onlineguy’s blog

I may have said this before, but I grew up in Michigan, and went to school in Kalamazoo.  With that kind of background, it's inevitable that I know, and love, the game of Euchre.

Euchre is a card game, somewhat like a truncated form of Bridge.  Four players are arranged in two pairs; partners sit across from each other, and cannot see each others' hand.  Table talk is, er, frowned upon (back when I played in college, it was worth a swirly....).  The players only use half a deck, the 9, 10, J, Q, K, and A of each suit, and the 5s are kept as score cards (each team uncovers a dot for each point earned).  The object of the game is to score 10 points.  Points are earned for winning at least 3 out of 5 tricks in each hand.

At the beginning of a game, one player chooses the trump suit.  There are various rules on how this player is selected; he can be the guy to the left, right, or across from the dealer.  In any case, the lead position rotates around the table with each hand.  When a player leads, he can call a trump and play card, or pass.  When a suit is trump, its cards are the highest ranking on the table, in order of rank, with one exception: the Jack of trump and opposite-trump (the other Jack of the same color) are the bowers.  The right bower, the Jack of trump, is the highest card on the table; the left bower, the other Jack of the same color, is the second-highest.  Because 4 players only receive 5 cards each from a total of 24, there are always 4 "mystery discards" to figure into your calculations.

I won't say too much more about the rules, mostly because I haven't played in 15 years.  That'll change soon, though, because I just found free flash Euchre games at Yahoo Games.  You can check them out at this link.  I like the simple graphics layout, the basic game rules, and the interactive nature of the site.  It's a good place to learn, or re-learn, the game of Euchre.

I'm a big fan of the Age of Empires game series (although they're not flash games, and they're definitely not free, so I haven't talked about them here), but it's possible to find similar games at the online flash game sites.  On such game is called Imperium.  I found it at FreeWebArcade.com.

This is definitely a fun little game.  You start on an island, and can choose one of two cities as the center of your empire.  You'll need to build resources: food, money, wood, iron, steel, etc, so that you can increase your population, build armies, and conquer the rest of the island.  Take over every section of the island, and victory is yours.  And how sweet it is, too.

There are levels of complextiy to this game.  First, you need to balance your empire's production, imports, and exports to maintain an every increasing level of prosperity.  The status bar will show how you stand on various items, whether they are increasing or decreasing.  If anything gets into negatives (wood or food, for example), your citizens will start leaving your city, abandoning it and leaving you without workers to produce or soldiers to defend.  Defeat will come swiftly.

You'll also need to build a balanced army.  Make sure that you establish a mix of sword-soldiers, spear-soldiers, archers, horsemen, etc.  An unbalanced army will go down to swift defeat, but a well balanced force will be almost unstoppable.

Overall, I liked this game.  The graphics are a bit cartoonish, but in whimsical way that was kind of fun.  There is a very detailed help section and tutorial, which will teach you how to play and win, and several difficulty levels to choose from.  This game gets a good rating from me, but not from my boss at work....

Here's a cool game, from www.Freewebarcade.com, one of my favorite flash game sites.  The game originated on www.Kongregate.com, another great site for free flash games.  The game I'm talking about today is called Battalion: Nemesis.  It's a fun little game, with all of the typical strategy game features: players take alternating turns, there are 'peices' with different ranges, strengths, and abilities, and each round is played on a set board.

In Battalion, you're the Red Team, and you're faced off against the Blue Team.  You command a variety of land, sea, and air units, including infantry, tanks, battlecruisers, and bombers.  The Red and Blue teams alternate turns, and on each turn, you can move every one of your pieces towards several objectives.

The most basic objective is to attack and destroy the enemy units.  You can also use your infantry to capture oil rigs, which provide an income stream, allowing you to repair damage units, or to capture 'warfactories,' where you can build new units.  Capturing properties has two advantages: you can gain resources, and at the same time, take resources away from your opponent.

The game has three levels of difficulty, and the computer opponent gets progressively smarter and more aggressive at the higher levels.  Also, there is a 'boot camp' option, which you can use to learn how the various units move and fight, before starting the full campaign.  There are 10 levels to the game, each tougher than the last, and at the end the story line (which I haven't really mentioned, because I usually just ignore games' storylines) resolves itself.  Sort of.

I give this game two thumbs up.  Try it out.

I've talked about genre games here before, interactive fiction and tower defense, specifically, but today, I want to talk about strategy games.

Strategy games are something that we all know about, even if we don't know that we know.  Checkers and chess are the two classic examples.  Personally, I rather like chess.  It's an ancient game, with simple rules, set pieces, and nearly infinite possibilities.  I was surfing around online, and found this site, Chess.com, that has a good online flash option to play the game.  I don't recommend choosing the 'easy' level; the computer player will simply stalemate you instead of checkmating you, but that could just be because I'm not a very good chess player....

Another cool option on this site is the "turn-based" game.  You can set up an online game with a friend, and simply play at your own pace.   The site will notify you when it's your move.  If you want to play with chess books and tips, and slowly massacre your opponent, this is the option for you....

Anyway, I'm really talking about chess as a strategy game.  It's got all of the features of the genre: a set playing field, pieces with individualized ranges, strengths, and moves, and alternating turns.  The Internet has taken this game genre to a whole new level, and I'll talk about some of those games in later posts, but Chess, that classic, ancient, orginal game, had all of the features centuries ago.  There is nothing new under the sun.....

Check out this game: Defender Y3K.

It's a tower defense.  Basically, you have a pathway to defend, and enemies, "creeps," are trying to travel that pathway and penetrate your base. You build towers along the path, to destroy the creeps.  The towers have different capabilities: range, firepower, cost.  You get points (usually shown as $) for every creep you kill, and can buy additional towers and upgrades on the towers you possess.

Sounds very simple, but what it really is, is high addictive.

There's nothing about this game that I don't like.  It's got constant action, colorful graphics, and not too many bells or whistles.  Those colorful graphics are simple line drawings, making the game fairly easy to follow; you're eye won't get confused by a flood of moving shapes.

At the top bar of the game's flash player, you'll find two buttons: one sends the next wave of creeps before the wave clock runs down, and the other pauses the game.  In pause mode, you can adjust the brightness and volume of the game, which is a very useful feature at work.

In the bottom right corner, you'll find the various towers you can buy.  Clicking one will show its cost.  Clicking a tower you already have will show you its level (towers can reach level 5) and the cost of an upgrade.  You can see your score, displayed as dollars, in the upper right corner.

All in all, a fun little game.  Try it out. 

Stickmen.  We all know them.  If you play enough online games, especially action games, you have seen them.  The stickman can be your friends, they can be your enemies, they can die horribly in a thousand ways.  After all, how bad can it be to take out aggression on a stickman?

So anyway, I found a series of games called Stickicide.  I may have written up Stickicide 3, before, but I have found the game's author's site, Crazy Awesome Yeah, and it's got loads of kill-the-stickman games.  Including the first two Stickicides.

These two earlier games haven't got as good graphics as the third Stickicide, but they do have the same premise.  They even have lots of the same ways to die, and a similar metal soundtrack in the background.  Not to mention the deathscreams of the stickman. It's obvious, I think, that the first two games were work-throughs, as he tweaked the coding; the third game is his final product on this series.

He's got other game series on the site, too, and they all involve killing stickmen.  Definitely a good place to get some rage out, to get some aggression out, or just to enjoy some computer flash game mayhem with no particular karmic burden, if that's your outlook on life.

Me, I like to kill stickmen.  I don't know why.  I just like good shoot 'em up games, or crush 'em up, or crash 'em up, whatever.  Anyway, the stickmen must die, and this is the place to do it.  Give these games 2 thumbs up.

All right, here's the game: Stickicide-3, at one of my favorite sites, Armor Games.  The point to this game is to die.  As often as possible, as violently as possible.  It actually took me a couple of tries to figure that out.

You have a stick man, unlimited lives, and a 3-D maze to run through, full of ways to die in bloody, gory stickman horror.  The game is timed, and when it starts, you can just start running.  Don't bother looking for a way out of this deadly stick-world; there isn't one.  Just keep running, and try to look for all the ways to kill your stickman.  You get points every time he dies.

You can crash a car, crash a rocketship, run across a giant circular saw, run into a giant wood chipper, get crushed by giant plungers, simply fall too far, jump onto spikes, get shot by a laser beam, get hit by a giant fist, fall into the green kung-fu guy's pit... this list is nearly endless.

The game is timed.  At the end, your score is displayed, and you are insulted.  I scored 8050, got a D ranking, and was told, "You can do better.  Nobody sucks that much."

This is definitely a game for sick minds.  Fortunately, my inner child is a twisted little bastard.  If yours is too, try this out.

OK, this game was a blast.  Literally.  As in, blast the targets and watch 'em bleed.  If you like shoot 'em ups, mixed liberally with gratuitous violence, this is a game for you.  It's called 12 Days, and you can find it in the 'sniper games' collection at Freewebarcade.com.  It's definitely worth a look.

The main difference between this game and other sniper games is in the graphics.  12 Days doesn't just do the basic stick figures; the graphics in this game are full color, moving, fairly realistic.  The game interface gives you a basic wide view of an area, and you can zoom in, with a smaller rifle-scope view, to take your shot. 

Like many other sniper flash games, this one is embedded within a story line.  Honestly, I could have done without the story line; it wasn't very good, in my opinion, and it's main purpose was to set up the scene, and present you (the player/sniper) with a scenario and a mission.  Hints to solve the mission are given in the story sections, but the game's authors could easily have just presented the hints in a simple mission briefing format, without taking anything away from the game.

All of that said, you should set your morals aside before playing this one.  The story line makes you a Russian mobster's favorite sniper, so you can imagine the sort of missions you'll be getting.  You rarely get more than one or two shots to complete a mission, but if you fail, you can choose to redo and keep the game going.

I give this one a thumbs up; it was a fun waste of time, and some of the mission hints were pretty tough to figure out.  And every now and then, you just have to shoot stuff to feel better.  It's a little more socially acceptable to do that on a computer screen than, say, on a bell tower, isn't it?

Reading this blog, you may get the impression that I like shoot 'em up games.  Well, that's because I do.  Especially zombie shoot 'em ups, but sometimes, I yearn for something different.  And when that happens, I'll play sniper games.  It's a good way to get some aggression out of my system.

Sniper Assassin is a pretty good introduction to the genre. There are no bells and whistles in this game.  It's divided into missions, with a short introduction before each mission to describe your objective.  The game interface is pretty simple, too.  There's a dark screen, with a rifle scope view finder.  You use the mouse to move the scope around, to see what's out there (what's out there will be briefly described in the mission introduction); when you find your target, you just left click to shoot.

The missions get more difficult as you go through the game, but pretty much, that's all there is to it.  It's simple.  The bad guy is described as a drug dealer, and let's face it, who wouldn't want to be a sniper with a big cocaine distributor in his sights?  I give this game two thumbs up, one for simplicity and one for plain old fun.

The sniper game genre is something to see, really.  Most are pretty similar to Sniper Assassin; as I said, it's a good intro to the genre.  Some of the games you can find start bringing in added features.  In some games, as you score, you can improve your scope, your weapons, or your skill.  Other sniper games feature moving targets, or elaborate storylines.  Some, like this one, use simple stick graphics, while others have more realistic flash videos.  All in all, it's definitely a fun set of games.  I'll talk about more of them later.

Some time ago, I wrote about a cool little flash game I came across called The Last Stand; the premise is familiar to anyone who's ever seen a Resident Evil movie: mutated, flesh eating zombies are everywhere, killing folks left and right, and turning them into more flesh eating zombies that attack folks, etc...  Not exactly rocket science, but definitely the stuff that great video games are made of.

As with any good thing, once was not enough.  The makers of The Last Stand made a sequel, called orginally enough, The Last Stand 2.  You can find it here.

Like the original, this game is great.  If you just want a shoot 'em up, you'll be most satisfied. If you want a challenging video game, with multiple levels and non-sequential game play, you'll be even more satisfied.

In the original, there were 20 waves of zombies, and you could spend the time between waves repairing your defences, searching for better weapons, or looking for other survivors.  The sequel keeps all of that, but has improved on it.

Your searches are conducted according to a map of the whichever town you're in. You can search houses, stores, and public buildings for weapons, survivors, and travel supplies.  As you accumulate supplies, you can head out to other towns, search them, and slowly make your way to the coast, to catch the last ship.  You have 40 days of 'game time' to do this.  Don't let the timer run out, or you'll be stuck fighting zombies forever!

There are three specific points where Last Stand 2 improves on the original: you can arm your fellow survivors with the weapons you find; you can find some additional weapons (the bow is fun, but for ultimate zombie destruction, you'll want the RPG!), and you can set traps to keep zombies away from your barricade (bear traps and various explosives).

I will, without hesitation, recommend this game to all of my fellow geeks out there.  Stay in one night, order pizza, rent Resident Evil, and play The Last Stand 2.  Definitely a recipe for a good time.