Fugdale’s Funhouse

Object: Destroy enemy pirate ships and collect gold to earn upgrades.

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.

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: Sort the smiley faces from the frowny faces.

Review: Are you happy today or sad? Perhaps this game will help you sort things out a little. Your job requires you to sort the happy faces from the sad faces. Each emotion belongs on a different side of the screen. You have several rows of red lines which only show up when you run your cursor over them. Somewhere on each line a face sits. If the face is happy click to the right of it sending it to happy land. If the face is grumpy send it to the left side of the screen where grumpies live. If it’s a spider, squash the damn thing.

Sometimes you find faces with masks on them. You have to remove the mask before you can see their expressions, or you can just take your chances and send them one way or the other. Careful, though, you only get a few misses. Things start speeding up rapidly. New faces show up on cleared rows changing the row icon from blue to red. If all rows turn red or you sort 3 faces the wrong direction, the game ends.

The game is cute, simple and fun for a few tries, but if you don’t have a quick mouse and good aim, you will probably only last a minute or so. The challenge is keeping the board cleared as much as possible and trying to beat your own score. Hopefully the frustration of the red rows mounting, won’t turn your happy face into a frown.