Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Drop the United States onto a map Tetris-style.

Review: For the geography hounds out there or for anyone who needs a little brush up on their U.S. States, this fun game is for you. You start with a blank map of the 48 contigious United States (no Alaska or Hawaii). The various states fall one at a time from the top and you must use your arrow keys to drop them into place. You have 3 levels to choose from. The easy level gives you the name of each state and places it with the correct rotation. The hard level doesn’t provide the names and the states must be rotated correctly to fit into place.

Even if you aren’t that great at geography, you should still be able to finish the puzzle eventually by closely observing the edges of the states compared to the edges of the map. Since the states fall from bottom to top, you won’t have that many choices as to where to drop it. The mechanics of the game are pretty good. The hit area for each state is forgiving as long as you have it lined up in the right column you won’t need to do any fancy maneuvering to get a state to land in its spot.

For those who are very familiar with the states, you won’t find this game much of a challenge. But for a bigger challenge, try completing the other versions of the puzzle featuring other countries or more specific areas. You can choose from Europe, Africa, France, Japan, Netherlands, South Carolina, and the United Kingdom

Object: Create and eliminate lines of blocks in a 3-D Tetris environment

Review: Fans of the classic game Tetris will no doubt have seen about a million different variations of the game pop up over the years. This one has an interesting twist which I haven’t seen before…3D.

The game plays just like Tetris. Use the arrow keys to move your piece right or left or drop it rapidly into place. And use your space bar to change the rotation of the pieces. Drop pieces into empty sections of the stack and try to form horizontal lines across the screen. When you do they are eliminated. Eliminate 4 lines together and you’ve formed a Tetris.

This game has all the appeal of the original Tetris with the addition of a 3-D playing environment. The direction of the playing field slants upward in a forced perspective. This complicates the game slightly because visually it’s more difficult to determine which column your piece is lined up in.

I had to dock the game a few points for a few reasons. The biggest being that the game doesn’t end when you’ve reached the top, it just sits there. You must refresh the browser to start a new game. Additionally the very repetitive techno loop gets completely annoying after about a minute. But this new take on an old classic deserves a little look see.

Object: Work your blue ball through a maze of three dimensional lines.

Review: I’m a big fan of mazes, so I really enjoy finding wonderful gems like this game. Using a simple graphical interface, this game creates hours of fun maze solving.

When you start you will be presented with a randomly generated cubical maze of white lines. You move a blue ball along the white lines trying to reach the red ball elsewhere in the maze. Use the arrow keys to rotate the cube in a way so when you press the space bar you move forward. You can only move forward, so the trick is getting the maze rotated in the correct direction to move.

Because the white lines are so thin and the angle of the cube is the only thing that provides visual clues regarding depth, you must turn the cube several times to discover the proper pathway to take. At first I found the controls a little confusing. It felt like the cube doesn’t exactly turn the direction you expect it to when you hit an arrow key. However, I quickly noticed that if you just tap the key in the direction you next want to head, the cube will rotate so you can move that direction even though it doesn’t always look like it. Also trying to turn a corner at an intersection can get difficult if you don’t align right on the corner. So I suggest tapping the space bar lightly, inching forward, until you are able to turn.

The simple look of the mazes is definitely misleading. It takes a good deal of investigation to get through the maze. Each game is timed, so work your way through quickly to try and beat your previous times. How fast can you get through?