Portent

This games takes the defence scenario but extends it by giving you the ability to build armies (using mana which is obtained by killing the baddies) and then you can go on the offensive. It’s a simple 2d left right scrolling and can be played with keyboard or mouse.

You have artillery in the shape of a bow and as well as earning mana during the battle, you also gain experience that can be used to upgrade your weapons, give you new types of troops. Great graphics, an ok sound track and just fun. Excellent.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This is quite tough as my lamentably poor score demonstrates. It’s table tennis (aka ping pong) playing against a touch computer opponent.

Just move the bat left or right with the mouse. Bounce angles seem determined by the point at which you hit- hitting the ball off the table is all too easy! But if you’re looking for a simple (albeit frustrating) game then give this a try.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

No, I’m not linking to a very dodgy porn site! (Oh dear, I bet I’ve started a new meme!). Siz|Easy lets you enter the dimensions of common objects and then shows them rendered using Flash with multiple views.

In the example show the objects are mobile phones and a pack of playing cards. The purple is the iPhone, the green a pack of cards and here are three other phones there including two Blackberries. it’s an interesting site and very well implemented though not a site I can see myself using that often!

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This is quite a neat way of showing recent stories about virgin brand businesses whenever they appear on the web. The flash animated radar (with a number of display options) shows each story as a star with older stories moving towards the periphery. Occasionally these fly into the centre so perhaps they’ve been updated or appeared elsewhere.

You can also filter on the various companies, I’d never heard of Blue Holidays or Virgin Comics. Hey this story might appear there in a day or two! Overall it’s quite a neat animation.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

This is a very clever bit of Flash programming. In fact the whole thing is pretty good. Normally when you look for books online you search rather than browse. It’s a way of life- Amazon have a couple of million books so how could you possibly browse them?

Well Canadian Chris Thiessen has worked out how, though at present there are only 21,000 books in his (I’d guess) Amazon affiliate store. The top one of the three screen shots show the whole bookstore at the top, each square is a rack. You can zoom in to see the individual racks (the middle shows one rack zoomed in) and clearly see the book covers. It always amazes me that it is book covers that attract people but it is.

The racks are laid out like in a conventional bookstore, but at least here you don’t have to worry about books in the wrong racks or trying to get to a book with people standing in the way! Just click on a cover and you get the cover plus details (shown in the bottom screenshot) with a link to buy from Amazon. I suspect the 21,000 selected for Zoomii are the top sellers which makes sense.

It’s a fast interface and works very well with a mouse wheel button for quick zoom in and out. I wonder if someone like Amazon would pick up this and use it. Could it be improved? Possibly. How about a pop-up that appears and vanishes (without clicking) giving a summary as you move over the book cover? That might eat up a lot of bandwidth of course! This site is highly recommended for being innovative.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I think this has been well thought out. Some levels are very easy whereas other take a bit more effort.

You get a set number of bombs on each level and have to propel the main character to the exit door. On some levels there are barrels which explode after a while or tnt which blows immediately. Add in crates and it gets interesting. As you can see I’ve reached level 19 so far. Not easy as on some levels you have only one bomb- eg level 16.

You don’t have to solve all the levels in one go. Once you’ve done a level you can restart anytime at that level. Nicely implemented with great graphics. Recommended.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

When I first saw this I thought it was one I’d covered before and it is a similar concept to that of Qbesq. You get a set of drawing tools, can vary the thickness, colour, intensity etc.

As the first tool you open with is a five mirror image, first efforts sort of resemble a kaleidoscope (well mine do, but I have the artistic soul of a donkey!), artists will find enough to work with. there is some beautiful stuff here. Nicely implemented.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

This is my mini city- not much to look at, but the more visitors it gets the higher the population becomes and then I can add industry, set up proper transport infrastructure, security, business and the environment. I’m not sure if they have to be unique visitors but would guess so or else repeat visits would clock up the numbers.

For once the link goes to my city called Portent999 rather than the site itself but you can set up your own free city and invite visitors. It’s a neat idea so long as people visit so come on everybody- turn my humble patch into a sprawling (but green!) metropolis…

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Popularity: 4% [?]

It looks rather bleak- you have a ball on the end of a piece of string. the other end moves with your mouse cursor so you have to drag it (the ball falls under gravity) and try and click on it.

I found it almost impossible until I learnt a trick. (Warning Spoiler). Drag the string to the left or right edge so the ball is half off the screen. then move the cursor off screen until it’s a few pixels away. Then a quick mouse move and click should hit the ball. What does it do? That would be telling!

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Popularity: 4% [?]

This is quite clever. You move a little man through a maze to get to the “end of screen” door, picking up keys to unlock barriers and avoiding jumping or moving onto the spikes.

So far so normal. However if you press the shift key, everything inverts - the screen dump actually shows the same screen twice, both normally and when it’s inverted. (Inverted 180 degrees and flipped colour).Lots of screens to get through and you will need to press shift as well as think outside the box. Very clever.

BTW, both this and the previous game are by Armor Games- a coincidence but also a tribute to the quality of their games. (And no I have no connection to them, financial or otherwise!)

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Popularity: 14% [?]

This is something of an epic game! One of the few Flash games that has a campaign. It’s the usual tower defence game except the view is sideways not a top view.

You’ve got 4 turret positions with a wide variety of weapons, most of which you can’t afford to start with but you earn points as you progress. It has the dumb logic that as your country’s last hope you are given a weak initial defence and the enemy always attacks starting with the weakest and gradually progressing to strongest. Still it wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise!

Beautiful graphics, decent but ultimately irritating music and great game-play make this an excellent diversion. I suspect it could be a real time killer so you have been warned!

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

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Popularity: 26% [?]

This is quite a fun diversion. In the centre is a rotating arm with various coloured balls attached. You have a ball shooting gun that revolves around the perimeter. You have to shoot the ball to hit other balls of the same colour so they fall off the centre.

It’s all about the timing and the first few levels are pretty easy. After that…

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Popularity: 13% [?]

This is a Flash demo of a C++ Physics engine. Yes it sounds like something only a programmers mother would recommend but some of the demos are fun such as the falling rag dolls pictured.

A physics engine is a piece of code that lets software model real world physics. A human can be thought of as a series of lines joined together (that describes the limits of my artistic ability!). But the angles that those lines make is constrained in the real world by bones, ligaments etc. Bending your arms back until they snap off is not a good idea!

In software a physics engine does that and lots more- objects roll or slide down slopes according to the pull of gravity and friction. This site shows a clever bit of conversion work off a C++ (programming language) physics engine into Flash. Very impressive.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

The point and click puzzle genre has grown out of nowhere over the last few years and there are lots of them around. The idea is that each screen is a visual puzzle. When you click on part of the screen something happens. You have to figure out the ordering and solve that screen.

Where they vary is the degree of animation, sounds etc and the difficulty of the puzzles. The Grow puzzles are more logical while in Curious you have to help the main character escape each screen. This is guaranteed to keep you puzzling for quite a while!

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Popularity: 14% [?]