Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Take back as many turkey feathers as possible and avoid the dinner table fork.

Review: Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Today the Fun House serves up a delectable Turkey treat. In this game you play as a gobbling turkey who’s been stripped of all his feathers. He fights for his life so he doesn’t end up as the main entree. Move your turkey around the checkerboard table and collect as many feathers as possible. Each round you have to collect an increasingly larger number of feathers within the minute time limit. Simply move your turkey over the feathers to collect them. Try to catch the corn power ups that fall. These power ups include: a turkey grower; a time slower; a magnetic feather catcher; a feather bomb; and a turkey speed increaser. You must avoid the pesky dinner fork which floats around the screen. Get too close and it will stab your turkey and hold it inactive for about 5 seconds.

This game has a lot of cute charm and makes a nice distraction for when the Tryptophan sets in. Of course, PETA will be on your ass for all the animal violence, but heck, you’re trying to save the turkey’s life, not kill it. Although the game includes cute graphics and gobbly sound effects, it won’t amaze you with it’s inventiveness. It doesn’t rank super high on the ‘collect and avoid game’ scale, but it definitely fits the theme of the day today and will provide a few laughs and a challenge that the whole family can enjoy. Wait, did I just say ‘ass’ in front of the whole family?

Object: Move your frog across the traffic and floating logs to the goal. Rinse and Repeat

Review: Everyone from my generation will remember the arcade classic Frogger. This game reached the peak of popularity in the 80’s when all the kids used to pump their allowances into the video arcade machines instead of towards the latest Xbox release. The object seemed simple enough. Move your frog from the bottom of the screen, through 4 rows of traffic and across 4 rows of floating logs into one of the 5 lily pads at the top of the screen. If you managed to get all 5 lily pads filled, you would progress to a more challenging level.

However, if you played at all like I did at that age, you rarely, if ever made it past level 2 or 3, because the game packed quite a challenge. So, now that we have reached the age where these classic arcade games have become quaint and antiquated, along comes an all new take on Frogger. In this version you don’t get the bird’s eye view of the traffic, but you must still use the same controls to accomplish the same task from quite a different perspective.

You start in front of several rows of moving obstacles and must move through them in a 3D environment. As you pass a row of traffic or floating logs the row in the foreground becomes opaque so you can still see what lies ahead, but now you can’t always see what objects will come moving in from the sides of the screen as easily as the original game. As you move side to side, the screen scrolls with you giving you different vantage points. Although you might assume the new version would provide you with more sophisticated controls along with the updated visual effects, you would assume wrong. Your frog still jumps quickly in one of four directions and you will have just as much of a challenge getting him across without him splatting or drowning as before…if not more so.

Despite the modern feel, the game still has all the charm of the classic version and having it in 3D now allows new players to experience the challenge for the first time.

Below are 8 interesting games in which the main objective is to survive as long as possible while avoiding the objects which are flying at you from various directions. The quality of each game varies greatly, but I included a good mix because even the simple ones are still fun to try. Many of the games are similar in concept, but each has it’s own unique take on the genre. I have presented the games in alphabetical order.

The designers of this game, Nicolay Edin and Axel Hammarback from nbstuff.com have based their game on Eskiv and they use a very similar concept with a few additions. You are a gray ball and you must use your arrow keys to move about the screen and collect as many green dots as you can. Each time you touch a green dot, a red dot will appear and start moving across the screen back and forth or up and down. Touching a red dot will kill you.

Along the way, special yellow dots will appear which give you special powers. This will either speed up the red dots, slow them down or make you invincible. When you are invincible, you can eliminate as many red dots as possible to clear out the board. Stay alive as long as possible for higher scores. A two-player version of the game is also available.

This is one of the few games in this list where you can actually touch the objects coming at you. The main objective is to keep your white ball on the blue square. This task is made difficult by the presence of about a dozen gray balls moving about the screen trying to knock you off. Stay alive as long as possible and try to beat your own high score. Designer Alex Heatonhas created a few other fun games as well.

In this game, the graphics are nicely presented and game-play is smooth. You play as a black square. Collect as many white circles as you can, while avoiding the dark blue circles. The circles all scroll in one direction across the screen, but unlike other games in this list, they don’t stay on the screen. So you should avoid getting too close to the edges because you never know when a bad blue circle will start to scroll from off screen.

Along the way, touch the yellow circles and you will receive special bonuses, which include, decreasing the size of your square, bonus points or making you invincible to all circles. On the other end of the spectrum, you must avoid the red circles. Touching them won’t end the game, but will cause adverse effects, like making all of the white circles deadly or speeding up all the circles.

As the game progresses, the objects start moving faster and your square grows larger in size, making it more difficult to fend off the enemies. If you’d like to play full screen try this link instead, but I couldn’t get the Michael Jackson soundtrack to play using this.

Dodge is a very simple game, similar to Ball and Eskiv. You move a blue circle with your mouse and try to touch the blue square randomly placed on the screen. Each time you do, another red ball will start moving around the screen, which you must avoid at all costs.

The difference in this game is that the balls don’t scroll in one direction, but move about in ping-pong fashion, so avoiding them is a little trickier. It’s fun to see how many red balls you can get on the screen at the same time. The game actually has a lot of replay value because it plays very smoothly and is a nice challenge, but the lack of audio and the simple graphics, make it less of a keeper than other games in this genre.

In this very basic game, you click and drag the red square and avoid the moving blue rectangles. Because of the somewhat shoddy mechanics of the game, this task is unavoidably difficult. It is possible to stay alive for a few moments, but touching the blue objects or the walls will instantly end the game.

I feel like this is someone’s first attempt at making a game. But despite it’s mediocre design, it is still an interesting challenge to try a few times. You might even get really good at it. The game doesn’t use randomization, so it will play exactly the same way each time.

If you’ve played Ball, then you’ve played this game. But this is the original that Ball is based on. Use the arrow keys to move your circle and touch the square, each time you touch a square, another blue dot will start moving back and forth across the screen. If you touch a blue ball, you die. Is this starting to sound familiar?

For those who enjoy this game, the designer, Jean-Francois Geyelin, has created a more intense version…Eskiv 2. The only difference I can find is that a few of the blue balls move at super fast speed, which makes the game a bit more challenging.

Designer, Brian Cable, has a completely refreshing take on this genre of gaming. Instead of controlling just one object you control a formation of several objects. You start with four tiny white dots which stay in an ever-changing formation. The formation slowly morphs into other arrangements and the entire formation slowly rotates as well. From the sky fall various colored dots. You must avoid touching the colored dots with any of the dots in your formation. However, the colored dots can move through the space between your dots.

The game slowly increases the speed each time you up a level. And one nice feature of the game is that if you touch a falling white dot it will join your existing formation and make it larger. This adds to the fun, but also makes it harder to play. You can add up to 5 white balls creating a formation of 9 balls. This game is a lot of fun and has great replay value.

This game is manic! Another winner from mofunzone.com, it is probably the most fully realized game in this list. Your cursor is a little spinning object which you control with your mouse. Move it about the screen and avoid the variety of objects shooting at your from all directions.

The number of different enemies you will face is vast. Each one has its own technique for killing you. Many just hurl across the screen, but there are some that move along the edges shooting bullets at you and others with other devious surprises. Along the way your special abilities will increase. You will get partial shields rotating about you and friendly satellites which will ward off enemies. After you complete a few levels you will be given special defenses, like invincibility, which you can trigger using your number keys.

The biggest drawback of this game is that it doesn’t save your progress and the splash screens between level-ups can interrupt the flow of the game a bit. But the sheer amount of inventiveness the game employs in trying to destroy you will keep you moving about frantically.

Let us know what you like or don’t like about any of these games in our comments section.