Fugdale’s Funhouse

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.

Review: This game has a pretty original concept. You stand in a deserted wasteland. You resemble a stick in the ground or a tree stump of sorts. Below the screen you have a limited number of growth spurts you can choose from on each level. Each growth spurt grows your tree in different ways. For example, one button grows all branches straight out; another splits each branch off into a fork; and others only grow the right branches or the left branches.

Floating above, you will find several gold rings. You need to grow the branches of your tree in such a way that you can capture all the rings by moving your branches through the center of each ring. You only have so many moves you can make on each level to accomplish this task. The first 5 levels won’t give anyone too much trouble, but after that, things start getting more complicated and the game starts throwing obstacles in the way as well, such as sparklers which ignite your tree and burn it to the ground. Luckily you can restart any level if you mess up or if your tree burns down. And you don’t have a time limit to complete the task so you can take your time and try to figure out the best combination of moves to make to captures all the rings.

The game has 16 levels and as long as you play using the same browser the game will remember your progress when you come back. Give this unique puzzler a twist. It’s great for arbor day fun.

Review: I might have a difficult time describing this game. It’s one of those you just need to play once or twice to understand how it works. But let me do my best. You start with a six by six grid which contains various sized blobs of green goop. The blobs come in four sizes–small medium large and full. You have 10 ‘drops’ in your tank. You use a drop, by dropping it on any one of the blobs. When you do this, the size of the blob increases one step. When you drop on a full sized blob (a large circular blob) it will explode sending liquid in all four directions. The liquid that moves across the board hits the next available blob and increases it’s size by one.

So you must use your drops effectively, trying to make combinations of popping blobs to help you eliminate the remaining blobs faster. You receive bonus drops each time you complete a combination and when you clear each level.

The game actually plays very simply. Once you try it, you will understand it quickly and have fun with it. It doesn’t require a lot of mental figuring out. You mostly choose full blobs which are adjacent to growing blobs and try to work your way through the board. The first time I played, I easily cleared four levels before running out of drops. I imagine with a little planning, you can keep going indefinitely. I haven’t quite run across this concept in a puzzler game before, so I enjoyed the fresh game mechanics this game provides.