Fugdale’s Funhouse

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.

Object: Destroy all human ships with your asteroids.

Review: Fans of the popular arcade classic Asteroids are in for a little reversal of fortune with this game. This time the asteroids are striking back. Tired of being picked on by laser armed triangular ships, Mr. Blue Asteroid gathers his rocky buddies together and strikes back.

You play as a large blue asteroid floating in space minding your own business. When a human-inhabited ship comes along and starts to shoot his puny bullets at you, you just crash into the ship and destroy it. Soon multiple ships, various mines and other enemies arrive shooting at you from all directions. After each level you are given a choice of power-ups: make yourself larger or faster, armor yourself, add more asteroids to your gang or spin your enemies out of control. Along the way you will learn new tactics and tricks to combat the enemies.

You can play with the arrow keys or the mouse to move your asteroid around, use the ‘z’ and ‘x’ keys to move your allied asteroids closer or further from you and the ‘c’ button or left mouse button to move away from your allies.

The sheer inventiveness of this game makes it a pleasure to play. Each level you get new goodies. And most of the early levels are pretty easy to complete, so new players won’t feel too stupid off the bat. The techno music is repetetive, but not distracting and you will have a lot of fun mowing down all the puny humans as you careen through the universe.

Object: Shoot soldiers and tanks by typing the word displayed below them.

Review: As a blogger and wordprocessor, I love to type. If going to war were this much fun, I’d have signed up long ago. In this game, players must stay alive as long as possible against mounting enemies. You start as a soldier in the center of the screen and other soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles start moving towards you from the edges of the screen. Each enemy has a short word underneath. You target enemies by quickly typing the word beneath them and hitting enter.

When you hit an enemy you will hear a satisfying gunshot and the enemy will fall dead. If you mistype a word, you will have to try again. Hitting ‘enter’ will clear your text field for a new word. The soldiers have short 3-letter words, while the larger vehicles have longer words.

Along the way you will get medical packs which you must type ‘fullhealth’ to activate and super weapons such as ‘detonate’ which will kill all enemies on the screen. Stay alive as long as possible and wrack up as many points as you can.

The game play is very smooth and the sound effects provide a satisfying response to your typing. You can set the game to 4 different difficulty levels, which effects the speed and number of enemies (but not necessarily the word difficulty). This game really satisfies, but I don’t recommend it for anyone with only one hand. I would rate it a 10, but the sequel is one step better.

Object: Shoot the baddies by typing the word beneath them. Stay alive.

Review: I didn’t think they could make a game that would rival the original Qwerty Warriors, but they did. Game play is much the same as the first version. The graphics quality, although similar, is a little more realized. Enemies and words appear a little larger.

The chief differences between this and the original version are:

• The player is stationed at the bottom of the screen.
• Enemies all approach from the top.
• You shoot enemies each time you type a letter instead of having to type the entire word.
• Once you start a word, you must finish it before shooting another enemy.
• You don’t have to hit enter after each word. Just type letters.
• More bonus items (’doubler’ and ‘explode’). And some bonus items last for a longer period of time.
• The higher difficulty levels move extremely fast.
• Players can submit their own word lists.

Although I think game play in this version feels a little more intuitive, you will occasionally find moments when you can’t target the closer enemy because if you accidentally type a wrong letter, you will often trigger a word on a different enemy and have to finish it first. Sometimes in the panic of the moment, this can really trip up the game. I also tend to like the enemies approaching from all directions like in the original version, but I must admit the words are a lot easier to read in this version. And the mechanics feel a little better. It’s a tough call as to which version is better. They both have their pluses and minuses, but I really like the fact that users can submit their own word lists and I like the shooting of individual letters better than typing the entire word, so version 2 gets my vote.

Which version is your favorite? I love to hear your comments.

For more typing games check out this post: 2 Typing Games Put Your Fingers to the Test