Portent

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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Crazy Golf isn’t quite the right name but the game is pretty much that. See the white ball in the top level. Moving the cursor behind it, gives it a push forward. The white rings and squares deflect it, while the dark blue circles swallow it.

You just have to get it to the target- a rotating disk with the word next in it. Sounds easy but .. well see for yourself!

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It’s hard to believe, but Pacman is almost 30 years old! (Well 28 to be precise). Launched in 1979 it has been one of the world’s favourite arcade games with it’s four ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde.

This is a pretty accurate rendition and I am still as hopeless now at it as I was in the early 80s when I played it, along with the other classics like Defender, Gorf, Missile Command and of course Space Invaders.

According to Wikipedia there are 256 levels and a bloke called Billy Mitchel was the first person to be accredited with doing this. The last level has a bug and is supposedly unclearable. Read the Wikipedia piece for full details.
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This is a really simple puzzle but it makes you think.

Just place the hexagons so the number on each hex matches the number of neighbours. They change colours, green means too few neighbours, yellow is right and red iis too many. When all are yellow you go onto the next level.

As you can see I got to level 21. Some hexagons can’t be moved so it gets challenging. An excellent puzzle.

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I haven’t tried all 31 yet but the one shown is a clever game where you slide blocks of symbols up, left, right and down. If you get 3 of the same next to each other they vanish and you get points. Very simple but ingenious.

Also of note, if you want to learn how to write flash tiled games like this, there are a considerable number of tutorials on his site.

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I started playing this a few months ago and have played it for free (resisting the temptation to speed up building etc) and managed to get up to 13 cities before dropping because I lost interest.

Part of the problem is the alliance I am in, where my number of cities is about the same as the other 6 people added up together. But I still find it just too slow a pace. I’d log in and spend 15 minutes giving build and recruitment orders and ship resources so i could afford to get more Moonstones and thus more Barons and thus build more cities. But after a while that sort of gets very samey.

I think Travian had a better over all pace plus combat played a bigger part in that game. EA have done a very good job, it’s very well implemented but it needs a bit more balancing to give it pace. If that’s done (and an iPad/iPhone app that interfaced to it would be excellent!) I’d rejoin.

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I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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If you have ever tried to move two hands in opposite directions at the same time then and succeeded then you’ll feel right at home with this game.

It has a left and right screen and all you have to do is move the ball (use keys for the left screen, mouse for the right) to avoid the moving triangles. It’s a little easier that on one screen the triangles move left to right and on the other up and down. But trying to focus and control two at once will make your brain ache!
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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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The best way to describe Flash Earth is to place it mid way between Google Maps and Google Earth. It can draw data from Google, Yahoo, Ask, Nasa, Open layers or Microsoft but the views are satelite view so you see an aerial view rather than a map. What you can do with it is smoothly zoom in and out and rotate.

It’s perhaps more of a toy than a serious mapping website but I’m not denigrating it. It’s fascinating to look at something and then compare it with the alternative from various providers. One of them (Microsoft) has street names, so you get a Google Maps type hybrid view. What you can’t do of course with Google Maps is smoothly rotate the view- Flash Earth is very good and very quick at doing that.

It also has a decent search, which works with UK postcodes as well. Take a look at the postcode SW6 1TR. It’s where I work; the Empress State building near Earls Court (in fact next door to the exhibition centre). The google photo is maybe 1-2 years old but the Microsoft one shows it being refurbished about 5 years ago (it cost £90 million!) so the view looks like a building site!

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Two or three years ago this was all the rage. It's a simple puzzle, you have 12 objects, 6 either side of the planet. Just drag the objects onto the planet and something happens.  With each object dropped, all previously dropped objects can go up a level, unless they have reached their top level.

To complete the puzzle, you have to work out the exact order in which to drop the objects to get the finishing result.  With 12 objects that is theoretically 12! (12 factorial = 12x11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1=about 480 million different ways). It's not that bad, you can figure it out but you need to be logical. It's quite fascinating watching what happens and trying to suss the answer. 

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If you’ve ever tried the Visual Thesaurus which is a paid commercial service this is similar. Just double click any of the other nodes to see more words spring up. Mouse over them and you get a mouse-over type tip. A nice visualisation of word’s connectedness and meaning.

It’s very well done and even best is that it’s open source with the source code provided (Flash and PHP) and it uses WordNet the excellent open source database.

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A nice colourful and simple to play puzzle. It works on the same principle as the plastic sliding blocks puzzles I did as a kid, where I had to slide the pieces to solve the puzzle. I.e. there is one gap so you can move any piece that can go into that gap.

Here you click on a car to drive it into the space and continue until all the cars in each level are in their colour coordinated parking spaces.

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As you can see, compared to previously, things are looking a lot greener. However let’s not get complacent.

In case you’re new, I’m playing in a sort of Flash Sim City where the more visitors improves the city. Currently there are three places you can visit: (I get no reward except satisfaction).

• Increase Population
• Increase industry
• Improve the road network

Of course you can only visit each link, once per day…

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If you give a reasonable amount of cash to a Bafta (for Craft) winning company, the result is an excellent and quirky website.

Done completely in Flash, the basic concept reminds me a little of Danny Wallace’s “Join Me”. By doing real favours to others (eg Buy someone a drink, give them your paper, babysit etc), you can create a “favour” a little animated flatulent libidinous ball or join someone else’s flock, in both cases entering what you did. You can also win prizes.

You can also get new ideas by clicking on a favour on the home page. There’s an excellent animated video which is well, just watch it.

Production quality is very high I couldn’t possibly fault it. My only complaint is that it reminds me of Film websites; very high production quality but not built or meant to last. All websites (this one included) need to reinvent themselves, add new features etc. Favourfarm was created as a viral for vinspired.com a Youth volunteering site is such a good idea, it should be continued and grown.

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