Well, normally I don't check out sites like Yahoo Games; I figure I'd rather go searching for free games, and the best games on Yahoo are pay-per-download. Since I wouldn't be caught dead entering my credit card number onto the Internet, that sort of shut it as an option for me.
But, every rule does have an exception. I was browsing through Yahoo today, just to see what games I was missing, and completely at random, I clicked on a link for a game called Miss Management.
While I was reading it, I noticed something I hadn't seen before: a download for a free trial version. Since I am never one to skip a free trial version, I downloaded it...
It wasn't my usual sort of game. Miss Management puts the player in "Denise's" shoes; she's a brand new office manager, and has to figure out how to get the best productivity out of her staff while balancing their personality quirks with the incoming work. The staff's goals are simple: hang out in the kitchen, chill by the water cooler, take a nap, "chat up" the ladies, doodle on the whiteboard, etc... The company goals are even more basic: get the jobs done. The office manager is stuck in the middle, and also has to keep the employees from each others' throats.
That last is vital; if an employee gets too stressed out, he'll break down and leave, and none of his goals can be accomplished until the next day. Fortunately, coffee and donuts will help to reduce employee stress levels. They'll also lure breaking employees back to their desks.
I usually prefer action games, but this one was cute. I liked it. I'd even recommend it. At least, the trial version, if you're a cheapskate like me.
As regular readers of this blog well know, I write only about free games. I don't play games to make money; I play games to have fun and also for the sense of accomplishment I get when I beat my previous high score or when I advance to a higher level in a particular game.
Some of my friends like to play online casino games. These are games like online slots and online roulette, in which you can win real money but you can also lose real money. Sometimes my friends win and sometimes they lose, but they always seem to have a good time. I have nothing against it, I respect their choice in online entertainment, but it was never for me.
Until now.
While browsing around the Web, I discovered something truly unique and different. It is an online casino game in which you can win money, but you cannot lose money. Here's how it works.
The game is Tomb Raider video slots, and it is being featured in a free online slots tournament at All Jackpots Casino. To get in on the action, you go to the All Jackpots website, fill in an online form to register, and sign up for one of the semi-final tournaments. The top 50 players in each semi-final advance to the final tournament, where they compete for the $50,000 first prize and lots of secondary prizes as well. It's all free: the registration, the signup, playing in the tournaments. But the prizes really are real cash prizes. Now you see what I like about this game.
By the way, the game is a lot of fun too. I have always been a fan of the whole Lara Craft/Tomb Raider genre. In this game, Lara - with her skimpy outfits and her big guns - and all the other familiar Tomb Raider symbols and icons are cleverly worked into the format of a 5-reel 15-payline slot machine. So even if you don't win, you'll have fun playing. If you do win, it's even better. (What would you do with an extra $50,000?)
Stickmen are the staple of online games these days, it seems. So many of the games I've found and played have revolved around blasting stick figures that I can't help but wonder if it's a sign of some strange, programmer pathology.
Probably not; it's more likely a sign of stickmen being relatively easy to animate. In any case, stickmen are the usual badguy in a whole heck of a lot of bash 'em up, smash 'em up, crash 'em up, and shoot 'em up games, and they usually find morbidly amusing ways to die. And as usual, I am going to tell you about one of these games.
The premise is simple: the stickmen are tired of getting bashed, smashed, crashed, and shot, and have rebelled. They are on the march, out of your computer, and across your desk, to the window, where they will launch themselves into open warfare with the human race. And you must defend the world, with the simple items on your desk.
Your defenders are the sort of common desktop things that everyone has: staplers, pens, paperclips, calculators, cell phones and the like. These little guardians are armed, or course, and are more than willing to shoot stickmen on behalf in defense of the Earth.
I'll admit, the stickmen in this game don't die with any particular special effects (poof! and their gone), but there are a lot of them, and they keep on coming in wave after wave. For every stickman that your defenders kill, you receive a bounty of gold; you can use the cold you collect to buy upgrades for your troops. Make sure that you take adavantage of the upgrades, or you'll never be able to keep up with the stickmen; they get stronger as the game goes on.
I think I'll stop here; if I tell you any more, I can spoil the game. It's not hard to figure out, so go ahead and play, and if you want, leave a comment when you discover the winning strategy.
I blogged before about this site:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/
where I found a collection of the old interactive fiction text adventures from Infocom; you know the games I mean: the ones where you read a scene, type in your instructions, and get a response like this: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
That line, of course, comes from the classic game, Zork, and it's Zork that I want to talk about today.
This is the original interactive fiction text adventure. It started as a joke at MIT (at least, that's the legend I heard), and became one of the best selling computer games of the 1980s and '90s. So what is it?
It's a fantasy-adventure. It puts the player (that's you) into the shoes of an adventurer, looking the lost treasures of the Great Underground Empire. You start outside a small white house in a forest, and your first task is to get underground. Try not to wander into the forest; unless you stay on the trails, you can end up hopelessly lost.
Once you get underground, your task has only just begun. In order to solve the game, you need to collect 20 treasures, but it's not easy. Some can only be picked up after solving a puzzle, and others are hidden. Some parts of the dungeon are not immediately accessible, and other parts are very dangerous. You'll also have to deal with the troll and the thief, either of whom can quickly end the game.
There's a reason this game is a classic. Go and see it for yourself.
Really, I have always loved space invaders. It's one of the great games of all time; a true arcade classic. And what does this have to do with this blog?
Well, sometimes, a good game just comes on over and bites ya. I found a game on Yahoo News today. It was in my headlines. It's called Chicken Invaders, and it's one of the best free online flash games I've ever played. Here's the link:
http://games.yahoo.com/console/chickeninvaders2
It's a lot like Space Invaders; you control a spaceship, defending itself against an attacking horde. The horde, however, is chickens.
Yes, chickens. Those harmless fowl we love to eat, that grace our tables, that were the butt of so many Muppet Show jokes. They are flying down, sometimes in formation, to attack, and you must blast them. Your weapons can turn the attacking birds into well-done drumsticks, which your ship can pick up for extra points. But beware! These chickens shoot back, and if one of their eggs his you, you lose a life.
You start the game with three lives, and play until you run out of skill or luck. The chickens advance in infinite numbers, but if you like a good barbecue, and a good video game, that is no problem. Just blast away, turn the chickens into drumsticks, and have a great time. I give this game two thumbs up, without any hesitation.
A collection of the classic early interactive fiction text adventures from Infocom.
Any regular reader of this blog will know, or at least be easily able to figure out, that I have a geeky streak in me. A big one, about a mile wide. Yesterday, while web-surfing, I truly indulged it. I am now in Geek Heaven.
You see, I found a site that has an archive of old interactive fiction text adventures; the really classic ones by Infocom, like the Zork series. Here's the link:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/
To play a game, just click its link. That will open up a flash window, and then you'll see the game's opening paragraphs. Remember, these are text adventures; they have no graphics, so you'll have to read the descriptions of rooms and objects carefully to get the clues to the puzzles. It helps if you use the descriptions to draw maps of the games.
I used to play these games when I was a kid, and I'd almost forgotten how much fun they are. Almost. What I had forgotten, though, was how to win. If you try these games out, and get a little frustrated by them (it's easy, I know), here are a couple of links to help you along:
Maps: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Maps/
Solutions: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Solutions/
Use the maps first. Sometimes, seeing where everything is in a text adventure is a big enough help. If you get really stuck, try a solution, solve the game, and then play it again, half-blind. Don't be afraid to try wacky things in a text adventure, like jumping off buildings, eating and drinking weird foods, or reading any writing that you see. Sometimes it'll help to solve a logic puzzle; other times, it'll just get a funny result.
Oh, and one last bit of advice: the flash versions of these games cannot support the 'save' command, so if you get something wrong and die (this can happen all the time in Zork or Enchanter), you'll have to start over.
Have fun!
I was playing yet another free online game, but I should have just gone fishing.
I just played a silly game called Canoe Clobber. It was on the freearcade.com website, and it was harder than it looked. I'm not sure that I'd recommend this one, though. Read, try it, and decide for yourself....
You're a fisherman in an canoe, but you haven't got a rod and line, so you have to run over the fish with the canoe. The game has a 2 minute timer, and your score is based on how many fish you run over.
Sounds easy, right? The hard part was the trash which the current brings down. Every bit of junk your canoe hits takes points away from you; once your score hits zero, your canoe sinks and the game is over. Since the various items being swept downstream on the current can move pretty quickly, and can sometimes look alike, the fish are marked with a black bar. Just don't be surprised if you find yourself stuck, and forced to hit pieces of track, or large rocks, though. This game is tougher than it looks.
Personally, I didn't really like this one. It was silly, it was wacky, it just didn't appeal to me. I'd rather just go get a rod and take the kids fishing at the lake. Maybe we'll catch something, and maybe we won't, but so what? It's the fishing trip that counts, really... I'll review a better game next time.
I found another site, new to me, and chock-full of flash games. Free flash games, as usual, because that's my taste in internet entertainment.
The site is freearcade.com. It's pretty darn cool. A big plus for it, as far as I'm concerned, is the good organization. The games on this site are neatly arranged in lists, by category. I went right to the arcade games, and found one of my favorite games of all time. I suck at, and always have, but it's sill fun.
It's called Battle Tank on this site, and the colors are better than I remember, but than again, I remember playing this game on an old Apple-II series computer in a college dorm room.
Battle Tank is a point-of-view game; it put you in the driver seat of a tank, driving around a virtual obstacle course of geometric shapes and enemy tanks. You've got a small radar screen in upper left corner, showing where enemy tanks, and any missles, are in relation to you (you are always at the center of the radar screen; your "front" is shown by a triangle within the screen). The object of the games is simple: drive around and blast the enemy tanks before they blast you.
This game really took me back to the 80s. With its very retro, line drawing graphics, it almost feels like the movie Tron. Even with that, it was still a pretty cool game, and definitely entertaining.
OK, I know, I said I would keep this little journal about my adventures in flash gaming, mainly, but something happened recently that I just can't help but write about.
I went to a video arcade with my 8 year old son.
I haven't been to a video arcade since I was in college. Back then, may favorite games were the shoot-em-ups, like Lethal Enforcers, or the bash-em-ups, like Rampage. On either of those games, I was the master. Of course, it took a lot of laundry money quarters to get that good, but I was still the master. And there was a laundromat next door to the arcade, anyway. And a bowling alley on the other side. Talk about a slacker's heaven...
Anyway, back to my tale of gaming adventure, even though you've probably guessed it already...
I took my son to the arcade. He'd been asking for a while, and last Friday he brought home a particularly good spelling test, to I treated him. We played pinball for about half an hour, when I noticed an open game in the corner. It was Rampage. I had to introduce the boy to the joy.
We spent the next half hour in the guise of Godzilla and Kong, eating tanks and smashing buildings, while I told him how, when I was in college, this game was one of my favorites.
We went through a lot of quarters that evening, but I still had the touch, and left my initials for everyone to see.
Back to freearcade.com, and this time I was playing the Mower Mole.
This is an amusing little knock-off of the game Pac Man. It's a maze-based game, in which you move a mole around the screen to mow the lawn (he eats the grass). You have to be careful of the snakes in the grass, so they don't kill you, and you have make two passes over the whole lawn. There are mole-holes around the maze that you can duck in, too. These are especially useful to escape from the snakes. Finally, each level features 4 mushrooms, which, if you eat them, allow you to eat the snakes. Snakes do not come back once they are eaten, so these mushrooms are even more useful than the mole-holes.
The game controls are very simple: the arrow keys move the mole. The mazes get more difficult as the game progresses, and there are more snakes on higher levels. All in all, it's a good challenge as a video game, and a fun find as free online game.
I was surprised I liked it; I'm not usually a fan of knock-off or spin-off games. I didn't even like Ms Pac Man, and that was really just the same game as the original. I thought that the eat the grass bit was pretty creative, though, and having the mole make two passes makes the game a little more difficult, too. Go give it a shot.
One word of warning, though: do not try to play this game at work! It is highly addicting, and hard to stop...
