Fugdale’s Funhouse

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: As someone who doesn’t like to see animals harmed, this game has a certain edgy theme to it. It involves the running of the bulls in Pamplona. But since this is just a cartoon bull and it always seems to win eventually by goring the human, I will let my diversion to the subject matter slide.

In this game you play as a dashing young toreador who is running from a furious bull out of the confines of the bullfighting stadium and through the streets of Pamplona. You must jump over fences and crates and fruit stands. Run through crowds of other fleeing men and last as long as you can before the bull finally catches up to you and flips your butt into the air.

There’s not much more to the game than that. However, the graphics and steady drumming score make this game a lively and responsive few minutes of flurry. The game treats the subject with a certain sense of humor and no animals are ever harmed in the game. In fact, the bull doesn’t even have to jump over the obstacles. He just plows right on through. The humor of the game is apparent even from the loading screen where your main character prepares for his bull run by spraying his arm pits with deodorant.

Review: This game follows in the tradition of similar collect and avoid games. You control Blobber, a cute smiley faced green bubble. Move him around the screen with your mouse and collect all the small green dots floating around the screen. You can also catch a somewhat elusive green star which appears briefly once per level. If you miss the star, you can still progress, but you will lose your bonus points.

What would any collecting game be without having to avoid something along the way? In Blobber, you must avoid a collective of mean baddies. Various numbers of them float about the screen. Some float randomly in ping pong fashion and others slowly follow you about the screen.

As you collect dots and stars, your Blobber will grow in size making it both easier to collect the other dots and at the same time, more difficult to avoid the enemies. After you have collected all (or sometimes most) of the green dots, some of the enemies will turn into friendly bubbles. When that happens you need to collect them as well. Sometimes enemies won’t change until you’ve collected other friendly bubbles and some enemies will never change to friendly bubbles.

This game proposes, on the main screen, that you won’t be able to play just one game of Blobber. Due to it’s cute graphics, nice sound effects and easy game play, I would be willing to agree with them. This game definitely has some charming aspects to it. Just make sure your connection is fast and you don’t have a lot of other internet related downloads going on in the background as it tends to slow the action down.