Fugdale’s Funhouse

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.

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?

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.