Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: This game provides a really unique mechanism, which I haven’t seen in any other online game before. The concept has a similar feel to other progressive puzzlers. You must make your way through a series of increasingly difficult courses and pop all the balloons you find. You accomplish this feat by maneuvering two little smiley faces called Globz. The two faces are joined together by a string. When you click the mouse one of the Globz anchors itself to the ground and the other one spins around it. You wait for the spinning glob to aim the direction you want to travel and hit the mouse button again. It then anchors itself and spins the other Globz. You have a red and a yellow glob and each of them can pop the blue balloons, but you must also pop multi-layered balloons and each Globz can only pop a layer of it’s own color.

You will soon discover that many of the walls on the courses are secret passageways to other areas of the course and you will also discover hidden bonus hearts and other obstacles and traps as the levels progress. The game play is unique and fun, but the fact that you must pop all balloons in under a minute on each course can make for some frustrating and frantic gameplay.

This game is simple and effective and a lot of fun. But don’t get on my case if it bursts your bubble.

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 simple game presents a grid of links (each link looks like a quarter circle). The links each start out rotated in random directions. You simply click on any one of the links and it will rotate one quarter turn clockwise. If one or both of the ends of the link you click connect with the end of an adjacent link, it will also turn clockwise and attempt to connect with its neighboring links. For each link that connects you get one point. Clicking on the right link can cause a chain reaction of turning links that can sometimes last for several minutes.

You must try to beat your previous score by finding the best link to click. The game has a unique quality to it. I haven’t quite seen this same premise before, but I had to dock it a few points simply because the user doesn’t really have much of a challenge, nor does he/she have much participation in the process. But still, clicking on a link that causes a long chain reaction does have some satisfying effect. It feels a little like getting a jackpot on a slot machine. So most people will definitely find this little game interesting for a while.

I found trying to strategize about the links a little too difficult. You can really only think a few connections ahead and the results always surprise you by being duds or by being jackpots. Despite the satisfying rush when first playing, the game holds little replay value and amounts to not much more than a cute time killer. However, props go out to the designer(s) of this game for coming up with a unique little interface. I hope to see more games by the same folks which incorporate a little more user interaction.