.  Once your tank is airborne, you can alter its trajectory, colliding with nearby aircraft and using the explosion to remain airborne.  By stringing together airborne combos of destruction, you earn experience needed to advance the level and purchase more aircraft to destroy. 

This game is old news, by Internet standards (it’s over a year old).  But two basic elements of gameplay have extended its shelf life.  First, your tank is built out of adamantium (or some other heretofore undiscovered metallurgical miracle), so you can only fail by running out of fuel.  And levels only clear when you’re on the ground, so stringing together that 80-hit combo gets a little dangerous when the fuel gauge is low and you don’t have a clear path back down to earth.  Having to juggle (get it?) this relationship between success and failure makes the later levels of the game particularly stressful.

Also, each of the five enemy aircraft affect gameplay uniquely.  Bouncers are variations on the standard plane, whose bombs linger an extra bounce, perfect for extending combos.  Gunners will only fire after locking on, but are great for mid-air bouncing.  Miners are other tanks with great lift, useful for saving you a combo if the planes disappear.  And homers are by far the most wily of the five, firing heat-seeking missiles that often hit your tank in mid-air, blasting you skyward.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost because homing missiles wouldn’t let me back down to the ground. 

The AE stands for Anniversary Edition, and the game’s got a quick play mode, medals, and a co-op mode I’ve never tried.  These extras are irrelevant, in my opinion.  It’s the straightforward normal mode that makes it for me.  It reconciles the zen-like experience of a simple goal and a simple control scheme with the joy of watching a tank fly through the air ripping helicopters and jets to pieces. 

It also somehow inspired me to write four hundred words.  I tip my hat to you, Indestructo Tank. 

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Midday Snack: Civiballs

Sure, the title’s a little goofy, but there are plenty of less enjoyable ways to spend a lunch break than playing some Civiballs (Everybody Loves Raymond on the TBS Break Room comes to mind).

Civiballs falls into King.com’s strategy category, though I would just as soon call it a puzzler.  It’s a cutesy, Flash descendant of physics-based puzzlers like The Incredible Machine and Armadillo Run.  Without all the annoying building.

Your goal: get the nerdy looking balls into their color-coordinated urns.  Gameplay revolves around most of the balls hanging from chains that can be cut with a click of the mouse.  Success depends on determining which chains to cut in what order, and timing cuts when chains are swinging.  There are some thirty levels, which can take from ten seconds to five minutes depending your puzzle-solving skill.

I do have a few questions about Civiballs.  Why the ancient civilization theme?  Why do Greece, China, and Egypt have identical sets of urns strewn about their respective lands?  And why must nerdy-looking green, red, and yellow balls be strung about with chains?  These (ridiculous) questions aside, Civiballs offers the same feelings of satisfaction/frustration that keep us coming back to physics-based puzzlers.  Enjoy.

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Midnight Snack: Pwong

On this week’s podcast (which you can listen to here or find in iTunes), Rob mentioned his fondness for Curveball, the classic browser-based 3D Pong game.  I didn’t set out to find a Pong-related game for tonight’s snack, but the stars aligned and delivered me Gaz’s Pwong.

Pwong is pretty much Pong on crack.  You square off against a computer paddle with the familiar aim of knocking balls past it to score points.  This game’s twist is the sheer onslaught of balls unleashed onto the screen as the game goes on. 

Cannons routinely pop up from your side of the screen, shooting more balls at your opponent, who (like the best of computer opponents) pongs them back at you mercilessly.  The tricky aspect of scoring is that the more balls onscreen, the less points you’ll receive for scoring them.  The onscreen chaos often resembles computer monitors from The Matrix, dense and indecipherable.  At this stage, defeat seems imminent.

Enter power-ups.  Pwong features two pretty standard power-ups (Large Paddle and Slow-mo).  Then there’s the “Ammo” power-up which allows you to shoot copies of your paddle – a useful way to overwhelm the computer.  These help to mix up gameplay and provide the occasional edge over the devious AI paddle.

Pwong isn’t that deep.  And it lasts only a few minutes (and one vaguely familiar techno song).  But there’s nothing wrong with short and sweet.  Plus, I’d never thought a Pong-descendant would be able to stress me out this much.

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Midnight Snack: Music Catch 2

Are you an Audiosurf fan?  Then you might like Music Catch 2.

You can find it over at Reflexive, where it and the original Music Catch currently top the list of browser games.  Music Catch 2 is also tearing up the charts on Kongregate.  Basically, if you haven’t spent at least five minutes with this one, you’re definitely missing out on something.

In Music Catch 2, you, well…you catch music.  It really is that simple.  You collect various floating shapes by moving over them with your mouse, aiming for a high score.  In a manner similar to (and yet wholly different from) Audiosurf, the music generates these colored shapes, reflecting (most noticeably) changes in rhythm and dynamics.  Special yellow shapes increase your point multiplier as well as the size of your cursor, while red shapes cause collected yellows to burst out of you like so many Sonic rings. 

You unlock different game modes as you go along.  These change how the shapes appear, as well as their behavior onscreen.  Three songs, solo piano works by Isaac Shepard, come with the game, and they provide a perfect soundtrack that is, at times, both soothing and stirring.  There’s a reason this game comes from a site whose motto reads: “Click. Play. Relax.”  If you find Audiosurf’s gameplay a bit too intense but enjoy music games, give Music Catch 2 a whirl.

One of the last options you unlock is called “Mp3 from URL.”  It allows you to import an mp3 link into the game, which will then generate shapes for you to collect.  Unfortunately, links from YouTube don’t work, and there’s no option to use music from your computer unless you upload it to a site yourself.  I tried it with Jonathan Coulton’s “I’m Your Moon.”  It was fun, but I think the game is really suited to more introspective, instrumental work.  Shepard’s piano pieces highlight the game’s inherent grace and simplicity, something pop music might dilute.  Have fun experimenting with whatever URLs you can find.  I’m sticking to public domain Chopin recordings.

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Midnight Snack: Blush

About two weeks ago, Flashbang Studios launched Blush.  If you haven’t been following the company like we have, let me inform you that this is the first of Flashbang’s eight-week games.  They’re pushing themselves to generate content, and in turn get noticed for the quality and quantity of their work.  Do them a favor and check them out.

I can best describe Blush as a combination of flOw and Off-Road Velociraptor Safari.  You control a physics based squid (or “Crystalline Attack Sperm” as their blog jokes) who explores the underwater depths around him.  You won’t find any freaky alien fish, but you will find plenty of jellyfish, oversized anglers, and monster eels.  As you destroy these other fish and collect the eggs they leave behind, your squid grows in size and tentacles – vaguely like flOw, I guess.

I liken it to Off-Road… because of the control mechanic.  You move your squid around by clicking/holding the in the direction you want it to move.  To attack other fish, or collect eggs, you must make the squid whip its tentacles around – much like you whip the spike-ball attached to your jeep in Off-Road...  Its a fun mechanic.  Just be prepared for a bit of frustration when trying to spin in circles to attack the larger fish.  Also, when you collect eggs, you must deposit them in one of the crescent-repositories, not unlike the Off-Road… teleporters.  I don’t make these comparisons to disparage Blush.  I simply think Flashbang has wisely selected which mechanics to borrow from previous games.

The game’s got some great atmosphere, enhanced by a great soundtrack that builds as the game clock ticks down (it starts at four minutes, a perfect length).  There are also plenty of achievements and leaderboards (which should be up and running soon, if they aren’t already).  Aside from the simple joys of popping anglers with my tentacles, Blush gives the player four minutes in which to debate the question “Am I controlling a sperm or a squid?”  How can you pass on that?

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Midnight Snack: Bloody Fun Day

Let me just tell you that I tried to write this a few times.  Each time, I would open Bloody Fun Day to refresh my memory before composing.  Thirty minutes later, I’d realize I spent my allotted writing time just playing the damn game.  That’s a good sign.

Bloody Fun Day, from the people at urbansquall, provides yet another take on a recurring theme here on Midnight Snack: the plight of cute things.  In fact, it’s subtitle reads “A Game About Killing Cute Things.”  You play as the reaper, charged with killing red “cuties” to stay alive.  Killing the other colors of cuties charges up one of the six special abilities.  That’s a lot of cuties to chop.  Suffice to say these things pop like balloons when you cut them down.

In Bloody Fun Day, you will immediately be reminded of games like Collapse and various bar touchscreen games that involve the elimination of like-colored blocks.  This game mixes it up – replacing the usual time with a turn-based system, giving the player an avatar, and creating a perpetually filling hexagonal map.  When cuties shuffle off this mortal coil, they are replaced by eggs, which take a certain number of turns to hatch again.  This interval between hatches increases as the game goes in, making it more difficult to reap the valuable red cuties needed to stay alive. Thus, picking and choosing the right target is paramount.  As is accumulating a sick high score.

Like many of the better browser games out there, Bloody Fun Day provides a new spin on a classic game type.  Kongregate boasts high scores and a handful of achievements, and the Unlimited Mode challenges you to reap for as long as possible.  I also tip my hat to the inspired special abilities.  They’re perfectly balanced and help spice up the game play.  Oh yeah, and Tim Wendorf’s graphics are great.  Slaughtering cute things was never this fun.

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