Alpha Core

In another bold attempt to make you waste lots of precious time, I present to you Swinging Ball, a game by Kenji Sihan in which you… well, swing a ball around. It’s all pretty self-explanatory actually, but lots of fun!

It starts off easy, but after a while the levels get really tough. For me, the hardest was the insanely difficult ‘Final Fling’ level near the end. You’ll know what I mean when you get there.

For some mysterious reason, I always like a good tower defense game every now and then. They’re so immensely addictive and GemCraft is absolutely no exception here! In this game, you’re a wizard defending the kingdom against hordes of attacking evil creatures. The game is neatly themed and the whole wizardry thing is nicely integrated into the game, but nobody really cares about the story, right?

The general idea of the game is that you build towers along the path where the enemies walk towards their goal and in these towers you put crafted gems (hence the name of the game). These gems can be combined to create even more powerful ones. There’s lots of levels, upgrades and specials to keep you busy for hours with this game. Also very nice in this game is that there’s an overall skill point system so that you can spend these on several special skills that have an effect on all games you play from then on. This combined with a great game-play, makes this game a truly addictive and fun experience! For a more complete review, I would gladly redirect you to the Jay is Games article. Enjoy and let us know how you liked it!

Jay is Games is having their fifth casual gameplay game design competition. The game “Doggnation” by Bart Bonte is my favourite amongst the 21 entries. It is a puzzle game with 50 levels, in which you help a peaceful nation of ‘doggs’ upgrading their castle. For this you have to take care that the doggs carry the right amount of coloured blocks in the right order into their castle. Further instructions are available in the game. If you get stuck somewhere, scroll down for my walkthrough. Read more

Nobody might know it, but I just LOVE escape games.

In this kind of game you find yourself trapped in a room, often you don’t know how you got there and you never know how to get out of there again. Your task is then to look around in this room (meaning: point and click with your mouse) and to hopefully find things, which could be helpful for your escape. In a lot of these games you also have to solve some riddles or logic puzzles in order to get the next clue. Usually you can’t die in an escape game, but there are also some where you do, if you make a mistake. Most of them give you unlimited time, some don’t. I myself like the ones most where you can’t die, even if you try the most stupid things and take three days for it.

One really nice example (I think maybe the best I played so far) is the Escape Game [Vision], which I found recently. This game has very nice graphics, doesn’t require pixel hunting (searching for the tiniest things, which are almost unvisible for normal peoples eyes), but offers a lot of tricky logic puzzles and a reasonable storyline. It is not too easy, so I’d better give the link to the walkthrough as well.

If you want more afterwards, rest assured that there is an unlimited amount of free escape games online allowing you to escape from almost every scenario possible. Click here for a choice of the better ones and google for something similar to ‘escape game’ or ‘room escape’, if you played through all of these and still don’t have enough.

Don’t forget to also check out my post about Weekday Escape.

We were recently at IKEA to look for a piece of furniture and I saw that they unknowingly have some great Go equipment on sale at the moment. They’re selling a product called Pärlor which are basically plastic pots with a lid filled with about 100 glass stones for €1,50 (price valid until August 2008) of which you can see a picture I made here to the left. Although a bit small, they’re quite good to use as Go stones: there’s black and white ones, they’re quite equally round in shape and easy to hold with two fingers and even the pots are great to hold the dead stones in. They’re great to give Go a go without the need to invest lots of money into some decent equipment (board, stones and pots).

For those who never heard about the game of Go (also known as Igo, Weiqi or Baduk): The Interactive Way To Go is a great place to get you started understanding the game. You can then test your skills in a game against the computer with Igowin. To divulging yourself even further into the matter, I can highly recommend Sensei’s Libary which contains tons of useful information and strategy discussions. Very nice is Tsume Go Of The Day, which serves you a new Go problem every day. Nice to get those brain cells working early in the morning.

Update (March, 19th): I removed the link to the Tsume Go Of The Day website, because it seems to have been taken offline. That’s very unfortunate, because it was one of my favorite sites to visit first thing in the morning.

If you want to play the game online, take a look at The KGS Go Server (KGS) or The Internet Go Server (IGS). Also take a look at MultiGo if you’re looking for a great game file viewer/editor. It also allows you to play against the computer if you install GNU Go next to it. EidoGo is also a very nice open source web-based editor and joseki tutor. Enjoy yourself!

David Scott created a sequel to Vector TD and calls it Vector TDx (here’s an alternative link without commercial). Because I’m so crazy about tower defense games, this game had to be posted on this blog as well. Enjoy! And if you get beyond level 27/50, let me know how you did it, please. These orange ones are so nasty in that level!

Armadillo Run is a physics game, in which you construct a path, using the materials offered and possibly not exceeding your limited budget, to help a rolled up armadillo getting to a blue sphere. But you’d better watch the movie to see what I’m talking about. The demo version is online as a free download, and even though it’s a lot more limited than the things the movie shows, it is real fun.

It’s been a while since there was a silly internet game worth mentioning. That’s over now! May I have the pleasure to introduce to you Sling, a game in which you control a little green ball of slime dangling, flying and bouncing around in 50 levels. The story is utter and complete nonsense and that’s great!

There’s also an easier Junior version of the game and soon there will be a sequel called Sling Fire. Enjoy!

Since almost a year ago, we’ve seen an enormous increase in popularity of the game poker, the Texas hold’ em variant to be more specific. I think it was around the time that the latest Bond movie (Casino Royale) was shown in theaters that I started to take some interest in the game. Sure, in high school we played some draw poker, but no game was ever as much fun as a regular hold ‘em one, simply for the reason that there’s a lot more interaction in this variant. The main reason for this are the ‘community cards’, a set of (eventually) five cards lying in the middle of the table that are shared by all players. Just two cards, called the ‘pocket cards’, are being dealt to every player at the beginning of every hand. These two cards are the only ones that can give you an edge over your fellow player. The community cards add a lot to the game and they offer a feeling of interaction. The game isn’t just about your hand and your luck drawing some cards anymore.

Update (October, 7th): NBC airs a great daily show called Poker After Dark and puts all episodes online for free. Watching the series is a good way to learn more about poker and to get to know some of the successful players out there. It’s really exciting and fun to watch! There are also some nice shows on Joost that are highly entertaining, e.g. the WPT (World Poker Tour) finals. Read more

Caesar & Cleopatra (by KOSMOS) is a game I recently picked up at the flea market at the IKEA Moorfleet parking lot in Hamburg. It’s one of the few two-player-only games in our collection. One player takes up the role of Caesar, while the other one ends up with Cleopatra. The subtlety of the game lies in the act that the players don’t battle each other directly, but rather try to gain as much sympathy as possible with the most influential politicians in Rome and Egypt.

It’s very nice to see how the game constantly re-balances itself. Winning one politician for you also means having a harder time gaining the next one for you as well. You can choose the pace of the game yourself by either openly showing which politicians you are interested in or by not revealing your intentions immediately. The game offers enough deceit, bluffing and suspense to keep anyone happy.

Until now the strange thing about this game is that the one who is winning in the end often did not expect this, while the one already celebrating his/her victory at the start faces defeat by a vote or two. This shows that the game is quite tricky, but therefore will stay interesting for a while.