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: 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.

Review: Ahoy Matey! Grab your eye patch and parrot and take up arms as you command your very own pirate ship out on the seven seas. This elegantly designed game puts you right in the middle of a pirate ship battle. You get a bird’s eye view of the ocean and your ship. Beautiful water effects and clouds rolling by add to the ambience, as do the sounds of seagulls and a creaking ship. Steer your ship about the ocean playfield and fire your cannons to attack enemy ships. The enemy ships float into view one at a time (at first) and you must maneuver your ship so that you can fire cannons off of either side. You can choose which direction to fire (up or down) by toggling the V Key.

Use the space bar to fire all your available cannons at once and tiny black bullets will spew off the side of your ship toward the nearest enemy ship. Each ship has four number statistics next to it. The top number is how much gold the ship carries; next is the integrity of the ship (hit points); then the number of cannons the ship has ready to fire and finally the number of pirates on board. You must also watch your own statistics at the bottom of the screen. Make sure you maintain at least one pirate or the game will end. If you get close to a ship, you can dispense with firing cannons and go into hand to hand combat mode, in which case the ships will turn red and you will see the number of pirates dwindling as they battle away.

As you sink each enemy ship, you collect all the gold on board. After you have destroyed all enemy ships on each level you will proceed to a store full of pirate booty upgrades; which include a faster moving ship; a faster turning ship, more pirates, more cannons, faster reloads and other fun upgrades to help you out. The game proceeds in the nature of a simple RPG, in which you mostly do the same thing over and over to gain more gold and increase the strength of your ship.

I found the design of the game to have very appropriate graphics, mechanics and sound effects. The transitions between levels are smooth and fun to watch, but the game starts to hit the same one note repeatedly early on and I found too much randomness at play in determining which ship will prevail in a battle. Aim is important and holding off firing until you have a good shot will decrease your chances of firing off all your cannons prematurely. Also, strategic purchases between levels provide much of the strategy in the game. But, once out on the waters, you have little more to do than move about and shoot at ships and the game loses some of its steam after a few minutes of playing.

Like all the games reviewed at the Fun House, you will find something fun about this game and it’s definitely worth playing It will surely provide lots of fun for a certain cross section of gamers, so give it a shot and let everyone know how far you get in our comments section.