6 Fun Games That Really Pop
September 1, 2007 No Comments
Pop goes the Weasel! Popcorn! Pop Rocks! Today the Funhouse presents 6 fantastic games that ‘Pop’. Each game either requires you to pop something or requires you to avoid popping something. You will pop many different items playing these games, including bubbles, balloons, numbers, tanks, daisies and circles. So get out your straight pins and get ready to have a popping good time.
43 Seconds - Pop Numbers Fast
In this simple test of speed, you have 43 seconds in which to pop five numbered bubbles in order as many times as you can. There’s not much more than that. The bubbles appear five at a time. Once you pop bubble number five, you get the next five bubbles. Each round of five, the bubbles get placed in a different configuration. Sometimes they are close together in a line or circle, other times they are spread out randomly over the play field or overlapping each other or larger than normal.
The game plays the same each time you try, so the replay value comes from trying to beat your previous record. I found the game a bit difficult using a track pad and even a mouse. If you have a Wacom Graphics Tablet, bust it out for this, as it’s much easier to hit the bubbles with a graphical pen.
The game’s soundtrack adds to the excitement with it’s racing game style dance music. The game includes 15 levels (with 5 bubbles each). If you can make it past level 10, then you possess super human popping skills.
Ball Revamped 5: Synergy - Pop a Daisy
This game provides hours of fun gaming as long as you have patience. Your task involves guiding a circular puck (which looks like a game of Simon) toward an square exit portal. The physics in this game cause the puck to slowly fall downward as gravity drags it lower. You use the arrow keys to gently tap the puck upwards or side to side and keep it floating. You can’t touch the walls or any other obstacles or your puck will pop and you have to start the level over.
The controls have a very unique feeling to them, the gravity really pulls your puck gently down and the arrow keys provide very accurate response. Never-the-less, it still takes a great deal of skill to master the controls, which adds to the challenge of the game.
The game provides several rounds of 10 levels each. The first 9 levels of each round include increasingly more difficult obstacle courses to make your way through. The 10th level of each round is a maze you have to make your way through. You can save your game at any point, which you will want to remember to do before closing. Most people will die many times on each level. Luckily, the level resets itself immediately so you won’t have much frustration doing the same task over and over.
The sheer imagination of designers John Cooney at jmtb02 studios is brilliant. The themes in this game change radically. The obstacles include exploding bombs, fire, water, wind, enlarged daisies, stars, and more. A lot of imagination and hard work went into this game as with the previous Ball Revamped Games.
Bubble Tanks - At War With Poppers
This game will make you feel as if you are floating along in the waters of the sea back in the beginning of time as a microscopic amoeba. Only you have a little bubble tank to ride in which shoots tiny red bullets at all the other amoebas.
Riding along in your tiny bubble tank you will run across little clusters of dark bubbles. If you shoot them they will disperse and leave behind a lighter colored bubble which you can collect to increase the strength of your bubble tank. As you work your way into other areas of the game, you will start to encounter enemy bubble tanks which shoot back at you. If they manage to knock out your supply of bubbles, you will be magnetically pulled back into the nearest safe area to collect more bubbles. But the idea is to knock out the other ships’ bubbles first. As you progress through a series of adjacent bubble arenas and acquire more bubbles, your tank and weapons will get bigger and better and so will the baddies. Other than that there isn’t much else to the game.
I really enjoyed the instructions for this game which lay in the background and you move your ship around the world to discover new instructions as you go. The game controls feel a little sluggish at times. You move with the keyboard and aim and shoot with the mouse. I found the enemy ships seemed to destroy me before I can even get aimed in the right direction. But the cute bubble graphics and the soft background music really add to the atmospheric quality of the game.
Boomshine - Popping Circles
If you’re the type of person who enjoys triggering chain reactions and just watching what happens, you’ll love this game.
The screen fills with a multitude of tiny colorful dots which gently float around. You must choose a dot and click on it, timing your click so that as the dot expands, it touches other dots around it causing them to expand as well. If you hit the right dot, you will set off a chain reaction of popping dots. In each level you are given an increasingly higher target number of dots to pop. The expansion of the dots last only a few seconds before they disappear, so you must wait until you get a cluster of them together before clicking.
Designer Danny Miller has created a really unique and elegant game. While gameplay doesn’t really involve much effort, there is a fair amount of strategy involved in waiting for the right moment to start the popping. Even though the game has a simple structure, it still provides a great deal of replay value and has a very calming effect on the player.
Sobics Fun Game - Teletubby Popper
At first glance this game feels like a ball and paddle game in the style of Breakout or Colibricks. But since you don’t have a ball or a paddle, one quickly realizes it falls more into the puzzler category.
The playfield includes several rows of colorful, balloonish, rectangular bricks. You control a little alien, which looks very similar to a teletubby. Collect single bricks or stacks of matching bricks from any column and move them to another column. Get clusters of four or more together and they all pop and disappear. As you play rows get added to the top, pushing the rest of the rows down (similar to Super Collapse).
To help you along, you can also use special dynamite bricks, which blow up an entire column of bricks at once. But your progress will be impeded by hard bricks which can’t be popped. The first 6 levels of the game are pretty easy, but the speed with which the rows descend gets faster after that.
The concept feels pretty familiar, but the cartoony slant, funky music and slightly unique gameplay make it a little better than similar games.
Touch The Bubbles - The Bursting Touch
In this simple game you only have to touch every bubble as it scrolls across the screen either vertically or horizontally. Simply move your mouse over a bubble and it disappears. Very soon, massive amounts of bubbles start scrolling across the screen making this simple task very difficult.
If a bubble scrolls to the other end of the screen, it will shatter like glass and you lose a portion of a heart. Lose three full hearts and your game ends. So the game is really a challenge to last as long as you can. Level one plays easy enough, but level two suddenly doubles the amount and speed of the bubbles making progress beyond that really tricky. You will want to make sure your mouse isn’t too sensitive or you have a graphics pad to play this. A track pad on a laptop, just doesn’t cut it.
When each bubble pops it sounds a musical note and at first it feels like you can create melodies from popping the bubbles, but alas, it’s just random notes. But it still provides a nice touch. The game ends far too quickly and the challenge doesn’t necessarily command a player to attempt it more than a few times.
Tags: Eliminate, Collecting, Physics, Obstacle Course, Puzzler, Shooter, Game, Elimination, Game Review, Games
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