Pong reincarnated as a circle

Posted on October 22, 2006

The basic idea of Flashy is simple. You keep the green ball out of the circle in the middle of the screen using the paddle that looks suspiciously like a URL. Which it is. A URL, I mean.

It’s also a descendant of Pong. A great-grandchild of the black and white game that basically sparked the video gaming craze. Now with power-ups. That’s right. If the evil enemy ball hits a power up, something good happens.

There’s not much to say about this game except that it’s addictive in the way Pong was addictive. You’ll play it for awhile, and then decide you’d rather be serving food.

Simple games that involve protecting your territory never get old. Ever.

You can play Flashy for free. And as many times as you want, straight from blahbleh.com.

Satisfy your inner artist with guns and colors

Posted on October 21, 2006

This is mono (the game, not the sickness). It’s a shooter game that has a simple objective: change the black screen to white or vice versa. That’s it. It’s somewhat of the virtual equivalent of filling water balloons with paint, pinning them to a really large canvas, and throwing darts at the balloons.

Except you’re not throwing darts. You’re shooting white (or black) pixels at colored circles that splatter on your virtual canvas when you destroy them. There are some interesting effects that come from this game, and there’s even a cool feature that lets you see the final screen of your last game. You may take a while to stare at all of the pretty colors to get in touch with your inner hippie. (And artist. Don’t forget artist).

Gameplay is easy. If you have auto fire on, then you use your mouse to move around the circle shooter. You use the right arrow key to change the direction, but it will become increasingly worthless to do so. After you make more than 30% of the screen into black/white, the number of your colored circle enemies will exponentially grow and you will probably have a pretty good power up.

Power-ups come in the form of pulsing stars. Once you manage to pick up a power-up, you have a better weapon. Other items include a circle which increases your energy. Your game is over when you have no energy left (meaning, you probably hit too many colored circles). The only indication of how much energy you have left is the funky movements of the background and a change in the music.

Everything combined makes a pretty neat game that will effectively nibble away at hours of your time. Hours. I mean it. No matter how simple the game seems, you probably won’t make 100% of the screen black/white during your first try. Oh yeah, and the music is good, too.

This absolutely wonderful shooter will even be embraced by those who don’t like shooters. Although Binary Zoo created it as a test of their scripting system, I’m glad they released it.

Quadplex free for guests, but experience lacks

Posted on October 21, 2006

I really suck at Scrabble. My grasp of vocabulary? Okay. My spacial intelligence, however, doesn’t match up with my verbal intelligence. Meaning this: I can never make intelligent words with the little alphabets lined up in front of me.

But, I swallowed my pride and searched for a free on-line Scrabble game per request from a visitor. I did find a rather nice downloadable game, but it wasn’t free. I did find Quadplex, a seemingly ongoing multi-user game.

You can either make your own account or log in as a guest. However, making an account means you’d have to pay. And who wants to do that?

Needless to say, I played as a guest. All guests have an “F” rating on Quadplex, meaning that you have no experience. Or you really, really suck. Mine was probably both. I played another guest who probably yawned her (his?) way through our debacle of a game. I ended with a measly 180 points. Other guest had 300 points.

I guess that’s one of the caveats of not actually registering (and paying). If you play other guests, you don’t really know how good they are. Registering will let you keep a running “grade” so people will know how well (or not) you play.

The Java-based system works quite well. There didn’t seem to be any slowdowns and the system perfectly calculated points.

Anyone who knows how to play Scrabble can play Quadplex. In my case, that means I know how to play. Just not very well. I think I’ll stick to play Hang Kangaroo at Miniclip…

Quadplex is a decent substitute for Scrabble and you can play anyone. But to get the full experience, you need to register. I also wish the interface were a little nicer.

You can play Quadplex as a guest, which I highly recommend. Otherwise, you would have to pay to play.

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