It’s the latest game from flash auteurs and former employers This Is Pop, and serves as a nice addition to their streak of bizarre and original diversions made for AdultSwim.com. I wrote the proposal for the game and did some meager early design work for it ages ago, and then chipped in a bit of play testing a few months back when it was closer to done. I’m happy to see the thing out in the real world, though I doubt that compares to the feelings of the people who put in the time to actually make the thing. Well done, you bunch of hideous perverts. I hope it makes you all so famous that everybody knows your faces, if only to save you the trouble of telling every parent you meet how many yards you have to keep away from their children.

Not sure I’ll have time to rewrite them, so you may just have to go without this week. I’ll probably include last week’s links briefly at the beginning of this week’s post or something. Carry on.

Update: it appears the Monday Flash post some survived mostly intact and hidden away as a draft, and should be going up in just a few minutes. Huzzah technology.

Anybody who knows what this first game is called, feel free to drop a line – I think its written in Chinese, as the site address points to it being hosted in Taiwan, but Babel Fish has no idea what to make of it and I can’t be bothered looking up a translation site not named after a Douglas Adams creation. At any rate it’s not the name that matters so much as the simple-yet-infuriating gameplay. See that little red box? That’s you.

It’s a simple concept – click and drag the red box to begin, trying to steer clear of the four blue boxes that immediately begin hunting you while trying not to run in to the black border. Once you touch something else the game ends, displaying how long you survived. As the time you get at the end will almost certainly be in seconds, trying again doesn’t represent any big commitment, so why not? My current high score is something like twenty seconds, and the number of actual minutes it took me to get there is a testament to how good this sort of game is at getting its hooks in. It’s not a deep game by any means, and you’ll never play it for more than a few minutes at time before getting bored. But it is the sort of thing that will always remain entertaining in small doses, a seemingly simple challenge that costs nothing to try but time and can never be conquered. It’s the oldest trick of games and puzzles, and still one of the best.

Boxhead: More Rooms is a remarkably similar game – navigate the room you’re in for as long as possible without letting the enemies touch you. It takes things to another level entirely, however, by having the good sense to include zombies, growling noises, and enough firepower to ensure the only thing with a chance of touching you is arterial spray.

Of course, it’s never actually enough – More Rooms is the classic lone survivor versus endless hordes of zombies (and occasional, inexplicable devil creatures), and there’s no way for that to ever end well. Luckily, creator Sean Cooper has ensured you’ll at least go out in style via an escalating array of powerful weapons and upgrades earned by killing as many zombies as quickly as possible. Each undead you mow down adds to your combo counter, and the higher that counter gets, the more varied your arsenal becomes. Things get really interesting when you realize the combo counter is also constantly going back down, which means you’ll need to let the room get a bit crowded if you want to earn wonders like a rapid-firing shotgun dealing four times the damage it normally would in a wide spray across the screen. Four difficulty settings and eight unique maps make More Rooms one of the larger Flash games around, and the interesting strategies that appear naturally in the name of survival show that all the hard work was worth it. I almost never do well enough to earn a place on the ever-shifting high score boards, but who cares? What good is momentary glory when there’s always a room full of shuffling brain eaters in need of a good shooting?

First is DEATHWORM, a game demanding to be typed in all caps if ever there was. DEATHWORM (Pronounced “DEATHWUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURM”, with the second syllable rising in unholy cresendo as you stretch it out) is the perfect answer to any and all holiday stress, as no other game this season will let you pretend to be the monster from Tremors with your family as everybody in the cast not named Kevin Bacon.

Yes, the gameplay is simple to a fault, and after a few tries you’ll realize that were it not for the extremely short timer cutting your play off unexpectedly you might never come back. What’s important is that this feeling doesn’t really hit until your fifth or six time at it, and by then you couldn’t care less. As the eponymous DEATHWORM, you have thirty seconds to devour as much as possible by bursting forth from the ground to consume houses, people, cars, trees, the occasional military helicopter, and more. By the time it hits home how hollow the game actually is, you’ll be too wrapped up in how many of those hippy hot air balloons you can consume before time runs out to notice. It’s not a lot, but it’s fun, addictive, and charmingly stupid in all the right ways. If you like it, by all means try it’s big brother and inspiration, the downloadable version of DEATHWORM. It’s Windows-only, but offers up so much more compelling fun than this version that it’s worth finding a way to play it.

And then there’s personal favorite Indestructotank!, which may not quite rate all caps but has certainly earned the right to wear its exclamation point proudly despite my distain for them.

I can only imagine the journey into stupid that would be trying to write a story for Indistructotank!, so rather than explain the “why” I’ll just go straight into the “how” – you are racing across a battle field in your – wait for it – indestructible tank, an unstoppable brute force that laughs in the face of danger and homing missiles. A nameless enemy has dispatched wave after wave of helicopters and airplanes against you, and the only way to take them out is to let their shots hit you and use the force of the explosion to propel you upwards so you can smash your indestructible ride into them. Doing so will send you flying even further up, allowing you to hit even more enemies and create chain attacks. With me so far? No? It doesn’t particularly matter. With Indestructotank!, all that matters is doing whatever it takes to smash yourself into as many aircraft as possible.

Only that’s not quite right, as you’ll realize the farther in to it you get. Smashing enemies gives you experience that goes towards levelling up, at which point you get a full tank of gas (did I mention the part about how, when you run out of fuel, you explode?) and the chance to buy more bad guys to fill the sky with. Having more things to bounce off of might seem great, as it allows you to create longer and longer combos and perform more ridiculous aerial acrobatics, but the only way to get the experience points earned from a combo is to end it by touching the ground, something which becomes harder and harder as the sky gets more crowded. It’s at this point, far into the game and with your pick of juicy targets to bounce off of, that you realize the truth: this isn’t a one-man war, it’s a suicide mission. And sooner or later you’re going to be stuck in mid-air when the tank runs out and you explode in a rain of shrapnel. It adds a wonderful and unexpected level of complexity to the game, challenging you to pull off as long a combo as possible while still keeping an eye on the quickest route to the ground. While the game starts off a bit rocky (it’s far too easy to die before you’ve gone up a few levels), it’s worth the minor annoyances at the beginning to push through to where a game that already breaks one convention by having you seek out enemy attacks breaks the one it created by having you learn when to leave that one last enemy alone in the intrest of surviving a bit longer. Maybe not so dumb after all, then.

This week’s games of note both come from the curious (but growing) genre of classic adventure games built in flash and playable via the web browser of your choosing. Quite naturally, the load times for each can be a bit of a bitch, between the rather high-level graphics and sound in each and the mechanics working behind the scenes, but it’s ultimately worth it as each game manages something genuinely impressive in a relatively small amount of space. Nit-pickers may argue that first game http://www.zapdramatic.com/mod1.htmMove or Die is a bit more “Choose Your Own” than pure “Adventure”, but these people should be disregarded. The puzzle blocks may be made up of words and emotional responses, but that doesn’t make them any less tricky.

The game opens with a man stumbling out of the woods and collapsing on an empty road. The road doesn’t stay empty for long, though, as mere moments later two friends speeding through the night run over him with their car. They stop to investigate, only to discover that not only did something other than their foolishness kill him, but he seems to be carrying a rather large amount of money for a vagrant wandering the woods. It’s at this moment that you, a nameless hitchhiker asleep in the back of the car up till now, wake up. You have to help the friends decide what to do not only with the body but the money he was carrying by arguing for and against the various pros and cons the situation presents. Even this short discussion is interesting, as the choices your offered for making your case cover a wide range of ground to argue from (including personal dreams, inner weakness, and fear in addition to expected angles like greed and logic). It only gets more complicated from here, as shortly after you get these characters to move in a particular direction some one shows up looking for the poor corpse in the road. It’s a game full of potential endings, and the arrival of this mysterious and menacing stranger can lead you to at least a few of them. Or it can lead you to the rest of the game, or somewhere else entirely. Whatever path you take through the story, though, it’s clear each of your actions have consequences both great and small for you and the other characters you encounter. As you progress a deeper mystery emerges, bringing with it harder choices and stickier situations where your conscious is truly your guide. It’s an incredibly complex system for a Flash game to run on, and clearly one created by somebody with not only a deep and abiding love for the Adventure games of yore but an eye towards what they could have become had the genre flourished. A lovely scene rewind feature is on hand to save you from any wrong choices you make, but this is that rarest of games that rewards even the mistakes you make with endings that feel natural to the story up to that point and a tease at later events you might miss out on.

Up next is Tipping Point, a more classic take on the Adventure game that creates a truly engrossing experience out of professional-level sound, graphics, and accessorizing herons.

You are a nameless couch potato, sitting bored and useless in frong of a blank TV in you shabby apartment at night. Passing out while channel surfing, you awake to a different program than the one you fell asleep to, one that seems to intrude a bit too much into the real world in the form of a gigantic bird perched precariously on your remote control. It’s here (as opposed to earlier) that things get weird, as a plea for help, a menacing automated cable channel operator, and a somewhat magic pocket watch lead to you being sucked into the pulled bodily into the scene on your TV. By turns simple and obtuse (again in the style of bygone Adventure games – specifically, those from once-great developer Lucasarts), Tipping Point’s puzzles offer a surreal challenge that so far feels all too believable. The photo-realistic graphics and quality sound work create a world that seems a natural fit for dream logic – of course the heron’s wearing a pocket watch, of course I’m wandering the beach I was watching on the screen just a moment ago – to the point that you never really question your action. Maybe it’s down to the load of point-and-click games I poured my free time into during my impressionable years, but Tipping Point so far feels less like a trip to aforeign land and more like revisting a favorite haunt.

Launchball comes via the London Science Museum and is all about getting a ball into a hole via any and all realistic (and sometimes less so) means possible.

First is Super Serif Brothers, which is exactly like Super Mario Bros. if there were only one of them and he were the letter “I” rather than a portly plumber with a tendency to dress as a racoon.

Pound signs (#) serve as the generic building blocks of levels, meaning anyting that isn’t a pound sign is special. Special characters can be used to navigate the level by serving as platforms, switches, exits, or things to collect. It’s simple fun, with some of the later levels getting pretty tricky. Miyamoto would be proud.

The real gem here, though, is the Level Pit, an ever-growing coloection of user created levels offering a vast array of challenges ranging from beginner to impossible. At the time of writing thre’s 3,556 of the things, all of which can be played for free. You can also play with the level editor (free and browser-based as well) if you fancy making and uploading your own. Like many other Flash games its simple appearance hides significant depth, and in this case the creators have managed to build a healthy and growing community around a simple browser game with no graphics and nearly limitless possibilities. Take note, MMOs: if you want your users to stay, give them the ability to make their own toys.

Next is Which Way Adventure, a choose-your-own-adventure game about nuclear annihilation, time travel, lady acrobats and manticores. Sometimes all at once.

Your options are truly limitless, provided you’ve ever wanted to destroy Western civilization, ride the rails as a hobo indefinitely, become a shoe cobbler’s apprentice, or be devoured by a manticore. In fact, no matter which way your journeys take you, odds are good you’ll wind up at the wrong end of said manticore, proving once again that art imitates life. Largely worksafe, depending on how your boss feels about crudely drawn cartoons of toppless circus women.

The reference here is only slightly less tenous than the Super Serif Brothers = Super Mario Bros. = Mario Galaxy one above. Tomorrow sees the commercial release of CSI: Dark Motives for the Nintendo DS, a port of the PC game from a few years ago of the same name that I produced. It might not seem like a lot, but this is kind of a huge thing – it’s a real thing in a real box on real store shelves, and it has my name in the credits section. I’ll talk more about it – and my actual job thing, which I just realized today I haven’t so much mentioned here before – over the next few days when I’m less about to pass out. In the meantime, if you or anybody you know are fans of the show or like playing detective in the style of the adventure games of yore, Dark Motives can be found at better videogame stores or via this handy Amazon link.

At any rate: games.

Orisinal, the site of Ferry Halim, has quietly featured exceptional Flash games since sometime in 2001. There’s no real rhyme or reason to how often a new one appears beyond “when its done”, nor is there any way of knowing when there’s something new to play besides checking occasionally or waiting for some other part of the internet to tell you. The only real common thread running through Orisinal and the work it hosts is the games themselves – each is based on a simple mechanic, some of which will be more familiar than others depending on the depths your game vocabulary. All (of the ones I’ve played) are controlled with the mouse, and all of them are about playing as long as you can before the game beats you. Even more interesting than that, though, is how many of the games are about helping some one or something – there’s precious little direct competition here, and more often than not you’ll find yourself in a support role as you help four burly men keep their grip on a rhino or guide a panda through the forest in search of food. That Ferry Halim’s games have quietly made him one of the most popular Flash game developers around is hardly any coincidence; he understands the core of wat we find appealing in games, and he gives it to us in spades.

I can’t decide if tonight’s games are my favorites because they’re the best work he’s done, or simply because they’re the most recent. Both are about helping someone else, and both are far closer to art than anything seen in a web browser is supposed to get.

Winterbells appeared about a year ago, and is still the first thing I instinctively click on whenever I visit the site. It’s about going up.

More to the point, it’s about a rabbit that wants to go up, and he needs your help. You guide him around the screen with the mouse, dragging it left and right to get him to follow the pointer. A single click is all it takes to make him leap towards the bells decending slowly from the sky, and each one you hit bounces him up a little further. Pouncing on birds along the way boosts your score and grants you even more altitude in the process.

The first thing that hits you is the soundtrack – light, playful strings that set the mood completely. This is a game, see – the rabbit understands he’ll never make it too far, and so should you. It’s not about the destination, it’s about leaping from bell to bell as you climb higher, each little ding signifying more points and a chance get that much farther than you did last time. Even when you fall for the first time – and you will fall, believe me – and feel your stomach crumple as the rabbit rushes to what must surely be his doom, the music never lets you forget that this is all for fun. There’s no real pressure, no frustration to be found here. It’s just playing for the sake of play. And it’s beautiful.

The Crossing comes from a similar place – jumping animals, helping, play till you lose – but carries with it a very different feeling. Using a paddle as a bridge, you help deer after leaping deer make it across a chasm without falling to their apparent doom.

But there’s more to it than just melancholy deer Pong. Music again – and again, strings – plays a big part in the experience, setting a tone that is almost haunting. While you’re not likely to play very long – even beauty wears thin with repetition, after all – you’ll probably stick around to note that it isn’t always the same deer you’re escorting across. While some can clear the gap in two leaps, others can’t quite make it and will need you to catch them a second time if they’re going to reach safety. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough of a poignant touch to make it all the sadder when one slips past you and falls in to the abyss below. It’s hard to shake the feeling that they were counting on you, and you let them down. You prick.

And it doesn’t stop there. While the remit of this self-appointed weekly spotlight says I only have to talk about two games, there’s a lot worth looking at on Orisinal, not the least of which is how Halim has grown into an impressive designer and developer since uploading his first title. I’m always enamored with watching ideas grow up in public, and few places offer a better view than Orisnal’s life story of one person’s idea of what games can be.

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?

Splume, like girls with bad name theory and the Q train, is the absolute wrong sort of thing to encounter at this sort of late and drinking time of night.

Level progression and degree of challenge move along as smooth as can be while the visuals and sounds lull you into the sort of puzzle haze the bravest of men are lucky to emerge from before the sun comes up. It’s Snood with a brain and an art style some one actually cares about – eyeballs watch and judge your every move before exploding in a squishy mess when matched, which is both extremely satisfying and a little sad. It casually surprises in the way the best puzzle games do, breaking conventions (like, say, the artificial boundries of the game world enforced only by the limit of the window size) as soon as you become accustomed to them. Proceed with caution and time to kill.

Hoshi Saga 2 is engrossing for entirely different reasons, opting to be frustratingly compelling instead of deceptively so. This is by no means a bad thing.

It’s a collection of thirty-six mini-games with the same instructions: find the star. The same trick never works twice, though, and the definition of “star” is hardly limited to a five-pointed drawing or heavenly body. There are several brick walls to run into here, but even more opportunities to feel immensely clever for working through one particularly strange bit. It’s also very much a Japanese game, and there’s at least one puzzle where you’ll have to dig deep down to find your inner otaku if you want to solve it. All in all its very well done, with even the gleefully obtuse puzzles showing off the skill of the developers. Should you run into a problem, ask for help in the comments section. I quite like the idea of this becoming a group effort.