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Video Games
If you're anything like me, you got Highlights magazine as a kid. It's always been a favorite of mine - probably because it's still on par with my current reading level - and I still cast furtive glances at it while waiting at the doctor's office. The best part, aside from Goofus and Galant, was the spot the differences game in the back.
Five Differences is a nice, grown-up version of the game. I don't think you need me to explain the rules too much, so I won't except to say you're given two images that are nearly identical but for five minute differences, which you're responsible for spotting and clicking on. My favorite part of Five Differences is the animation and graphics, which look like a slick cross between Adobe Illustrator artwork and flash. The number of differences you have yet to find is also worked into the current puzzle neatly, and it can be fun just to pick them out. A nice ambient soundtrack would work well here, but, alas, no tunes.
Go play Five Differences here.
Also, a note for you Scrabulous fans. I'm a big Scrabble fan, but I never got into the online version. However, if you play, you better do it while you can. It seems Hasbro has had enough of the copyright infringement and is looking to shut it down.
Who doesn't like dolphins, with their seemingly unbridled joy and willingness to please? Luckily, now, they can further entertain us with Dolphin Olympics 2. The game lets you use the arrow keys take control of a dolphin as you swim around, gain momentum, and shoot out of the ocean, ready to perform flips, corkscrews, etc., for our enjoyment.
You've got two minutes on the timer to score as many points as possible. There are a bunch of ways to add to your totals, though. If you can tempt the other sea life to follow you out, you'll get bonuses. Same goes for smooth re-entries, which, if you're able to keep going, will let you string together tricks for crazy amounts of points. Try the dolphin tailslide, as that's what makes this Olympian make those hilarious Flipper noises.
Play Dolphin Olympics 2 here.
You people suck! I come into this website looking for laughs and laughter and you people give me a game, no not a game...A stinking picture of a game I would really like to play at the current time. I would, without a doubt, never suggest this website or any other website to my friends that you have created or will create in the past tense of time. Therefore I am very appualed and diguisted with the work you have crafted.
Okay you know what..just forget that last comment
Thanks Anthony for that strange little play you just put on :). Game's fun, isn't it?
I can't quite explain my addiction to this game, all I do know is that this A & E camera crew won't stop following me around.
3,512,521. Longest combo 149 tricks. Beat That!! OK, so this game is a little addictive.
What an addictive game it is!!! Our first block class of junior high schoolers has became dangerously addicted. We have had multiple scores over 200 million with the highest being 256 million. Everyone should join in the thrill!!
fuck you
bgjkfioghjjkghhjb;fgkho;khfg GAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!
Games Joke (:
Much like foul-mouthed Irishman Colin Farrel's 2002 stinker, Afro Ninja's most recent in An Escape Series has you locked in a phone booth, though there's no crazy sniper with you in his sights. For some reason, though, you're locked in a phone booth (bumbling ineptitude, I imagine) and you have to get out. Despite the fact that you probably haven't even seen a phone booth in something like 20 years, the game is still a fun, but really tough, little challenge to figure out. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's unbeatable without the help of the handy-dandy walkthrough link at the bottom of the screen.
The Phone Booth feels a lot like those old point-and-click adventure games, like Shadowgate, that I spent most of my youth playing. If you're not familiar with the games, all you have to do is click on various objects and around the screen to move around and pick up things that will help you on your way. Unlike the point-and-click games of yore, the cursor doesn't light up when you move across something you can interact with. That said, it'll take some guess work to get moving. If you find this one a little tough, try the earlier games as they tend to be a bit easier.
Play The Phone Booth here.
Unrelated, I wonder if Afro Ninja is related to this guy, who never fails to make me laugh.
So CP's Brian Howard sent this game my way a week or so ago, and it's his fault I can't stop playing. Chain Factor is like Connect Four, Tetris, and Plinko had a baby. In the game, you drop discs, numbered one through seven, onto the board, one by one. The point of the game is to line the discs up in horizontal and vertical rows, thus making them disappear. It's a little confusing at first, and if you just start clicking away, it won't make any sense. The discs will only disappear when the number of discs in its row matches the number on it. For instance, if you have a four, a four, a six, and then drop a two into the row, the two fours will disappear. You'll also be given blank grey discs to drop, and they'll start to crack and eventually reveal a numbered disc that comes into play.
The real fun of this game begins when you start linking chains of disappearing discs together, hence the name of the game. They're pretty hard to plan at first, but you'll eventually start to get the hang of it. It's an oddly satisfying feeling to watch the chains unfold, kind of like when you'd clear a round of Tetris after that well was nearly full.
Go play Chain Factor here.
Don't blame me! Blame CP's Carolyn Huckabay. She gave me my first free fix. I've been p(l)aying every since.
Don't blame me! Blame my friend Diane, who got it from her sister, Ellen, who got it from her boyfriend. It's like an STD without any cure!
So, like turn-based combat games but does the fantasy or sci-fi genre not really do it for you? More of a nerdy, politico? Oh, boy, have I got the game for you. In the aptly named Campaign Game, you can step into the shoes of presidential hopefuls Obama, Edwards, Clinton, Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson (is he still in the race?) and duke it out over sections of the country backed by a CNN-inspired soundtrack. You get to hire three staff members (a combination of fund raisers, operatives, hatchetmen, and spin doctors, each with their own abilities) to do your dirty work for you, too, but decide carefully what kind of campaign you want to wage.
Campaign Game is tricky and takes some getting to, but, basically, it works pretty much like our political system: the more money you have the better you'll do. Money fuels your abilities and actions, like smear ads, rallies, and bouts of flag waving. There's an added bonus, which I didn't try, in the game's multiplayer mode, so call up your friends of the opposing faction and start flinging some mud.
Play Campaign Game here.
So, is it supposed to be exit or excite? Either way, I have to say that the word excite (or at least a clever version of it) isn't normally applicable when talking about spreadsheets. And, to be honest, it isn't exactly applicable with Excit over at Kongregate. The game dares you to escape a spreadsheet (gasp!), but does offer some fun puzzles as you progress through 30 levels. Think of this games as 2008's Portal, but for number nerds and accountants. Basically, you use the arrow keys to move your Microsoft Excel-like cross-shaped cursor out of the maze. Once you hit a direction key, it'll keep moving until it hits an obstacle. Make it to the green square, and you're off to the next level. One thing that Excit has going for it is that it's pretty much the most work-safe game ever made. Feel free to escape the evil clutches of the spreadsheet from your cube without anyone being the wiser (they'll just think you're really into your work). Go play Excit here.
Can't. Stop. Playing...
One of the things I miss the most about living in the suburbs is easy access to sledding trails. To this day, I'm still convinced that my friend Mike and I set the Havertown land-speed and distance record for a two-man toboggan at the local golf course (the secret is to wait until after dark when everything freezes over).
Luckily, even from the city or your office you can still get a bit of the sledding experience thanks to Line Rider. In the game, you get to draw lines (sounds fun already, doesn't it?) to create a course for a little dude on a runner sled to race across. It takes a little time to get the drawing tools down, but once you do, you'll be trying to get the dude to catch some serious air. The time and effort involved in making a good run reminds me a lot making courses out of those old plastic Matchbox car tracks or a jump over a flaming roll of toilet paper for your Evel Knievel stunt cycle. Of course, half the fun is when your dude bails and faceplants.
When you're done, make sure you check out the YouTube videos of the insane courses people make.
Go play Line Rider here.
This column touched on zombies a few months ago, but as far as I’m concerned it’s never to soon to revisit them. I stumbled across The Last Stand the other day, and it’s a nifty little bundle of zombie blasting, strategy and nerves made by Armor Games, which brought us the really fun Dark Cut 2 Civil War surgery simulator. In the game, you’ll take on the role of a nameless survivor of a zombie epidemic, holed up on one side of the screen behind a barrier of wood and metal scraps armed with only your trusty pistol. If you can make it to dawn and clear the first round of zombies, most of which are either of the lurching Shaun of the Dead or the rapid, fast-moving 28 Days Later variety, you’ll get 12 hours to spread between fixing your barrier, looking for new weapons, or searching for survivor (a little tip: I find that a six, four, two hour spread, respectively, works best). You’ll have to decide which strategy works best for you, and it can be tempting – and rewarding – to devote a lot of time to weapons hunting. If you find survivors, you can support up to six, and they’ll hang out behind your wall providing just a little help. After you acquire at least one additional weapon, you can pick your main and backup, switching between them in game with the spacebar. But, lookout, once you get the chainsaw surviving the required 20 days and nights to beat the game a cinch. Check out the game here.
I think it was around the time that Saving Private Ryan was released to mass appeal and critical praise that game developers turned their eyes on the World War II genre. Sure, Nazi blasting games like Wolfenstein 3-D on the PC had been around a while, but since the late ‘90s, you could count on a bevy of WWII shooters each year, and the Medal of Honor series has been one of the most long running and productive. Medal of Honor first appeared last year on the Wii with Vanguard, a game the received mediocre reviews on all systems but Nintendo’s, where it did even worse and was lambasted as a rushed port with awful controls. That said, many Wii owners might be cautious to pick up Heroes 2 – or might even be sick of the genre altogether – but the game does a lot for the future of Wii games by nailing the controls. One of my biggest problems with Wii games has been that not many developers outside of Nintendo have fully utilized the Wii’s motion controls, resulting in the games feeling like dumbed-down, recycled material. While Heroes 2 doesn’t wow in the plot or gameplay departments – it’s more of the same missions, equipment, and story – the controls are what makes it fun. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, showed that a first-person shooter could really work well on the Wii, and Heroes 2 takes that foundation on builds on it. Using the Wii remote to aim your weaponry and the accompanying nunchuck for movement, the controls feel intuitive, and you’ll get to do fun things like flick the remote to pump your shotgun and make overhand throwing motions to lob grenades into enemy machinegun nests. There's also a control scheme that supports the recently released Wii Zapper, but I didn’t play with one. The game also supports online play through the console’s built in wi-fi, and that works well, too, allowing you to take on up 31 of your friends in deathmatch and capture the flag modes. A veteran of a lot of PC-based multiplayer games, it took me a while to get used to the tv and not being directly in front of the screen. After about five minutes, though, I was scoring some points. And if you get bored with the single-player and multi-player modes, you can tackle a lot of the game’s levels in arcade mode, an on-rails shooter reminiscent of the old arcade shoot-em-ups. On the downside, the games sports some of the worst artificial intelligence ever seen in first-person shooter. Wave after wave of enemy soldier will sometimes completely ignore you, refuse to take cover, or run straight into your midst. Same goes for your squad mates, who seem quite adept at shooting up walls and closed doors for no reason. Overall, the game is pretty fun. It’s nice to see that EA did actually put some work into making this an actual Wii game, which hasn’t been happening enough in the console’s year of existence.
I've never played any of the Guitar Hero games, and even though I'm sure I'd be terrible at it (I tried the real guitar and the resulting sound was as melodious as, say, a pack of screaming babies) I still want to get it. The ridiculous price tag is what's keeping me from any rocking, so luckily I can bide my time with Flute Hero. The game works the same as the Guitar Hero games in that buttons that correspond with certain notes - in this case the number keys. In Flute Hero, there are 10, which makes it ridiculous, and I'm hoping the developer was kidding when they suggest that you hold your keyboard in the traditional flautist position. Of the four difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard, and insane) I did nothing less than horrible on the easiest. I suppose that makes me a flute loser, but, hey, at least it wasn't the piccolo, the dorkiest of all woodwinds (sorry piccolo players). I do have to point out that the game does have a volume knob that goes up to 11, a nice touch. Go play it here, but be forewarned, there is a cuss word used in the countdown to the game starting, so it's midly NSFW.
Guitar Hero is by far my favorite game! It's way better then dance dance revolution or pump it..
Are you able to play in expert difficult?
Imagine doing 100% in that difficult.. Sounds impossible right? haha
have you seen this video?
weshow.com/r/us/p/25092/100_on_expert_level
This guy managed to achieve that score.. That's insane!
I bet he is a professional real guitar player...
Hey im a flutist i want to try this OUT!! whoooooo this is soooo cool i have to tell mah friends!!!!!
Something to tweet about!
Jamie (Toronto)
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