Portent

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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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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Well I’ve been attacked a few times but having joined a big clan TIE-II – currently 8th in the ratings) helps. If I notice an attack on me, I can request help and repulse the attacks (hopefully!)

There’s a lot of resource management though not quite as much as Inselkampf. I’ve now got 4 villages. The first took 5-6 weeks to get it to the point where I could establish a second one. Now it’s about 8-10 days to create a new village (it’s constrained by culture) and I’m near to maxing out at least one village. You can’t build all building types so I’ve got one big military city and the rest are resource feeders.

The capital village can have resource (Wood, Clay, Iron and Wheat) producers raised to level 20 (That will take a long time!) whereas all other villages are limited to 10.

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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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MMO is short for Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to games where lots of players play er online- in games like World of Warcraft, Everquest and many more.

Metaplace looks interesting and I have signed up for the Alpha. The idea is that they provide the technology to let you set up a game, puzzle, role playing game in 5 minutes. Mind you, I don’t expect anything to be brilliant with just five minutes work- call me cynical. But you can reuse others work- inherit from them, with their permission. Metaplace’s technology provides the back end scalability to let lots of players interact in your world with 3D or 2D technology.

Each game is a website but with links to other games, well if nothing else it will provide lots of work for artists. Questions I have are – what are licensing terms regarding commercial use? How much logic can i put in to the backend server? If I make money out of this, what do I have to pay or is it even allowed? But it looks very interesting.

Warning – The site appears slow, I expect it is getting a lot of traffic so be patient!

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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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Well Electronic Arts have stepped into the free browser game with Lord of Ultima which can be best described as bits of Travian (village and buildings) plus the magic and fantasy of Might and Magic (with quests as well) in a very well produced game.

The game is played in cities and regions. Its the typical start from scratch and build farms, quarries, woods etc. These are quick to upgrade but to L3 takes about 5 minutes. You have a week to build a stable economy and a good defence force. After that you are a in the cold hard world.

Add into this the region map where other cities can be found an attacked (and constructed). Graphically this is light years ahead of Travian but also in depth (magic, quests!) and breadth and the tutorial quick start where you get rewarded fr getting going (same as in Travian) works very well. Also there’s a shop where you can buy things to help you in the game. For now I’m not going to do that but it may be that its what is needed to do well.

There are currently 24,000 players on this server. Impressive though obviously all aren’t playing at the moment. More to come as i play this (if it doesn’t eat up too much of my time).

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I love playing simple wargames and this mini Command and Conquer clone is just 4KB in size. It’s part of a collection of games that are minuscule in size if not in intention. The source code was 32Kb in size (it’s on Google code), so you can play in your browser.

You will need Java if you wish to play it but it’s easily downloaded and installed.
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As you can see I won. Mind you it was on the easiest level and when they mean easy they mean very easy.

Playpen is an interesting idea. They’ve taken the mediawiki software that drives Wikipedia and a host of other websites) and created a Ceefax type graphical click and point adventure game.

Being a Wiki type site anyone can edit the screens and add new ones and there are something like 1,500 of them. So enjoy and if you’re creative or artistic add some more!

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A couple of years ago I started playing Travian, a free browser game of expanding your village and attacking other players set in the time of Rome with you being one of three tribes (Romans, Gauls or Teutons). I got knocked out but eventually realised, I’d been playing blindfold with one arm tied behind my back.

So I’ve rejoined and things are progressing slightly better. One thing I’d missed out on were the quests. Click the Soldier on the right to get these as you can earn grain, iron etc and speed up your growth.

Anyway, more as I progress. I’m only at position 5622 in the table so room to improve. I’m playing on server 6 under the name Portent.org.

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Coming Spring 2010 it says so any time now. Atmosphir is thousands of game worlds that you can play through and you can design your own as well.

It’s not 2nd Life but it does look fun in a 3D Mario sort of way. There’s a beta test that you can sign up to as well. I think calling it an Adventure game is a bit confusing as for a lot of people, Adventure games are text only puzzle worlds. There’s a pretty good video to watch, to give you more insight into what it offers.

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I’ve been playing this game on Windows for 7 or 8 years and it made it to the iPhone a few months ago. Although it’s ostensibly a wargame, it’s as much a puzzle. I’ve written about Slay Tactics on my darkgames.com website if you want more background.

The game is simple. You play against 5 computer players and have to expand your territory by conquering theirs. The game play is simple, just 4 sizes of soldiers with type 2 defeating type 1, etc. Each turn you can move any of your soldiers to any location adjoining the territory they start the turn in.

However the higher the type, the more support costs and if you buy too many and can’t sustain them in each territory (more areas provide more support) then all in that territory starve. Add in to this mix, support reducing wasteland that spreads fast and trees that spread slowly and it’s quite challenging.

Of course the move to a touch interface changes the character of the game considerably and the first version wasn’t much fun to play. The current version is much improved and if you like strategy type games this is definitely worth the £1.19 (UK) or equivalent.

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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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