2 posts tagged “arcade games”

I like arcade games.  No surprise there.  It's that general facet of my personality which has impelled me to write this blog.  It's also impelled me (well, this happened first, really, before the blog) to seek out and find strange new game sights....

Yahoo's not a strange site, but it does have a large collection of games, including a selection of free flash games.  Since I simply cannot pass up a free flash game without trying to play it, this was tailor made for me...

The first freebie game I tried was called "Snowball."  It was definitely a fun one, and it got me to try several others, but those are for a different post.

Snowball is very simple: You're rolling a giant snowball down a mountain.  Along the slope are dogs, skiers, snowmen, Yetis, trees and houses.  Those first four can all be sucked into the snowball if it is big enough, but the trees can reduce or stop the snowball, and the houses will always stop it.

As you play, you can collect trophies for beating the backyard, regional, national, and world records for snowball weight.  There's no practical purpose to that, but is kinda fun...

Honestly, I think the real fun in this game is just to build up momentum, and see how big your snowball can get.  My personal best is 1605 pounds.  Maybe I'll beat that tomorrow, or maybe I'll just ry a different game.

In my last post, I talked about a website I found, http://flashgamesfun.blogspot.com, which is full of free flash games.  I mentioned a few of the games I'd tried, and liked.  In this post, I want to talk about one of my two favorites.

It's a genuine arcade classic.  It's Missile Command.  Well, on this site it's called Missile Strike, and the "attacker" is a wave of comets, not a wave of missile, but otherwise, it's the same, with good graphics.

You command a planet's defense system, and your mission is to stop the waves of comets from landing.  You choose to launch your missiles from either one or three bases, and the "game options" give you other choices, as well: the speed of the attacking comets, the speed of the defending missiles, the number of missiles and comets in each wave, the number of "big mutha" bombs you can launch.

Once the game starts, it's like the old arcade game.  You target your missiles by moving the cursor to where you want them to detonate; you shoot by pressing the mouse button.  When a missile detonates, it creates a short-lived explosion that destroys any comet it touches, so one missile can stop several comets. The waves are continuous, but each time you clear a level, your missiles reload.  If you run out of missiles, or face too many comets too quickly, you can use the "big mutha" bombs, which will clear the screen of comets, giving you a quick break.  As far as I could tell, there was no upper limit to the number of levels in this game.

The best part of it, though:  I don't need to use a roll of quarters to reach level 17!