In keeping with my half-hearted attempt at giving these posts a theme, this week’s games are all about doing something as fast as possible before something terrible happens. Twitch gameplay, with its focus on last minute saves and navigating swarms of alien bullets as if they were pedestrians on a crowded street, is my secret love; the secret shame of all my big talk about games being as welcoming as possible for players of all types. Sometimes nothing else hits the spot like a game that demands your full attention and sharpest reflexes. That time is usually an hour or so after I should have gone to bed.

Of course, our first game Fracture isn’t as hard as all that – it’s exactly as hard as it needs to be to trick you into letting your guard down long enough to make a crucial mistake.

I assure you, it’s more fun than the above image would suggest. Fracture is, at heart, a clone of popular Xbox LIVE game Geometry Wars (itself a clone of arcade legend Robotron 2084), and the gameplay is just as easy to grasp as its console inspiration: move with the arrow keys, shoot in a particular direction with the WASD keys, and avoid the waves of shape-shaped enemies that constantly appear to attack you. Simple, right?

And deadly. Your only help appears in the way of occasional power-ups that appear as you break certain point thresholds – gun upgrades, superbombs, and even an extra life or two, all of which you’ll desperately need if you want to stay alive for any length of time. And staying alive is the name of the game here; there’s no final boss, no last battle, no princess to save, just more and more enemies and the undeniable truth that eventually you’ll screw up and they’ll get you. There’s even a leaderboard to add your name to at the end, which is particulary helpful as it shows that no matter how bad you feel over how long you’ve been playing, there’s always somebody out there with cause to feel even worse. Only now nothing matters more than beating their score.

Fracture doesn’t add much to its gamplay lineage, but it’s biggest contribution – rubber walls that rebound your ship – is a fun one. My favorite tactic combines strafing with pinball, using a tight corner to bounce my ship back and forth while keeping the guns pointing in one direction to create an impenetrable wall of bullets. Maybe you’ll find your own use for them.

And then there’s TBA, where the only grim fate that waits if you aren’t fast enough is an embarrassing amount of time on the clock. But surely that’s enough?

In TBA, all you have to do is press the space bar at the right time to launch a ball from one cannon to another. Simple, again, but in its way every bit as nerve wracking as the next dozen shooters. Because all you can do is try to fire in time to fall in line with the workings of the technicolor Rube Goldberg machine that is each level, gameplay quickly becomes a series of leaps of faith, building in intensity and dread as the cannons you’re hoping to hit are place farther and farther out of site. By taking as much of the control out of your hands as possible, TBA is in some ways the essence of twitch gameplay, demanding more thought and speed from you than its simple design lets on. The ability to pick which level you want to play is always welcome, as is the color-coded success indicator showing how fast you completed a level. There’s always a second or two to be shaved off, and more often than not there’s a short cut demanding intense skill or sheer luck to help you do so. Perfect for a late night guilty pleasure, when just one more level isn’t going to hurt anybody.

Filed under: Flash Games