Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: This game provides a really unique mechanism, which I haven’t seen in any other online game before. The concept has a similar feel to other progressive puzzlers. You must make your way through a series of increasingly difficult courses and pop all the balloons you find. You accomplish this feat by maneuvering two little smiley faces called Globz. The two faces are joined together by a string. When you click the mouse one of the Globz anchors itself to the ground and the other one spins around it. You wait for the spinning glob to aim the direction you want to travel and hit the mouse button again. It then anchors itself and spins the other Globz. You have a red and a yellow glob and each of them can pop the blue balloons, but you must also pop multi-layered balloons and each Globz can only pop a layer of it’s own color.

You will soon discover that many of the walls on the courses are secret passageways to other areas of the course and you will also discover hidden bonus hearts and other obstacles and traps as the levels progress. The game play is unique and fun, but the fact that you must pop all balloons in under a minute on each course can make for some frustrating and frantic gameplay.

This game is simple and effective and a lot of fun. But don’t get on my case if it bursts your bubble.

Review: It’s another hectic stressful shooter for all you gamers who need to take out a little agression. This one has an inventive setting and structure. Basically, you wander down the photo-realistic streets of what looks like Manhattan. The quality of the video is quite good, as if you are watching a film. Hovering in the foreground of the picture is your hand with a finger pointed like a gun. Every once in a while you stop and all sorts of devilish cartoon characters rush out of doorways and sewer drains and start running towards you intent on smacking you. You must shoot your finger at them in order to kill them before they hit you.

Each time you take a hit from one of the critters, you lose one of your hearts, and you only have four hearts to start with and those toons are ruthless. The variety of characters coming at you include speedy fanged cats, bobbling gumdrops and snakes with cannons for eyes. The controls feel a little wonky and aiming can be a bit tricky. As you progress little cardboard boxes appear which give you power ups, like devil horns. You can also save your progress at certain points throughout the game and even challenge a friend to play with you. I found the game a little difficult to master, but kind of cute and original in it’s unique design and gameplay.

If you hit the space bar it activates a flying duck, but I haven’t been able to figure out what purpose the duck serves. It just flies across the screen quacking, but you can neither shoot it, nor does it appear to help you destroy the enemies. Maybe I lack enough focus to figure out what purpose the duck serves, but I’m sure gamers who enjoy this type of challenge will have no problem discovering what is probably obvious.

Review: It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a quiz game on this site (in fact it’s been a while since I’ve reviewed any game on this site). So here’s a fun quiz game from the folks at Buzzdash.com.

First select one of the categories for your quiz. You can choose from several subcategories within Entertainment, Sports, News & Politics, Business & Finance and Other. After selecting your area of expertise, a 15-question quiz will start. For each question you will get several multiple choice answers to choose from. The questions don’t ask about facts, rather, they ask about matters of opinion. For example, the game may ask you “Which of the following movies is your favorite?” You must answer how you think the majority of other players have already answered. So basically, don’t necessarily want to answer how you normally would, but rather, what you think the collective group of users have chosen as the most popular answer. After you answer each question, you will get a point if you chose the most popular answer others have given. You will also get to see the percentages chosen for all the other answers.

This fun quiz gives a little perspective on how others in the world think about things. Most of the time if you just follow your instincts, you’ll get the correct answers easily, unless you have totally lost touch with the pulse of the world. Give it a shot. The interesting questions often have illuminating answers at times. Although the quiz creates a fun diversion, the lack of bells and whistles and compelling game-play lost a few points from me, but you should still have some fun, especially if you enjoy second guessing what others have to say.