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: Here’s a fun ball and paddle game. Throw your three balls up into the air and then continue to juggle them by bouncing them off your paddle one at a time. Each time you hit a ball, your score increases by 10 points. Make it to 1000 points and you reach the next level. Each level makes things a little more difficult. For instance, level two decreases the size of your paddle a bit.

It’s fairly easy to keep your balls in the air. (I wish it were this easy to actually juggle balls in real life). The balls seem to come at you in a steady rhythm, so you won’t have to worry about having to hit two balls at the same time. I found that if you guide the balls close to one of the edges of the screen, they get a little easier to control. If your balls get too spread out, you can tap them back in line by hitting them with the edge of your paddle. When you lose a ball it will hit the ground and start flashing. You can relaunch it yourself or it will automatically launch after about 5 seconds. But beware, you can only drop 5 balls before your game ends.

Review: This charming progressive puzzler has all the charm of the popular Hoshi Saga Puzzles. In this series of 18 short puzzle levels, your simply have to destroy the Bobteds on each screen. The Bobteds take on different forms in each level, from water towers to stars to percentage symbols and other objects. Each level has a slightly different technique you must employ to get rid of all the Bobteds, but all of them involve dropping one or more silver pinball balls onto the course so that they bounce onto the Bobteds.

Sometimes you have only one ball to drop. When you drop it, it bounces or causes objects to move which help destroy the Bobteds. Whenever you have more than one ball to drop, you will place each of them somewhere on the course and all balls will drop at the same time after you’ve placed the last one. Many times you need to set the balls at various heights and locations so that they will interact with each other. If you time a ball to bounce and then bounce another ball off of it, it will arc just right to wipe out all the Bobteds. Most levels have pretty easy solutions, but some require a little playing around with first to discover ways to accomplish your task. I had a particularly difficult time with level 16.

All levels in this game have a visually appealing design, using simple pastel graphics and various objects you can bounce off of, turn or maneuver to help you out. The design of this game shows a lot of inventiveness. The game plays just once through progressively. Once you’ve solved all the puzzles, you’ve finished playing the game, but as quickly as most players will be able to make it through, they will also enjoy the fun and cool factor this game provides.