Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Capture the dots by drawing shapes around them.

Review: Alex Heaton, who brought us Balls!, brings us another fun game involving enemy balls. In Trap Draw, players must eliminate the various dots floating about the screen, by drawing a continuous path around them enclosing them inside. If any dot touches an unfinished path, you will lose health in your health meter. To help out, you can trigger explosives with your Shift Key, which grow larger depending on how long you hold down the key and how much energy you have in your explosives meter. Explosives should be reserved for the stronger or faster enemies.

In order to draw lines you must choose between using the mouse or the arrow keys by clicking the appropriate button at the bottom of the screen. I found the mouse is a little easier to control. Click the space bar to start drawing. You will find a bit of a drag when drawing and the controls do take a little getting used to. You can’t just simply enclose a dot with an unbroken line, you must connect the line to the point your started drawing it. This gets tricky when you have many enemies floating around. The dots come in varieties, some disappear, others splinter off into multiple dots when you capture them. A few other surprises come along as well.

You will get bonus health and explosives as you play and you need to merely touch them with your cursor to retrieve them. The game is fun, but the drawing mechanism doesn’t feel as responsive as it should and like many drawing games of this type, it will either frustrate you to no end or light a fire of determination under your butt. Either way it’s good for a few plays at least and might even become some people’s new favorite. Let me know what you think of it.

Object: Clear out a patient’s brain of all alien infiltrators.

Review: Have you ever seen the classic movie “Fantastic Voyage” about the scientists who shrink a ship down to molecular size and travel through a man’s body to help cure him? Well, this is that movie’s bastard grandchild in game format.

You control this groovy little robot wrapped in a protective bubble as it moves from a man’s hands, through his ear, into the depths of his brain. You have the task of killing many alien invaders which have made a home inside the patient’s cerebrum. The funky clicky soundtrack edges you on as you roll, jump and shoot. The aliens come in many forms. Don’t be surprised to see several cancerous-looking, floating, turd-like creatures everywhere you go, you can shoot them easily with your spacebar gun, but you will also face more curious aliens such as a bombshell housewife from the 50’s. Along the path through the gorily detailed brain areas, you will have to collect bullets in order to keep your gun loaded. They are stashed here and there.

The game has a few frustrations, namely the slightly difficult jumping mechanism. You have to do an awkward double jump to reach most every new plateau and it can get frustrating when you start to fall and have no way to save yourself. But, the delight of the game is in its fresh cartoony design which reminds me of Brak and Space Ghost Cartoons.

This is an original looking flash game, which uses photographic images, not only in the background, but in the foreground interacting with the characters. You start the game jumping from finger to finger on a giant hand and crawl inside a giant ear. I have yet to play too far into this game and I’m curious to see how far into this man’s mind we get to travel. This take on the action, side-scrolling genre is fresh and an example of what makes Flash games just so damned cool. So if you like exploratory surgery and getting into the meat of the matter, this game will surely appeal to you.

Object: Break all the bricks on each level with your bouncing ball.

Review: This game uses the same concept of games such as Break-out, Arkanoid and Colibricks. You control a paddle and bounce a ball on it to break the bricks laid out in the course. The bricks in turn will spit out objects which, if caught by your paddle, give you special abilities like super speed, invincibility or multiple balls.

This game provides a lot of new twists on the layout, the paddle and the items you get. First off, the paddle has a curved shape, like a bow pulled back ready to shoot an arrow. Your ball seems to bounce in the direction of the curve where ever it makes contact with the paddle.

The game also provides inventive brick layouts on each level. Sometimes you get a pyramid of stacked bricks, other time you get bricks that move around. Many times you will have white bricks which you can’t break with your normal ball. You must break a few non-white bricks to get special items in order to break the white bricks, otherwise they just serve as obstacles. One of the early courses features just two yellow bricks you must break, but they constantly move and have white bricks surrounding them, making them almost impossible to get to. Some bricks must get hit several times in order to break them, other bricks will fade in and out and can only be removed when visible.

The courses have extra features, such as rounded bumpers on the sides and top of the screen which periodically emerge and send your ball careening in various directions and some screens feature magic tele-porters which warp your ball to other areas of the screen. You have to think fast to see where your ball will end up.

Numerous special items fall from the broken bricks. These include items which allow you to fire bullets that break any brick (even the white ones) or items which change the size of your paddle or the speed and size of the ball. One item causes your ball to shoot bullets out in all directions. You also have a bomb item which allows you to blow up large chunks of bricks at once. Special dragon items allow you to shoot lighting or fire. Other items make your ball burn a straight path through the bricks without bouncing. The game seems to have about 15 different items and they fall so rapidly you can’t possibly catch them all.

These features make the game a lot of fun to explore, especially if you love the ball and paddle genre of games. But the game has a few minor annoyances. The cursor arrow stays visible. This diminishes the illusion that you are controlling the paddle as opposed to the cursor. Additionally, the game has a little bit of a lag or stutter, so sometimes the paddle skips over a bit and you miss the ball. Luckily, if you lose all three available lives, the game allows you to continue from the current level, so these stutters don’t ruin the game.

If you enjoy this game, leave a comment and tell everyone how you did. Also check out these previous posts for other ball and paddle games:

7 Ball and Paddle Games You Won’t Want to Miss
Mmeoww - Game Review