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.
