Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Shoot all the baddies before they shoot you.

Review: This sequel to the popular Stickman Madness original is a fun action shooter game using stick figure men. The background locations are all black and white line drawings, but have remarkable detail for such a simple concept. The game plays like a first person shooter, you see your gun in your hand and enemy stick figures pop up from various locations and try to shoot you. You simply aim with your mouse and try to splatter their brains before they plug you with too many bullets.

You reload your gun by hitting the space bar. You have a heart meter on the bottom of the screen which tells you how many hits you can take before you die. You only get one life so use it well. Along the way you can collect health repair kits to give you back your health. The game doesn’t have any fancy AI schematic determining the enemies location or spicing things up with variety. It will play the exact same way each time you try it, so remember the locations of the enemies and the order they show up and each time you play you will get a little farther. Remembering to reload your gun every now and then is helpful too.

The splashes of blood that splatter with each kill show up in red against the black and white background and give the game some edge. But after you’ve gunned down enough enemies and basically “learned” the game, there is little to come back and enjoy again later. There are a multitude of similar stickmen shooters out there (why most of the stick figure games are always bloody shooters I don’t quite understand), but this one has a slick design and plays very well so it’s higher on the list than most.

Object: Destroy enemy pirate ships and collect gold to earn upgrades.

Review: Ahoy Matey! Grab your eye patch and parrot and take up arms as you command your very own pirate ship out on the seven seas. This elegantly designed game puts you right in the middle of a pirate ship battle. You get a bird’s eye view of the ocean and your ship. Beautiful water effects and clouds rolling by add to the ambience, as do the sounds of seagulls and a creaking ship. Steer your ship about the ocean playfield and fire your cannons to attack enemy ships. The enemy ships float into view one at a time (at first) and you must maneuver your ship so that you can fire cannons off of either side. You can choose which direction to fire (up or down) by toggling the V Key.

Use the space bar to fire all your available cannons at once and tiny black bullets will spew off the side of your ship toward the nearest enemy ship. Each ship has four number statistics next to it. The top number is how much gold the ship carries; next is the integrity of the ship (hit points); then the number of cannons the ship has ready to fire and finally the number of pirates on board. You must also watch your own statistics at the bottom of the screen. Make sure you maintain at least one pirate or the game will end. If you get close to a ship, you can dispense with firing cannons and go into hand to hand combat mode, in which case the ships will turn red and you will see the number of pirates dwindling as they battle away.

As you sink each enemy ship, you collect all the gold on board. After you have destroyed all enemy ships on each level you will proceed to a store full of pirate booty upgrades; which include a faster moving ship; a faster turning ship, more pirates, more cannons, faster reloads and other fun upgrades to help you out. The game proceeds in the nature of a simple RPG, in which you mostly do the same thing over and over to gain more gold and increase the strength of your ship.

I found the design of the game to have very appropriate graphics, mechanics and sound effects. The transitions between levels are smooth and fun to watch, but the game starts to hit the same one note repeatedly early on and I found too much randomness at play in determining which ship will prevail in a battle. Aim is important and holding off firing until you have a good shot will decrease your chances of firing off all your cannons prematurely. Also, strategic purchases between levels provide much of the strategy in the game. But, once out on the waters, you have little more to do than move about and shoot at ships and the game loses some of its steam after a few minutes of playing.

Like all the games reviewed at the Fun House, you will find something fun about this game and it’s definitely worth playing It will surely provide lots of fun for a certain cross section of gamers, so give it a shot and let everyone know how far you get in our comments section.

Object: Clear out a patient’s brain of all alien infiltrators.

Review: Have you ever seen the classic movie “Fantastic Voyage” about the scientists who shrink a ship down to molecular size and travel through a man’s body to help cure him? Well, this is that movie’s bastard grandchild in game format.

You control this groovy little robot wrapped in a protective bubble as it moves from a man’s hands, through his ear, into the depths of his brain. You have the task of killing many alien invaders which have made a home inside the patient’s cerebrum. The funky clicky soundtrack edges you on as you roll, jump and shoot. The aliens come in many forms. Don’t be surprised to see several cancerous-looking, floating, turd-like creatures everywhere you go, you can shoot them easily with your spacebar gun, but you will also face more curious aliens such as a bombshell housewife from the 50’s. Along the path through the gorily detailed brain areas, you will have to collect bullets in order to keep your gun loaded. They are stashed here and there.

The game has a few frustrations, namely the slightly difficult jumping mechanism. You have to do an awkward double jump to reach most every new plateau and it can get frustrating when you start to fall and have no way to save yourself. But, the delight of the game is in its fresh cartoony design which reminds me of Brak and Space Ghost Cartoons.

This is an original looking flash game, which uses photographic images, not only in the background, but in the foreground interacting with the characters. You start the game jumping from finger to finger on a giant hand and crawl inside a giant ear. I have yet to play too far into this game and I’m curious to see how far into this man’s mind we get to travel. This take on the action, side-scrolling genre is fresh and an example of what makes Flash games just so damned cool. So if you like exploratory surgery and getting into the meat of the matter, this game will surely appeal to you.