I thought that I was finished with my series of browser game reviews, but perhaps I’ll do one more yet.

“Skill games” are the genre that to me seems like the linchpin of the popularity of browser games in general. They are the perfect casual games, and always have been, long before browser games existed and the genre flourished in arcades and home computers. The casualness is well affirmed by the uncaring attitude that gamers tend to have towards these games; I myself almost didn’t notice that I should actually write a bit about these games as well if I’m supposed to be reviewing the browser game media in general. Considering how much I’ve been playing these games while trawling through the browser game selection, it only makes sense to highlight some of the ones I’ve returned to several times.

As a somewhat arbitrary move I’m going to recommend Dolphin Olympics 2 and Fly Me to the Moon, two fine skill games I’ve stumbled upon during the last couple of weeks. (I think Markku recommended them to me or something.) This move is arbitrary in that there are quite many titles in this genre, and I have made no point at all of studying the width of possibilities out there. It’s enough to note here that I find both of the above titles to have good craftsmanship, as well as the most important quality of the genre: the basic skill activity in the game is fun. I already wrote about this design precept a bit in my Forever Samurai review earlier, but it bears repeating as an analytical explanation of game quality: a good skill game, casual or not, presents as its core activity a skill set that is fun and enjoyable to practice and improve. Otherwise the game cannot be helped.

This is not to say that either of these games is quite perfect in what they do. Setting aside the hardcore requirement for game depth, I still find Dolphin Olympics annoying in how it sets point scoring as the core goal when jumping as high as possible is actually a much more interesting and relaxed challenge. In general it seems to me that this genre suffers from the so called “community aspect” quite a lot – the game just has to have a scoring method, usually a most nitpicky one, and it has to push the opportunity of adding your score to a high score list at all junctures. I don’t quite know what the designers imagine me to be thinking – surely they don’t think that I have the time to compete in every minor pastime on an international level, especially when the game’s central activity itself doesn’t often seem to be concerned with point-scoring at all. Fly Me to the Moon does have a minor use for points scored within the framework of the game itself, but it’s still clearly minor.

Skill games vs. puzzle games

An interesting question raises its head in that puzzle games are quite successful as browser games, too. They’re another very casual genre, similar in many ways to skill games. Notably many puzzle games in browser games are so called “physics puzzles” that replace exact rules with a physical model and allow the player freedom to solve the puzzles in any way they see fit within the physical model – Incredible Machine is the model here. These games often require a modicum of dexterity and speed, blurring the line between skill and puzzle games to a degree.

I don’t particularly recommend puzzle games as a browser game genre, interestingly enough. While skill games can be enjoyable for the simple core activity they offer, browser puzzle games seem to mostly follow an insipid item interaction puzzle model, which is one I’ve never been too fond of. The best titles of the genre like Saunavihta or Red Remover are not exactly bad, but playing them is a strictly routine thing with little in the way of insight in the play process. Maybe I’m just playing too easy games or something. Or it’s just that even my level of casualness has its limits.

My series of browser game reviews continues with another title Markku linked for me.

Small Worlds, according to its title screen, is apparently some sort of casual game contest competitor. This is easy to believe, as the game is certainly pretty casual. It is also exactly the sort of minimalistic, concerned design that I’d make myself if I were in the computer game business. I’d compare this with Hey Wizard! I discussed earlier in that both are platform games with a minimalistic bend; it’s just that this is much more minimalistic than Wizard ever, making it the extremist wing of browser minimalism.

There is not much to say about Small Worlds in terms of content without over-explaining it. The purpose of the game is discovery purely and simply, with no extenuating secondary obstacles or goals. Even this is something you would and will discover through playing the game, so saying it here unnecessary frames the experience. One benchmark of a good casual game is certainly that it can be played with no study (in fact, my brother Jari goes as far as to claim that all video games should be possible to reduce to this stage by interface development; I find that I agree), which is definitely both possible and enjoyable in this case.

Another benchmark of a casual game is that it doesn’t take too long to play. Small Worlds is over in fifteen minutes, has no challenge element and has no replay value, which takes it a good ways towards interactive multimedia. It’s still no worse than many adventure games in terms of game-content, though, so at least in historical terms this is easy to consider as a game.

After playing it, consider

The game uses computer technology conventions for aesthetical purposes in clever ways, which I like. Extremely low-resolution graphics zoom out into more conventional ranges as the world gets explored, making the three-pixel protagonist seem less and less out of place. The graphical elements that seem merely sketchy in local view become parts of a living painting the player discovers through the movements of his avatar. The majestic (yet minimalistic) musical score contrasts drastically with

The player is motivated purely by curiousity, as the game does not explain its goals nor means of progress. This curiousity is transformed into a greater form by the first functional discovery, and it becomes a mission with the second. The mission never replaces the simple joy of painting the small worlds as the game progresses, however, merely accentuates it. And before the player has the chance to grow bored, the game is already over, dodging the sustainability issue of exploration as a motivation.

However, there is more

My brother Jari reminded me quite forcefully that “this sort of wankery has been done before, it’s called game poetry or some such”. He’s right, of course, even if I haven’t followed the scene as closely as I could have through this decade. Jari also linked me to Daniel Benmergui and told me that he doesn’t like this sort of thing because they’re too easy. If we understand a game poem as an interactive multimedia that does not involve a real challenge element, then Jari’s stance is pretty hard to justify. However, if we see it as simple laziness in design – that’s much easier. Which are we looking at when we consider this genre of “game poetry”? Should we even be calling it game poetry, or is it more useful to talk of “concept games” – the latter term would emphasize the game’s role in design discourse between peers over its audience reception; ideas over execution.

I didn’t like everything the aforementioned Daniel Benmergui presents at his site, but Today I Die was sort of impressive in its naivete. It shares the poetic approach of Small Worlds, but has a different gameplay and maybe a tad more challenge in an adventure game sort of way. I find that the design value is situated in both games sufficiently similarly to speak of an over-arching genre of “game poetry” here – both of these titles might be considered concept games in that they proof certain nuanced and rarely utilized design principles, but I’d consider this incidental in the light of the fact that there are plenty of concept games with no poetic elements, and likewise some game poems that are not very conceptual at all – I’m reminded of the Fly Guy, which is so simple a game poem that it may only be considered a concept game if we decide that the whole idea of game poetry needs to be proofed thoroughly.

So, “game poetry” it is. As mentioned above, we might define the core experience of this genre as being interactive, toy-like experiencing of content. The idea here would be that aesthetics are experienced differently when you give the audience the capability of directing the pace, order and context of the material. Looking at it from this point of view, there is much in traditional game design that fits under the label: traditional adventure games in general are often characterized by the lack of any meaningful content except player-directed pacing and ordering of graphics, sounds, plot and other aesthetic elements. I haven’t asked Jari, but I suspect that he might accept that whatever he thinks of Small Worlds and Today I Die, the concept of this genre in general is valid. Then again, good adventure games are hard to find, so maybe not.

(Now that I think about it, of course, I probably wouldn’t use “game poetry” as the name for this genre after all. Poetry implies things like shortness and minimalism, which doesn’t hold for all members of the group I delineated above. Still, it’s good enough for our purposes here, especially as almost all browser games are short and condenced like ludic poems anyway.)

My series of browser game reviews continues, this time with the seminal genre of browser games.

Tower Defense games are perhaps more than any other single genre characteristic of browser games – so much so that many of the games reviewed so far in this series of mine actually had clear tower defense logic in them: a passive player against actively attacking enemies that come in waves, with the player improving his defenses as best he can in between. I have no absolutely clear favourite within the genre, but I definitely recommend checking it out – the specific game could be Desktop Tower Defense, Gemcraft or something else entirely.Tower defense is a very stratified genre, comparable to Tetris-like drop puzzles and such in how each game lifts 80% of its logic from the predecessors, only making small improvements or changes. I understand that the genre in its modern form comes from Starcraft or Warcraft 3 or something like that, some game in which people could make mods to turn the game into something where the player would place a variety of defensive structures (“towers”) alongside a fixed path, along which enemy figures would then travel in waves, waiting to be shot before they could finish the gauntlet and score points against the player’s diminishing health supply. That’s the genre in a nutshell, incidentally.

Being critical of the entire genre is possible, but ultimately futile – if you haven’t played this stuff, try one and find out whether it’s your thing or not. If it is, then there are certainly better and worse titles to choose from, but those nuances are likewise highly personal in nature: I definitely like the strategic aspects in Desktop and Whiteboard, which apply the innovation of getting rid of fixed paths in favour of allowing the player to shape the battleground as he would, building his own maze for the enemy creeps (apparently this is a technical term for the enemy figures in this genre) to travel. Players who like to grind and gain complex rewards might like Gemcraft or the Protector series or the Invasion from Hell series (actually, these are almost all serial in nature; the genre is hugely popular, it seems), which all have experience management, a campaign mode and so on. The basic activity is the same, though: in all these games the player has to devise the most efficient protective gauntlet possible with the resources available to him. It is actually a bit difficult for a game in this genre to be “bad”, as your job as the player is to simply figure out the game, break it if you can and play it only as long as it sustains your interest. The worst a game like this can do is to not sustain that interest for very long, but even then the level of the play experience itself wasn’t necessarily that bad – you just stopped playing when it dropped below a threshold, just like you’d have done with a great game in the genre.

I should also note that my own experience indicates that tower defense is something of a stress relief genre most of the time; the games with the highest level of math and options, like Gemcraft, are frustrating and overwhelming because of that. It’s also why I like Paper War, which is simple enough to figure out and easy enough to play with pure strategy; high level play in tower defense games depends on intimate familiarity with the given game’s details and some pretty hard math on the exchange rates of time to money to tower strength to tower numbers and so on.

Why I don’t like this genre much, even if it is important

Most tower defense games fail to engage me because they’re pretty weak on the goal-setting department: the idea is usually to just improve your skills with the particular game to get a better score or make it through even harder levels than the ones you played through last. For example, I got into Desktop Tower Defense for a couple of days last year (or so), long enough to play the normal mode of the game through on moderate difficulty. I rather liked that, and I think that I might have continued playing the game at higher levels of accomplishment, except for the fact that it started to feel too much like work.

Another important factor in why I didn’t hone my skills further in Desktop is that the best parts of the game are rather vulnerable to spoiling: there’s not much for me to do in these games after I read some treatise written by a dedicated player on how the game should be played. The mere knowledge that there are much better players out there than me, while the whole purpose of the game is to get better, but getting better is not a skill issue but a knowledge issue, deterred me for some reason. I guess I’m just not cut for high-level play in this sort of game.

As a more general observation, merely improving on your game (as opposed to other goal systems a game might have) seems to work best when the player manages to get into a mindset where he is competing with himself, his own previous score. Comparisons with others are not very fruitful when those others are anonymous Internet monkeys on a high score list instead of real people. I consider high scores a vulnerable accomplishment mechanism for this reason, and a game with no other arc ultimately frustrating; it’s much better if the game has some sort of real ending that tells me when to stop playing. Not a very deep insight, I suppose – endings are in video games to generate feelings of accomplishment.

My series of browser game reviews continues with a quite current game – apparently it was published just a couple of days ago. I certainly wouldn’t have stumbled on it if I weren’t writing these reviews and doing background research for them.

Forever Samurai is a simple and beautiful side-scrolling fighting game from Pixelante Game Studios (AKA Evan Miller, not to be confused with Auntie Pixelante) that is set apart by an immaculate sense of style. The game is not very long, but it makes up for this with intense action and a suitably challenging difficulty level. I’m not an easy customer for action games, as they usually fail to reward me sufficiently to keep me invested, but the carry-over of experience points and gradual increase in my own skill of play keep me nicely with the game here.

The fundamental reason for why I find Forever Samurai so good is that its action model provides a good interface for enjoyable skill learning on the player’s part. This is far from given in action games, even if this is, it seems to me, a primary determinant in what makes a good action game. Forever Samurai does good in this regard, as the basic technique of slicing and dicing your enemies is easy to learn, allowing me to play facilely from the beginning. High-level success in the fighting system depends on interesting and learnable skills such as timing (attack to interrupt the enemy, withdraw from under their attack), positioning (use movement skills to avoid getting ganged upon and to get to position quickly to perform attacks) and  observing the enemies (which have different behavioral modes and attack types). This might be positively compared to games in which success depends on rote memorization and execution of the challenge, as is the case with some platform action games, or games that reward grinding practice, good reflexes and attention to minor detail, as is the case with many fighting games. It’s not that these things could not be adjusted to be comfortably easy, it’s that some things are more fun to learn than others, so a game that works with player skill needs to focus on skill sets that are fun to learn and fun to execute. The fighting skill in Forever Samurai is both, gaining my approval.

Aside from the above general trait of the game’s design, I find other things to enjoy here as well:

• The game’s graphics are beautiful vector art, very mature and natural for the medium. I have grave misgivings towards the ugly age of computer graphics that was thrust upon us through the late ’90s, as polygon graphics took over from earlier bitmap art. This sort of 2d vector art has nothing in common with that; it rather preserves a natural relationship to the lineage of visual arts, instead of looking like something created technology first like polygon art inevitably does. I wouldn’t mind seeing games on more prestigious platforms made with these sorts of techniques.
• The game’s literary content is stylish; there are no excess explanations, the player doesn’t really know what is going on except for the fact that his samurai is hunting a huge red demon lion (or perhaps racing it to a destination?) that thrashed through his place in the introductory cutscene. On the way to the final confrontation with the lion (which tracks the player’s progress in the background art through the game) you get to duel with kappa, tengu and other mythological critters of Japanese folklore. Cool.
• I’ve rather come to enjoy this thing common to browser games where you get carryover benefits that open up new facets to the game when you play – something that is not quite a saved advanced position in a campaign, but rather minor advantages you can take with you from one game to the next. It goes well with short games you aren’t supposed to save, and it goes especially well with action titles where failure is constant. Here I don’t mind failing, as I still get xp and can use that to get a bit of an edge for the next time I try the game.
• The hardcore mode of the game has a logic that pleases me. It is always excellent if a game can work in extreme conditions where failure is frequent and the player is going to repeat stuff a lot. I seem to only play the hard difficulty levels in games I take seriously, and this is just such a case – I actually enjoy the one life mode with few mistakes allowed, it makes the combat in the game quite a rush.

All in all, definitely a game to recommend, even surprisingly good – I had no idea this sort of clarity and originality would happen in browser games when I started checking them out.

The Pixelante Mystery

I haven’t been too concerned with the creators behind these browser games I’ve been checking out, but Forever Samurai left me impressed enough to get a bit curious. This is good, because I discovered that the Pixelante guy (just a bit over 20 years old – we have reason to expect great things from him) has actually made other games – and they are almost as good as this one! Consider: Hunted Forever (as far as I know that repetition in the names is just a style element) is an original, minimalistic platform game with a tense atmosphere and the good, plastic control feel familiar from as far back as Prince of Persia. Towering Forever is a sidescrolling tower defense game with beat’em up elements, while Oozing Forever is a well-made high concept platformer with an amorphous blob on the center stage. (Falling Forever is a simple dexterity puzzle game – not bad, but not exceptional, either.) I don’t mind playing any of these, quality craftsmanship one and all – Hunted I’d even consider a game to recommend, just like Samurai; the duel of man and machine painted in it is inspiring, that’s all.

I find it rather promising that these Pixelante games show a clear trend towards excellence, improving in chronological order. They all display a good sense of multimedia representation and a clearly improving touch for the interactive action interfaces used by these games. The cultural content is good as well, the creator shows a good grasp of modern culture and an ability to create original art therein. Considering these points, I grow more curious: how viable is the browser game as a development platform for professional game creation? Furthermore: how come nobody in the Internet seems to be writing about browser game phenomena like Pixelante? I’ve yet to research the scene thoroughly, but I find it curious how little media there seems to be on this stuff, despite the browser being a major platform compared to many others. I‘ve had much more media exposure than this guy, it seems, even if his games get a thousand times more distribution and exposure if playcounts at the browser game aggregation sites are anything to go by. I feel my curiousity towards the community aspects of the browser game scene rising – is it that all the media is hiding inside the members-only portions of those large sites, and that’s why nobody seems to be discussing these games in the general Internet? Or is it that there’s just such an insane amount of these games out there that everybody has stopped discussing individual games and game studios long ago? Or doesn’t anybody consider this platform seriously enough to write about it? No idea.

My series of browser game reviews continues.

The two Sonny games are console adventure games (CRPGs, as they’re called) in style, closely akin to Final Fantasy and the like. Now, I don’t remember that I’d have spilled my full invective against the genre here at the blog, but those who know me might have heard me say some very unflattering things about the combination of passive consumership, bad writing and atrociously grinding gameplay typical of this Japanese genre of games. Thus it is all the more surprising that I actually like Sonny – it might be the best game (series) in the genre that I’ve ever played (depending on how you define the boundaries of the genre, anyway); and it achieves this by being sensible and matter-of-fact about the core activity of this type of game, rather than by pushing out into other types of game like some other good runners do.

The Sonny games stand out positively in the genre due to four main features:

• No-nonsense plotting doesn’t take itself too seriously, and doesn’t waste the player’s time. Sparse cutscenes and a few lines of dialogue here and there serve to contextualize the game, but at no point does the designer imagine that he is writing literature. The game is very genre-conscious while also being subtly original and irreverent towards the same; most importantly, the lyrical (as opposed to dramatic, plot-related) content, such as graphics and literary concepts, are well-made, complimenting the actual gameplay content and giving the games a very personal, flavorful overall look.
• There is no meaningless running around in the game world or encountering random encounters. In fact, there is no running around at all – the main interface consists of a button for shopping, a button for character inventory, a button for having a training combat (for grinding experience) and a button for fighting the next plot fight. There are no renevable resources, even, so no time is wasted on healing the party between fights. Fight all the plot fights successfully, and you win the game. But to do this you need to equip the right equipment, the right team and the right skills.
• The game’s core activity, as befits the genre, is optimizing a team of fighters for the round-based, largely numeric fighting game that matches the player against increasingly difficult opponents. The player gets to optimize his own character’s skills, as well as the equipment for the whole team. Both optimization problems are ever-changing and have no absolute answers, you just have to work constantly to keep ahead of the (at times steep) enemy power curve. You get to change your own character’s configuration around pretty flexibly, which means that you can and will have to change him up for different fights.
• The fight scenes themselves are quick and simple insofar as the game controls and user interface go, but actually pretty complex rules-wise when compared to what you usually get in this genre. For instance, temporary conditions caused by both attacks and buffs are much more important than usually in the genre, and there are many tools for manipulating those. It seems that there are no enemies that would be immune to status attacks, too, so this is one of those rare games in the genre that seems to play fairly with its own rules. (A typical cop-out in the genre is to make the most difficult or plot-important enemies immune to status attacks that’d cripple them, making for the old jungle saying that you should never invest in anything but damage-per-round in these games; you’ll never get to use that blinding attack in an actually difficult fight, anyway.)

Based on the above it might seem that less is again more with this browser game, and I guess that is true – the genre in question suffers horridly because the core activity is usually encumbered with half-wit attempts at purple prose and transparent speedbumbs in the form of random fights. Sonny in comparison has a flavourful setting (with zombies and stuff; no rason to explain in detail, it’s ultimately secondary in this genre), but the attention is totally focused to making the fights and character optimization for them work for themselves: once again the core activity wins the day in game design, making for a much more compelling game than the last Final Fantasy I bothered with.

The two Sonny games are pretty similar, the second just improves on the first in all of the above four categories except the second one – the games are identical in what you actually do in them. It’s entirely feasible to play the first game through (it’s not very long) to learn the basics and enjoy the plot (such as it is), especially as the second game seems to be considerably more difficult and much longer.

My series of browser game reviews continues with a third installment. The premise of the series, as can be found in the original post, is that I’m telling you about browser games that I recommend for their quality of design. I’m no expert on the subject, I just mostly play what my brother Markku recommends to me. Click on the game’s icon to play it, it’s as easy as that in this new age of free ready-to-play browser gaming.

There are actually two titles in this series of platform games, Hey Wizard! and Quest for the Magic Mojo. The basic content is similar enough in the two – the wizard guy, who can’t jump, has to navigate his way through various levels filled with monsters by using the magics in his disposal. The minimalistics graphical representation makes the games very atmospheric (not to speak of the technological benefits of using pure vector art), while the freely navigated levels add a sense of exploration. Both games involve the wizard gradually gaining a more powerful repertoire of magics that allow him to jump, float, climb and blast his way through to his goal. The two mostly differ in tone, with the first game being more difficult and grim, while the latter focuses more on the exploration.

Hey Wizard! represents a certain trend towards “beautiful minimalism” that I think I’ve been noticing in these browser games. It is technically a very basic platform game, but the choice to use modern technology only to accentuate that basic core activity, rather than overlay it, makes the game a very peaceful experience for the old-time gamer. The simple art evokes feelings and impressions rather than dictating them, which I’m sure everybody is familiar with from many different art forms. Likewise, the simple activity is evocative: there is no great complexity in the wizard’s jumping and floating magics or in how he shoots his enemies, you can do all of that pretty much automatically once you get the hang of it. The games are not too long, either, so there is no danger of getting bored; the only experience left is amusement and sense of wonder and curiousity as you encounter new sorts of enemies and other vistas.

The first of the two games is clearly more difficult of the two, with less fluid control of the wizard and weaker magics at his disposal, while the enemies are much more aggressive. The designer (who seems to be Swedish, is all I know about him, and even there I suspect some Finnish roots due to how he uses Snufkin as his studio logo) has, I suspect, done some thinking and concluded that his game serves better with a low-tension engagement from the player side; the second game is much more meditative, with the wizard having almost unlimited flight capabilities that allow him to leave the ground and flit over enemies, only engaging with the terrain to navigate on his way to his goal on the maps that are even larger than earlier.

All in all, it’s easy to recommend a well-made platform game like this, especially when the game desists from excess design cruft and excess difficulty both. The experience might be slightly shallow in analytical terms, but when taken at face value, the evocative world of the Wizard is easy to remember long after vanquishing the mysterious Master of Puppets. I wouldn’t play this sort of game obsessively for days and weeks, but then I wouldn’t do that with any other platform game, either. The genre is best in relatively small servings, just like these games.

My series of browser game reviews continues with a second installment.

This is a pretty new game, I understand. Another title with tower defence roots, except this time you’re managing a team of fighters defending a castle from various attacking critters. The core activity is point-and-click shootery, with switchable weapons and managing reload times. After each “day” of combat you get to invest the money recovered into better defenses, such as more fighters, better walls and so on. Experience points flow, too, so your fighters get to learn fancy new skills. The game strives to hit all the hardcore buttons at once, and succeeds rather well.

My favourite part of Elona Shooter is that it has quite a bit of width in terms of strategy and goals. The game is rogue-like in that you advance in the game by improving your own play rather than by saving position (I understand that there is a saveable mode as well, I just never played it), which constraint works well when the game has a high degree of randomness that derives into a large set of potential strategies you can implement depending on your initial chargen choices and the luck of the draw. This width of strategic options is augmented on multiple levels:

• The different weapons play quite differently in the point-and-click portion of the game. For example, cartridge loading vs. clip-loading guns play quite differently in that you have to reload the latter whole clips at a time, while with the former you can take whatever time you have in between enemy waves to do partial reloads. There are bows (no reload necessary), automatic weapons, grenades and so on, all gained as a random selection of enemy drops and shop inventory, which means that your play experience is greatly impacted by the weapons you happen to collect in play.
• The fighters available to your team are also randomized, and the skill improvements they get when they level are also randomized. You can control both sets of randomization to a degree, but ultimately you have to go with the flow. The fighters you have influence your strategy to a high degree, as the different skills have a radical impact on what you can or can’t do. A character with “Taunt”, for example, allows you the new strategy of making the enemies stronger in exchange for more money, which will only be useful for certain strategic frameworks.
• The various activities you can do in between battles are relatively static (barring the opportunities opened by equipment and experience gains), but their usefulness is impacted by both the random portions of the game as well as your own strategic choices. For example, it’s usually not worthwhile to spend any time collecting eggs from chickens (a no-strings-attached method of gaining money) unless you’re willing to invest large amounts of money on those chickens to begin with.
• The key thing that ties all of the above together is that unlike many other games, in this one achievements (interesting, Wikipedia doesn’t seem to recognize that this stuff exists outside the XBox) gain you permanent advantages in the game, advantages that carry over to new plays. This provides strategic coordination to the game: you can’t hope to finish the game on one try, but at least you can try to achieve one of the various medals available in the game, providing you with a small bonus for your next play. This, in turn, makes the selection of various strategic options in the game far from arbitrary; praying or using suicide bombers or whatever other course you might pick becomes not just a strategy, but a goal in itself, encouraging you to play the game in different styles on different play-throughs, trying to pick a suitable achievement goal that you have a chance of fulfilling with your current character/equipment set.

The above elements click in Elona Shooter in an exceptional way, making for a very enjoyable, ascending level of challenge. The curve of difficulty in the game might be too much for some, at least until you realize that your goal isn’t necessarily to constantly improve your rate of days survived. Once you manage to consistently survive for 10 days or so, the game hits an extremely enjoyable stage as you dedicate yourself to collecting the achievements and figuring out the larger macro-strategy: which of the several courses of strategic action allow you to survive past the radically more difficult midteens levels? Puzzling this out is very fun because of the above effect of randomized strategic constraints combined with a series of ascending difficulty achievements that encourage different tacks of play.

(Alternatively, you could just play that save state mode of the game and miss out on all the fun. I understand that it allows you to just retry each level with extra cash until you’ve grinded yourself into an upper hand position. I hear that the designer has also made a roguelike, so I have no doubts as to which playstyle he prefers.)

I am not entirely happy with the level of tension in Elona Shooter in that sometimes the sheer level of hand-eye coordination and tactical decision-making speed required feels frustrating instead of challenging. The slightest mistake kills you when your strategy is even a bit off the optimal that you must discover and chart yourself. I would probably be even happier with the game if it had a more fruitful balance of strategic principles and performance excellence; now you have to have both to get anywhere in the game, instead of being able to compensate for one with the other.

In the interest of full disclosure I have to say that unfortunately my brother Jari discovered an exploit that allowed him to short-circuit the process of gradually incrementing understanding of play, jumping directly from “survive 15 days” to “survive 40+ days and quit playing because of boredom”. I lost much of my own sense of challenge with the game after finding out how to do that, which is a shame, because nothing is actually forcing me to use the one strategy out of 50+ that is so radically powerful. In fact, I should think that trying to find other, equally powerful approaches should motivate me just as well. Still, for one reason or other, much of the mystery surrounding the challenge of the game evaporated for me when Jari figured out how to beat it and got to the upper levels first. Others will likely have quite different experiences of play.

Let’s begin this series of browser game reviews!

The Space Game is a real-time strategy game in the vein of Command & Conquer, set in space. Specifically typical of the genre is the attention slathered upon resource-gathering (space ore mining), which needs to be balanced with military concerns. Typical of browser games, on the other hand, is the tower defence -like military model: the player is a semi-passive party in the military conflict, situation defensive structures and waiting for the computer enemy to attack in “waves” that must be destroyed for the ore to flow. I’m not a particular fan of real-time strategy (as far as I can see, the only reason to do it instead of turn-based is so you get to try out wacky game mechanics that work better in a non-discrete environment), but I definitely can enjoy it when done well and provided with a pause button.

I especially like two things about this game:

• It is very pretty in the minimal sort of way that browser games do so well. The only elements of the game board are space rocks that contain the ores to be mined, and the network of production and defence structures the player creates. The latter resembles (by intent, it has to be) graphical constellations you’d see in star maps with angular lines against the stylized space background. As the enemy attacks in the form of variously colored, simple space-craft sprites, the player’s constellations flicker and lasers criss-cross the screen as battle is joined. It is very satisfying to create efficient logistics and defensive arrangements when the results are displayed as abstract art like this. The seamless zoom function is icing on the already pretty cake in this case, as well as being a beautifully simple tool for handling larger logistical systems; the graphical representation makes it easy to see how your system of production works at a glance.
• The game’s resource control model rivals similar games on traditional platforms in terms of depth and intricacy. There are just two resources – ore and energy – but their interactions are cause for satisfying emergent strategies. As just an example, ores need to be mined to create structures, such as solar plants that create energy, and energy stores that store that energy. Energy on the other hand is needed to make structures, such as mining platforms, function. Most significant energy drain comes from defensive lasers, which is why storing energy is good for getting through the spikes of consumption during enemy attacks. These sorts of logistical concerns control the game.

Perhaps, if I had to find something to criticize, I’d say that my focus in playing a game isn’t best preserved by high score modes, especially when there are so many different ones as to dissuade my goal-seeking and confuse me. The game has a respectable campaign (of a bit over half a dozen increasingly difficult scenarios) that takes one night of intensive play to play through, after which the game sort of presumes that the player would be satisfied to go into an endless grind of time attack modes and such. I have a feeling that I could have enjoyed even more content – more different structures, enemies and perhaps space objects aside from the ore. Or scenario goals other than “mine enough to finish the scenario” and “survive to a set time limit”. But complaining about what’s not there is not very sensible when what the game has is so good. The game’s a bit narrower than the aforementioned Command & Conquer in many ways, but that also means that it does not tire the player out.

Of high scores

Thinking about it now, I probably should say another word or two about play modes and high scores: in my opinion high scores work best as a game-directing device when they are the only measure of success. I’ve never managed to get into high scores in games that proffer a real arc of play-through accomplishment, while in something like Tetris I can take the high score relatively seriously. I find that the direction of attention in designing the Space Game is a bit misplaced in how much it focuses on the idea of high score play instead of specific scenario play. I’d have much rather seen a larger campaign mode instead of an exhortation to go and micro-manage the game obsessively for weeks without still being able to be the best player of the game in the world (and why I’d want to be the best in this particular game, that’s beyond me anyway).

The above is probably not that uncommon for long-term gamers, actually: I can’t be the only one who finds himself refusing high scoring challenges because he knows that the payoffs are long away and dependent on obsessive, compulsive micromanaging of game play. You can do it in a culturally deprived environment or when the activity really clicks with you, but being the absolute best I ever can be in Space Game or Donkey Kong isn’t on my personal list of passions.

Not that this has anything much to do with the Space Game, mind you – I recommend it fully, you can always ignore the high scoring modes after playing through the campaign like I did. I might even consider playing the “mining” modes, actually, as they’re technically not high scoring – they’re just generic scenario play, which suits for this game just fine with its long (for a tower defense game) scenarios.

An important addition

After tooling around a bit at Kongregate after writing the above, I came to notice that the Space Game actually has a sequel. In The Space Game: Missions we get a large campaign with essentially the same system as the original game, except this time it’s full of strategic objectives and such instead of just “survive as long as you can”. Seems that the designer was thinking in the same direction I did, above. Most excellent, this – now I have more rocks to mine instead of doing something productive.

A beginner’s introduction in the sense that I am a beginner, that is – I’ve never taken to the genre with my full powers of sitting-in-front-of-a-computer. During the last couple of weeks I’ve played this stuff more than usually, though, largely because of my brother Markku, who plays this stuff quite a lot. Consequently I can recommend some excellent games to anybody interested in video game design or just playing innovative games.

Browser Games, Casual Games

After scratching the surface of this exciting genre of games, I think that browser games are where some of the most exciting game design has been done this decade. While expensive A-list video game industry has descended from intellectual leadership to curiousity to irrelevance, I find many of the values that attracted me to video games in the first place to be enshrined as a matter of course in the browser game media; it seems that the constrained technology works to keep the development costs down, allowing ideas to shine instead. While I’m personally mostly lukewarm towards modern computer games (haven’t read the industry magazines since the end of the ’90s, for instance), this stuff intrigues me – I could imagine working with something like this myself at some point. In fact, playing some of these games reminds me of my own mission statement towards casual gaming, which I wrote up as a sort of a set of connected game concepts some five years ago; I see a lot of similarities in my thinking at the time and much of this game design I se in browser games now.

About casual games – I have to say that I don’t see the browser game platform as a primarily casual one. There are some quite heavy and involved games created for this platform. This is of course a perspective error, as casual gamers like my sister Mervi certainly don’t play the hardcore stuff, and for them the platform is all about the simplest games. Still, despite the intellectually rich environment, the truth seems to remain that the best stuff is still created towards a hardcore audience, limited platform or not. This is probably largely because I am myself a hardcore gamer, and therefore can appreciate the increased nuance, which makes me flat out ignore much of the casual genre. Then again, it might not be – I know that there are some casual games that I can appreciate, and some games where hardcore interests match with casual ones.

A word about the industry behaviors of the scene for those who know even less than I do: it seems to me that browser games nowadays are made mostly in Flash and some similar technologies, and published through large aggregation/collection sites like Kongregate or Armor Games. The revenue model seems to mostly involve advertising, either by the publishing website (which splits the profits with the game creator) or embedded within the game code itself. I have no idea how lucrative this sort of thing is, but then, game development for the platform is easily within the reach of a minimal design team, and game contents are usually not very extensive, so this stuff can be created as a hobby, too. I know almost nothing at all about the people behind these games; from my viewpoint they just pop up in my email as my brother sends me links to them. I assume that some people dedicate themselves to the form and establish studios or something.

All that being said, let me recommend some good browser games. I can’t say that my list would be nearly comprehensive, as I hardly know this platform myself, but I can say that each of the titles I introduce are worth a look for general video gaming interests. Because browser games are free and hassle-free (no difficult installation prosedures in modern browsers, just click a link, wait a moment and go), there’s not much reason to skip this stuff aside from the bother of having to skim through the hundred bad or average games to find the gems. For that reason, recommendations – I wouldn’t have discovered most of these games if Markku didn’t send me links to interesting games all the time.

I was going to put all of my recommendations here as a list, but I actually have a bit to say about each game separately, so I think I’ll write separate posts about each. So expect some game reviews shortly, with the above context in mind.

Well since i’m bored to death at the office i figure there are lots more just like me … so let’s see about some entertainment.

However, caution is recommended to those new at office slacking .. de bossman might come at any time and catch you leading the mint rubbing association (the mint rubbing association is a group of people who take mint leaves between their fingers and rub those leaves to see what happens .. in other words .. slacking ) so i recommend either a very neat system with a bucket or cans tied to the door that will alert you in case of boss attack or a very ingenious gizmo i can’t really remember what it’s called but it works someting like a pedal, connected via usb that will switch to a preffered program … excell or whatever will make you seem like working on press.

So without any further delay let me introduce one of my personal favorites, Crush the Castle where you get in control of a mighty trebuchet and need to engage in castle bashing court-people killing action.

Next things you should definitely not miss, is Ultimate Assassin 2. This is a brilliant game where you need to assassinate a target and get a way with it. Please take note that this game will require a lot of concentration and the risk of getting caught playing is very high. Yours truly has already been busted once.

Enjoy!

Algo que está em alta nos dias de hoje são os jogos de browser … Os jogos de browser são jogos online que não precisam de instalação nem nada você simplesmente entra no site se cadastra e começa a jogar … Eis alguns dos browser games que eu jogo ou já joguei …

Consagrado como melhor browser game de 2008, The West aborda a temática de velho oeste… No The West você pode fundar uma cidade, duelar com outros jogadores, fazer quests entre outras diversas coisas ….

Link

Com uma temática diferente Ogame aborda algo mais relacionado a ficção científica com planetas, naves e afins … No Ogame você começa com um planeta onde inicia seu império … Com o tempo você pode conquistar outros planetas ou mesmo dizimar um planeta adversário …

Link

Com Popmundo você administra um personagem e sua escalada para a fama lidando com tudo que um artista de verdade deve lidar seja fãs, gravadoras clipes ou espetaculares show … Popmundo te coloca em contato com o mundo artístico e tudo que ele pode oferecer …

Link

Tribal Wars

Tribal Wars lida com um contexto mais medieval onde você controla uma vila e pode dominar outras vila expandindo seu império …. Com Tribal Wars você pode comandar hordas de cavaleiros, espadachins e arqueiros conquistando território… Seja sozinho ou em um clã Tribal Wars é um ótimo jogo de Browser …

Link

Bo Knows Procrastination

When I was a nine-to-fiver, the afternoon hour between 3 pm and 4 pm was devastating.

When fire drills are happening left and right, that one hour reminds you just how little time remained to fix whatever fuck up was causing your boss to walk into your office every 15 minutes.

But when the shit isn’t flying and your job is relatively safe, that one hour can be even worse.  Especially on a Thursday or Friday before a big weekend.

Before you suck it up and actually work on that long-term project sitting on your To Do List, check out these little time-wasting gems.  All playable in your browser for free.

Note:  Be sure to turn your sound off before playing (rookie mistake).  Unless you’re sitting in a corner office.  In that case, don’t bother wasting time on video games, just head to the bar now.  Go ahead.  No one’s watching.

Desktop Tower Defense 1.5

• Rating:  5/5
• Description:  Build and upgrade your line of defense against wave after wave of pixels with ill intent.
• Time It Will Waste:   It’ll be quittin’ time before you know it

Monster’s Den:  Book of Dread

• Rating:  5/5
• Description:  An addicting dungeon crawler for you RPG fans
• Time It Will Waste:  May extend to your off-work hours

Word Whomp

• Rating:  4/5
• Description:  One part scrabble, one part wheel of fortune, this is for you brainy types
• Time It Will Waste:  More than a trip to the bathroom

Robokill

• Rating:  4/5
• Description:  You are a robot, you kill stuff
• Time It Will Waste:  Long enough to realize that you’re rocking the video game tongue

Tecmo Bowl

• Rating:  5/5
• Description:  The game that stole a significant amount of my childhood is now playable online for free (as are many NES games on this site)
• Time It Will Waste:   As long as it takes for you to get Bo Jackson or Walter Payton 5,000 rushing yards and a championship

I’ve been finding and playing lots of great little browser games lately.  My laptop is not the top spec so many pc games struggle on it which is why apart from games like Spore and World of Goo i prefer to play flash browser games, they take up no room on the hard drive and dont slow the pc down.

Here are some that have captured my mind and wasted minutes of my life.

Windosill

Dream Chronicles

Dicewars

Llama Adventure

Fly Guy

My latest game enjoyment on Facebook is Bowling Buddies. All these games are just a bit of relaxation and diversion and are something to fit in spare moments. But, damn, they are addictive.

Funmin.com is a gaming website which provides a wide variety of free online javascript browser games. It’s one of the highly ranked website out of the network of websites of HIOX India. Known for the exciting games it has. Funmin.com has come up with the release of yet another set of newly designed games. Spend your free time playing online games, as exciting as never before. The company has decided to add new features to make gaming exciting by giving importance to high scores, month wise, year wise and to display only the first ten top score for that particular month.

It’s a common scenario in all offices or household to play online games. To get a whole new experience in gaming people try different games, as games have become a favorite time pass of people who are internet savvy. Games bind people for hours together on the internet looking to better their scores.

Rajesh Kumar, MD of HIOX India said that Funmin.com is one of the favorite sites suited to all ages, as all games listed are simple to play. It was focused to provide interesting games that are simple to play and get high scores fast. He further said that the three newly released games “Swap Game”, “Brain game”, “Color Line Tetris game” were designed to be simple and funfilled.

The Swap Game is a board game to swap the pawns in two different colors to the opposite board. The scores are calculated based on the time and the number of moves made. The pawns can be swapped either vertically or horizontally between adjacent pawns only. Just click the mouse to swap the pawns, it not that hard for anyone to play this interesting game.

The other game that was released is the “Brain Game”, yes as the name suggests, the game needs some brain to play this game. Not just brain a little memory too, remember the randomly generated numbers inside the bubble that appears for few milliseconds, when the number alone disappear click the bubbles in the ascending order, the random numbers appeared. One can get high scores remembering the numbers.

“Bejeweled Color Line” is expected to attract more visitors as this is an easy to play game.

Scores are added when similarly grouped color boxes are removed. Get more points by grouping more number of similar colored boxes and removing them. It’s also challenging as all color boxes need to be removed within the time limit. Challenge your friends and relatives to play this game to beat your score.

Check out all three games released to get ranked by Funmin.com, provided get scores that are within the first ten high scores.

Kopfrechnen is a german word for mental arithmetic. In the following game you have to add numbers to a sum that is wanted as fast as possible with many summands as possible. My actual high score is 22466, can you get higher?

Kopfrechnen Game

So, I saw in my blogs’ stats that someone came by, by searching for “how to install ikariam sexy theme”. Once more this saws how people, even if they don’t express in words, are easily read. Google owns us all. But what if we own google? I advise you to find out how to use smart keywords in order to find really useful things like top secret documents of governments, or databases with user names and passwords, or even online webcams with no security.

Anyway, back to our subject. First of all you have to use Firefox to install a script that will make your life easier. Then you shall add the greasemonkey add-on (by the way, as a good (wo)man that you are, think of a donation you cheater). Now to the most interesting part, by searching in google for “greasemonkey scripts” you will find what you want, but that would compromise you! So here is the direct link. You can thank me in comments by the way. Note here that these scripts are illegal by the games’ moderators, also known as wankers.

This will be your academy from now on

Now, as for the useful ikariam scripts here are some. Ikariam Reloaded removes the silly ads, and replaces them with some useful stats like your selected city generals. But be careful with that! You can be found because you use too much bandwidth of their servers. Ikariam Empire Board, adds a table in the bottom of the page with information about all of your colonies. By using that you are not able to be found since it only reveals information once you’ve opened the exact page that it wants. Ika-core-SearchTools, adds an information bar on your left, with search capabilities, but you should be aware that you are easily spotted by using the search tool to find a players’ cities. However Ika-core-SerchTools are useful for their feature to inform you about you total army in your cities page, without going to your barracks, and also adds information on your city, about which buildings are available for your resources to upgrade.

And finally our most interesting part, the Sexy Theme. You can use it freely and no one will find that. I guess the wankers are using it already. Happy gaming fellow humanoids. God be with you!

Update: The problem for finding a players’ cities is solved with that tool. The wankers can’t simply find you with this, so use it freely.

Update 2: Seems that for some reason that page is down. But we were winning and without it, so…

Update 3: Here is the list of the legal scripts. Not that you want it anyway…