Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: Let’s take a cosmic trip to outer space, shall we? You start out as a tiny meteor floating around in the cosmos. As you move next to smaller meteors, they will gravitate towards you. When you collide with a smaller planet or rock, your meteor will absorb it and grow a little larger. Eventually, your tiny rock will grow to the size of a small planet and you will be able to absorb planets that are a little larger. On later levels you progress to the size of the sun and even bigger.

You must, however, avoid the gravitational pull of larger planets (which tend to collect in the middle of the playing field. If you get too close to one of them, it’s gravitational force will start to suck you towards it. If you hit a larger planet you will revert to your original size and will have to start the level over again.

As a strategy, I found it easiest to float around the edges of the screen at first (near the white borders) and absorb as many smaller rocks as you can. Then when you have reached a medium size, start to move toward the larger planets. You will probably find that the gravitational pull of the larger planets will have you pressing the arrow keys very hard trying to avoid the sucking power. Just remember, you only need to press them softly and just avoid close proximity with huge planets until you can match their size.

After you have cleared all the planets on a level you will progress to further levels with even larger planets and stars to contend with. The game is little more than a collect and avoid challenge and you will find it’s pretty easy to pick up if you just take your time and move slowly around the screen. If you aren’t sure which planets are larger or smaller, just stop moving for a moment. If a planet is larger, you will start to move towards it. If it is smaller, it will start to move towards you.

Review: This game falls into a certain niche of ball and paddle games where you have to draw the paddle or course for the ball to take. You need to reach the red rectangle by bouncing or rolling your red ball into it. Each level has an established course of lines already drawn. You accomplish your goal by drawing additional lines, ramps and bumpers to guide your ball in the right direction. You can pretty much do this fairly easily as you have no limit to the amount of lines you can draw, but in order to score high, you must draw as little as possible and try to finish the multitude of levels as quickly as possible.

The red ball definitely has a very persistent bounce to it and if it lands straight down on a flat surface it will bounce in place indefinitely. Some courses require a little creative thinking to get your ball to have enough momentum to move over obstacles. Also the sides of many of the courses often need patching up because the ball cannot bounce off the screen.

I found the game fun to play despite it’s relatively simple solutions, however, you must play through all the courses in order to get a score and there are a lot of them to play. If you stop midway through the game, it will not save your progress, so make sure you have a good half hour or so to play the game. The only drawback I found to this game lies in the drawing mechanics. Sometimes if you draw a line off the screen and release the mouse button, the line will continue drawing when you move your cursor. This can result in unintentional lines and having to clear the board several times. Fortunately, you are able to reset the ball when it gets stuck and you can clear all your drawings by hitting the ‘C’ key.

So give your right brain an artistic drawing challenge and your left side a physics based puzzle challenge and have fun with this cute little game. If you get bored playing the game, you can try out the level editor (in the options menu) and design your own courses.

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.