Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Guide the red ball towards the red square by drawing lines for it to bounce off.

Review: This game falls into a certain niche of ball and paddle games where you have to draw the paddle or course for the ball to take. You need to reach the red rectangle by bouncing or rolling your red ball into it. Each level has an established course of lines already drawn. You accomplish your goal by drawing additional lines, ramps and bumpers to guide your ball in the right direction. You can pretty much do this fairly easily as you have no limit to the amount of lines you can draw, but in order to score high, you must draw as little as possible and try to finish the multitude of levels as quickly as possible.

The red ball definitely has a very persistent bounce to it and if it lands straight down on a flat surface it will bounce in place indefinitely. Some courses require a little creative thinking to get your ball to have enough momentum to move over obstacles. Also the sides of many of the courses often need patching up because the ball cannot bounce off the screen.

I found the game fun to play despite it’s relatively simple solutions, however, you must play through all the courses in order to get a score and there are a lot of them to play. If you stop midway through the game, it will not save your progress, so make sure you have a good half hour or so to play the game. The only drawback I found to this game lies in the drawing mechanics. Sometimes if you draw a line off the screen and release the mouse button, the line will continue drawing when you move your cursor. This can result in unintentional lines and having to clear the board several times. Fortunately, you are able to reset the ball when it gets stuck and you can clear all your drawings by hitting the ‘C’ key.

So give your right brain an artistic drawing challenge and your left side a physics based puzzle challenge and have fun with this cute little game. If you get bored playing the game, you can try out the level editor (in the options menu) and design your own courses.

Object: Keep your balls in the air as long as possible.

Review: Here’s a fun ball and paddle game. Throw your three balls up into the air and then continue to juggle them by bouncing them off your paddle one at a time. Each time you hit a ball, your score increases by 10 points. Make it to 1000 points and you reach the next level. Each level makes things a little more difficult. For instance, level two decreases the size of your paddle a bit.

It’s fairly easy to keep your balls in the air. (I wish it were this easy to actually juggle balls in real life). The balls seem to come at you in a steady rhythm, so you won’t have to worry about having to hit two balls at the same time. I found that if you guide the balls close to one of the edges of the screen, they get a little easier to control. If your balls get too spread out, you can tap them back in line by hitting them with the edge of your paddle. When you lose a ball it will hit the ground and start flashing. You can relaunch it yourself or it will automatically launch after about 5 seconds. But beware, you can only drop 5 balls before your game ends.

These five ball and paddle games each give their own unique flair to the genre. Some are more difficult than others, but all of them have good replay value and are fun to play.

In this fun skill test you simply click on the soccer ball and it will fly towards the wall at the end of the room. Hit the white rectangle on the wall as many times as you can in the time allowed. To increase your time, click on the random number bubbles that appear every once in a while. Try to get as high a score as you can.

In this game you control a purple sponge with eyes and bounce your ball around the course. There are floating bananas which send your ball in different directions like pinball. If you hit the green thingy, you get another ball added. If you hit the red thingy, you will be able to shoot pretzels. Different things happen depending on what you hit. You only get one life and you get 10 points for every second you stay alive, with an extra 10 points per second added for each ball in play.

The higher your score when you die, the better your rank will be in the end. Ranks are the funny part of the game. If you die right away, you will be ranked with a pile of poo or a butt. I worked my way up to “Susan” in a few minutes. But, since you only get one life, this game usually quickly comes to an abrupt end, just when it starts getting fun. The fact that your cursor remains visible is a slight annoyance. Also, when you get to fire pretzels, you can’t just hit the spacebar like in some games. You must click your sponge paddle directly, which almost always causes me to lose track of the ball and die.

How many balls can you juggle at once? In this game you must bounce the falling juggle balls off of your paddle. But you must draw your paddle in the air each time you use it. Click and drag to draw a straight blue line. The line can be flat or can tilt at an angle and you can draw it any length you want. But the shorter the line, the higher your ball will bounce. The lines only stay visible for a few moments, so you have to draw them when your ball is close enough to make contact.

Use your ball to collect stars in the sky and you can also touch question marks which add additional balls to the field. This is where the juggling aspect comes in. I really like the way you draw your paddle in this game. It combines elements of a good drawing game with a traditional ball and paddle game.

In this interesting game from Gas Games your ball is inside a shape. Starting with a 5-sided shape, the amount of sides grows as the game continues. On one side of the shape there is a thick line, you must maneuver your ball so that it hits the thick line. When you do, another thick line will move into place another wall of the shape. Keep hitting the thick lines as they move inward. Each time you hit a line your time meter increases a little bit. But watch out, if it gets to the bottom before you finish the level, you will die.

The game is fun for a while, but the controls have a definite drag to them, which makes moving the ball somewhat muddy. In later levels the perimeter shape will turn slowly making it harder to hit the appropriate side of the shape. And as I said before, the number of sides will increase as the game progresses.

This is your more traditional ball and paddle game, but it is very colorful and fully realized. Each level displays a bunch of multi-colored bricks, which you must smash with your ball and paddle. As in games like Arkanoid, special items will emerge from broken bricks which give you special powers. The items are broken into two categories. ‘Ball items’ give you extra points or change your ball in some way. These remain floating where the brick once was and you must hit them again with your ball before they disappear. ‘Paddle items’ give your paddle special powers like size increases or firepower. These items will fall from the bricks and you must catch them with your paddle to activate them.

Some special items aren’t very helpful and others will automatically blow up big chunks of bricks or catapult you into the next level. You get three lives, but they go quickly. Luckily the game provides you with a password each time you start a new level. The paddle itself has two bumpers on the sides which will dramatically increase the speed of your ball. I found the angles that the ball bounces off your paddle to be unpredictable. In other words, it won’t always go the direction you think it should. Again, your cursor arrow remains visible during play, which distracts from focusing on the paddle itself. But this is a minor annoyance for an otherwise nicely constructed game.

If you enjoy Ball and Paddle games, check out these previous posts:

7 Ball and Paddle Games You Won’t Want To Miss
Mmeoww - Game Review
Magic Ball Bounce 2 - Cool Ball/Paddle Game

And as always, you can find all games reviewed on this site in the All Games Section.