Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: Click on the type of label you would like to design, then add a symbol from one of the many available, type your warning text and click the ‘create label’ button and this site will generate a downloadable label for you to keep.

You can have hours of fun making signs and labels for your dorm room “Smoke Dope Only in Non-Flammable Areas” or your bar “Warning: No Vodka Martinis Allowed!” or for your kid’s bedroom doors “Security Notice: No one over 14 allowed without a hall pass.” The applications are endless.

Since you can type whatever text you like, this site has zillions of applications. But if you want a little more fun, make sure you check out the other iterations of this site by the same creator, JJ Chandler. Those include: Warning Sign Generator, Tombstone Generator and Street Sign Generator.

Review: This site is a work in progress. As it develops it promises to be a fun online toy to play around with. It currently doesn’t even have a working title, so I am calling it Sketch. Basically, the premise is pretty simple. You draw a shape or line with your cursor and as soon as you release the mouse, your drawing transforms into a weighted, jointed figure and falls to the bottom of the screen. It reacts like a series of attached sticks might react when dropped from a height. The objects have a certain physics applied to them and the more you draw, the more the objects pile up. Use the space bar to clear the screen.

The concept is more difficult to explain than to just see it in action. Try it out. I can’t wait to see what new features the designer adds to the application in the future, but for now, it is a pretty interesting drawing program which allows you to play around with your sketches after you make them.

Review: This simple game presents a grid of links (each link looks like a quarter circle). The links each start out rotated in random directions. You simply click on any one of the links and it will rotate one quarter turn clockwise. If one or both of the ends of the link you click connect with the end of an adjacent link, it will also turn clockwise and attempt to connect with its neighboring links. For each link that connects you get one point. Clicking on the right link can cause a chain reaction of turning links that can sometimes last for several minutes.

You must try to beat your previous score by finding the best link to click. The game has a unique quality to it. I haven’t quite seen this same premise before, but I had to dock it a few points simply because the user doesn’t really have much of a challenge, nor does he/she have much participation in the process. But still, clicking on a link that causes a long chain reaction does have some satisfying effect. It feels a little like getting a jackpot on a slot machine. So most people will definitely find this little game interesting for a while.

I found trying to strategize about the links a little too difficult. You can really only think a few connections ahead and the results always surprise you by being duds or by being jackpots. Despite the satisfying rush when first playing, the game holds little replay value and amounts to not much more than a cute time killer. However, props go out to the designer(s) of this game for coming up with a unique little interface. I hope to see more games by the same folks which incorporate a little more user interaction.