Any sort of on-going feature runs the risk of running into problems concerning quantity or quality, and with Monday Flash it’s definitely a case of the latter. I get my web games via osmosis from the dozen or so games-related sites I keep up with, and while there are still lots of the things popping up, many of them are too similar to games I’ve already discussed here, to simple to merit talking about, or just not very good. The artificial need for a theme between games I started forcing on each installment wasn’t really helping either, though that’s more the fault of my own OCD issues than the community of web game developers.

So I’ve decided to throw the doors open a little wider. Monday Flash is now Monday Games, focusing on any and all sort of game that is digitally distributed and can be grabbed via the internet tubes connected to your computer. While it means not everything talked about will be as OS agnostic as a web game, it’s an excuse to talk about the great many downloadable indy titles to come out of last year and (if January and February are any indication) this one with the same sort of almost-certainly-intoxicated vigor you’ve come to expect each Monday night/Tuesday morning. Web games will still make regular appearances, though the number of games will depend on how much there is to say about something (and, of course, and much I’m in love with the sound of my own voice at the moment). Regular service to begin next Monday, barring unforeseen complications or another ride home spent lost on the F train.

Desktop Tower Defense has become something of an institution in the last several months, which isn’t too surprising – in many ways, it encapsulates everything great about the tower defense genre (a wide variety of oncoming creeps and towers to stop them with, the sense of out-thinking the inevitable) while branching out into several fantastic new directions (dozens of play styles, no set paths to have to build upon, fostering a community by way of forums).

StormWinds is a different take on the genre entirely: while there’s still towers, and still things what need defending from, it offers up a 2D view of the battle field and a far more hectic (and potentially more exciting) experience than most of its forebearers.

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.

But oh, what a game I’ve brought you. Off-Road Velociraptor Safari is exactly what it sounds like: a mad dash through a possibly prehistoric, possibly hallucinated landscape filled with lush jungles, towering cliffs, inexplicable ramps, stacks of crates and, of course, deadly velociraptors. Built in a mere eight weeks by Flashbang Studios, it’s very nearly more fun than anything has a right to be. Multiple screen grabs included this time, as I’m not sure any number of single shots could properly capture what’s going on.

Every inch of Velociraptor Safari rejoices in being a game, at throwing as many things to do and as it can at you with never a care for how well it all fits together. With a wide sprawl of landscape to run through, just enough physics to make the gravity grabbing you at the height of a jump feel real without killing your buzz, and yes, many, many raptors to run over and capture with the immense spiked ball on a chain that pops out of the back of your jeep, there’s more to see, do, and try than could ever be accomplished within its five minute time limit. It’s not just a playground, it’s recess – you’ve got just a little while to get done all the things you want to do and everything else has to wait till next time. Lucky for you (and very, very unlucky for any sort of productivity you might have cobbled together up to this point), the next time is a mere mouse-click away. I’ve spent far too much time already leaping off of the various cliffs, ramps (are those repurposed solar panels? If not, why not?), and finding as many ways as possible to wreck my jeep in the allotted time that actually catching dinosaurs becomes something of an afterthought. That said, knowing I can point my jeep at a raptor and run it down whenever I like is the sort of option more games should include. Brain Age, take note.

Here’s a video of the game in action. If you played Splume, the rather great puzzle game talked about here a while ago, you’ll already have the browser plugin necessary for the game to run. If not, it takes all of a few seconds to download, and is well worth your time. Did I mention the part about how your character, the one driving the jeep, is also a velociraptor? Only he’s wearing a pith helmet and a monocle? Oh, just go see for yourself already.

Timed Climb is perhaps the simpler of the two – your only goal is to time your jumps just so to get your ball higher than other people have. Nothing to it, right?

Only not. In addition to timing each jump, you also have to keep an idea on how much you’ve charged said jump before leaping. The longer you hold the space bar down, the higher you go. Of course, the longer you hold the space bar down, the closer you come to bouncing off the edge and into oblivion. Timed Climb is perhaps harder than many of the games I post here, and will probably require several tries to get the hang of. I justify this by pointing out the fiendishly seductive nature of it’s high score board: rather than presenting you with a list of the best players at the end, the game’s high scores are constantly displayed in the form of flags at each platform displaying the name and point total of the last player to get there. Even if no one tops it, each high score has a lifespan of only twenty days, with the its information slowly fading away over time. This is the real innovation (and hook) of Timed Climb – imagine Hillary reaching the summit of Everest to discover not only another climber’s marker already in place but a further ledge a tantalizing few feet above and you get the idea. Take a look at the other games created by esoteric developer ooPixel and it’s no wonder that this is the sort of thing they come up with in their down time. After all, these are the same people who looked at something like Asteroids and thought “Okay, yeah, great and all, but what it it were more RPGish?”

And then there’s Robot And The Cities That Built Him, a game featuring not only my favorite title of the year so far but possibly my favorite instructions screen ever. On top of all this, it confirms what so many of us already expected: listen to nothing but Bette Midler’s ‘From a Distance’ for a week, and don’t be surprised when your creative output takes the form of a game about genocide at the hands of an army of giant robots.

Robot a prototype built in seven days, is a simple enough game to play – build giant robots with which to kill humans. Use the hearts humans drop to build new robots or upgrade the ones you already have. Each robot begins losing life the moment it’s created, so you’ll need to build new ones to replace them or save up enough points to upgrade at just the right time. You can change a robot’s position by grabbing it with the mouse and moving it – drag-and-drop it to the right to make it the first line of offense in your war against the humans, or leave it more on the left side to mop up the extras. While the build menu shows slots for up to six robots, only the first two are in the game. These two types can be upgraded several times over, however, so you won’t even miss them.

Sure, Robot runs out of gameplay around the thirtieth city, but who cares? Should you even reach that point, you’ll have already realized enough different strategies to want to rampage through the game’s 2D world one more time. Warts and all, I’d kill to produce anything as engaging as this in a mere seven days. Bette Midler and all.

Once you inevitably exhaust Robot And The Cities That Built Him,, however, be sure to try out developer 2d Boy’s other game, the IGF-nominated wonder that is World of Goo. The game is coming to both the PC and Wii (!!!), but in the meantime you can try the student game that led to it all, Tower of Goo. This earlier version of the demo is PC-only, I’m afraid, but it’s well worth your time to find something that can play what is already promising to be one of the most innovative games of the year.

It’s not too big a stretch to say Doublefine played a big part in pushing me towards games as a career. Founded by Tim Schafer, he of LucasArts’ golden age and such titles as The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle, and Grim Fandango, it was their first game Psychonauts that pushed me into wanting a PS2 after… oh, a good five years of not owning a game console at all. A darling of a game in every way but the ones that make you money, Psychonauts reminded me what games could do and how, in the right hands, they could take you places no other medium could. It was as warm a welcome back to videogames as I could ask for, and when a friend-of-a-friend’s company in New Jersey was looking for game testers for a month, I decided to try it out. Coincidentally (or, y’know, not), on my first day of work they had the newest issue of Game Developer out in the lobby with Psychonauts on the cover. There are worse omens.

But as none of that has anything to do with Flash games, let’s see about getting on to the point. Doublefine are currently working on their second game, Brütal Legend, for the 360 and PS3. In the meantime, they’re continuing the proud and rather innovative tradition of letting their staff enjoy rather non-traditional creative outlets during development. It began during Psychonauts with a number of the staff creating webcomics, and it continues with the new game in the form of mini-games built in (wait for it) Flash. Both of the games featured so far were created by a handful of staff when they probably should have been working on something else, and both are clearly here because they made somebody – probably the boss – laugh.

Epic Saga: Extreme Fighter was the first to appear, greeted with appropriate fanfare not only on Doublefine’s own blog but on several of the more reputable gaming sites around. It’s a delicate metaphor on the human condition and man’s struggle to escape the shadow of his primitive ancestry presented through the medium of punching and kicking.

What Cursor*10 lacks in substance, it more than makes up for in style. The latest from Yoshio Ishii of Neko Games, it’s more than a spatial puzzle game – it’s a single player co-op spatial puzzle game.

As mentioned above, Cursor*10 is by no means deep – once you know what you’re doing, it’ll only about ten minutes or so to reach the sixteenth floor. But like a certain other unique puzzle game starting with P and ending in ortal, it’s not how long the trip takes you, but the journey itself. At the start of play you have ten cursors at your disposal, each with a limited lifespan. Progress is made by finding and clicking the staircase on each level leading up, some of which will be hidden in boxes or can only be activated with a button on the floor. Once your current cursor’s time is up it dies, sending you back to the bottom to start all over again with the next one. The goal is to get to the top before all your cursors are gone. I’d elaborate further, but I’m afraid I’ve already given away what makes Cursor*10 special. Suffice to say it’s one of the more unique twists I’ve seen in a game, and despite spending all weekend thinking it over I’ve yet to come up with any other place I’ve seen the same mechanic used. And when it (pardon the pun) clicks, it’s as satisfying a moment as you can ask for from a puzzle game.

Chain Factor, on the other hand, doesn’t feel so much like something new as it does the distillation of exactly what I look for in all manner of puzzle games. Since being introduced to it last week by Bastard Coworker #5, it’s completely taken over several seemingly vital parts of my brain with little hope of ever giving them up. Negotiations have failed, and I’m afraid my cerebellum – and now, of course, yours – must welcome its numbered disk rulers and hope for mercy.

The premise is maddeningly simple – drop disks into the grid and make them disappear by having their number match the size of the row or column they’re a part of. Gray disks can be broken to reveal new numbers, often setting off a chain of cleared disks that are worth more and more points. Every so often a row of grays appears on the bottom, knocking everything up a notch. If any row has over seven disks in it, the game is over. Like I said – simple. What’s not so clear is what about this formula makes Chain Factor so hopelessly addictive to the point that it’s occupied every ounce of free time (and more than it’s fair share of should-be-working time) I’ve had since last week. I suspect the answer lies somewhere with it’s creators, the always-fun kids at area/code, a company dedicated to creating games that intrude on the real world as much as possible. I don’t know what now-defunct ARG spawned this little flash-based puzzle game of pure joy, but I can only imagine the rest of it being something of a disappointment after its players found this. God help us all if they ever bring it to the DS.