I can’t believe I forgot about this golden old school gadget when my friend linked this to me the other day. I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives by Skop.com is an interactive kung-fu cinematic remixer that to my joy has been updated over the years to make what was an epic idea epicerererer.

This is no mere “add some text to some premade scenes”. With almost 150 combos to use AND record them with this will have you going for hours. Unfortunately, unlike most of scene remixers that are out, this has no save at the time, although the authors say “Soon, we will add a database in which users can store their results and share it with others, thereby giving Bruce a small virtual home.”

None the less, is there no better time to waste then with Bruce Lee? Give it a go.

[ Play I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives ]

Solarsarus by The Super Flash Bros is an oddly nifty dinosaur flinger bounce off planets get high scores and blow up said dinosaurs, um, game.

While the art is as good as you would expect from them I do wish more was added, as in effects and maybe even having the dinos bite chunks out of the planets or something. While it is all well done, looks wise it is missing a little zazz .

Good loop and who knew planets colliding with themselves and dinosaurs sounded just like playing croquet.

An easy game to play and even easier to get hook on, use your mouse to left click, drag and release the dinosaur into the planets and watch them all bounce around. Myself, I find it good to bounce the dinos off each other, getting lucky and have them fall back below the line, then you get to use them again. While not a terribly in depth and psychological thriller it is an awesome waste of time complete with hi scores and exploding dinosaurs. It really can not get much better unless there is a sequel .

[ Play Solarsarus ]

Go Squirrel Go!!! is a fun and addictive lil game where you must advance through the clouds grabbing nuts on your way up.

Nothing new in the way of graphics or animation but for this time waster they are both well done and not bad to look at while playing.

Could have used an audio turn off as the loop did get a bit annoying after awhile.

More of a mini game/time waster, Go Squirrel Go!!! is still fun and easy to play. Using your mouse to move and a single left click to get started, you basically scroll upwards jumping from cloud to cloud with the clouds disappearing after you jump from them. Sounds easy but with each time playing the game has random cloud patterns making for good replay value. Definitely a great time waster.

[ Play Go Squirrel Go!!! ]

varStudios has been developing visually stunning vector-style games for some time. Games like Neon and Lumination put them on the map for as some of the best mouse-busting game designers in the web-game industry.

Abstract Sea, their latest game, continues the tradition of stunning your eyes and busting your mouse.

I REALLY wanted to love this game. As a designer myself, I really can appreciate the overall style of this game, and fired it up with high hopes.

What I found was a game that certainly delivered artistically, but fell a bit short in the fun department.

The game is straight monotone color. Everything is all on the play area, from battleships to the score display, nothing is segregated. The explosions look very cool with the spinning boxes that fly off of enemy ships as you blast them into the sea, and all the alpha effects just look great. The game is just gorgeous.

Even the sound is great. The music isn’t really anything special, but the effects really help the game. Your bullets make no sound unless they hit something, which is a huge help when you are evading and firing at the same time.

You can watch your own boat while listening to the sounds. If your bullets go quiet, you know can move your attention to aiming for a split second, then resume a defensive watch. Not a lot of games use sound to this degree, and it’s just another thing that made me want to love this game.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is simply a recycled single screen 360 degree shooter game. There’s not a huge variety in the weapons you can get, although this may be due to the simplistic vector style art. There is a good AMMOUNT of weapons, but they don’t really FEEL all that unique, and the single color blocks used to represent your bullets is probably the reason for this.

The other thing that gets old is the variety in enemies. I think there are severl types of boat, but in the frantic assault they all tend to look the same and only vary in minor ways such as overall armor and the amount of shots they can fire.

I tried to give this game a long thorough play, and I really did have fun with it for a few minutes. But after the initial enjoyment wore off, and the variety screeched to a halt, I just got bored and let the enemy ships sink me.

I think this is still a good game to waste time with, but beyond killing a few minutes, there’s not much to this game to keep you coming back.

[ Play Abstract Sea ]

I remember when I was younger, watching my dad try and play Doom.  I gave him such a hard time for leaning his body and trying to look around the corners in the game.  I guess he was just so immersed in the game environment he felt like he was actually in it, but it was still pretty funny to watch.

I never thought I would catch myself doing the very same thing, let alone with a web game. But those bastards over at FreeWorldGroup (with DX Interactive) got me ducking and diving through their new game, ‘Missile Game 3D HS‘.

Missile Game is not an incredible feat of gaming genius by any means. You play as a missile trying to fly through a tube with rotating obstacles, and it’s all 1st person view. The art is simple black and white circles with varying shapes cut out, and lines to indicate the walls.The sound is pretty plain, and the music, while certainly not bad, is nothing to write home about. Even the control is extremely basic…. you just move the mouse.

But what you don’t expect from such a simple game, is just how easily you get sucked in. As you start shooting down this 3d tube at break-neck speeds, you no longer care about any of the shortcomings the game may have, all you want to do is not run into a wall.

I could write a large review, as I have in the past, but I really think this is one of those games that you just have to play.  Words and screenshots will not do it justice. I’m not sure I would play this game for large amounts of time, and I probably won’t play it next week… but damnit, I am having a blast (pardon the pun) with it right now!

[ Play Missile Game 3D HS ]

Sometimes games get a lot more buzz than they deserve… this time, it’s a game with a shitload of bees, so maybe it makes sense.

Bee Dodger, by Steven Colie and ShirtTurtle is a rather generic side-scrolling ‘avoid the enemies’ game with very little to offer in the way of innovation. The reason I feel it’s getting a lot more hype then it deserves is the involvement of Dan Palidin, a talented artist who worked on award winning games like Alien Hominid and Dad n’ Me.

The art in this game is pretty decent, considering there’s only about 4 different ‘characters’ and none of them have many animations (the wings actually flap though!). The background is just a bunch of motion lines with an underlying color that changes as you progress. Because of the similarities in style to Dan Palidin’s art, however, people seem to be much more impressed then they would otherwise. Maybe they think Dan was the artist on the game… I don’t know.

The sound is also pretty weak in the game. The effects are pretty minimal, but at least they aren’t annoying. It’s the music that really carries this game. The music IS actually done by Dan Palidin and is a bit of a Radio Disney sounding song. You know.. those wacky dance songs that drill into your brain because they have some silly phrase that gets repeated over and over? Well in this case, it’s watermelon.

The gameplay is pretty simple and easy to pick up, but really, not very much fun. Basically you fly around with the arrow keys and try not to hit other bees. That’s it.

The first time I played the game I did rather enjoy it. After that, I didn’t really feel any desire to play again, so for people like me, it’s good for maybe 2-5 minutes.

Overall, the game just comes off as an interactive music video, because the music is the only real draw to this game.

[ Listen To Bee Dodger ]

In honor of the superbowl I decided it was time to review a sports game.  And what sport exemplifies the spirit of competition more than beer pong?

Frat Boy Beer Pong, by Mad Science Industries, puts you in a first-person showdown against a small variety of drunken misfits where the first person to pass out not only loses, but gets humiliated.

The art in the game is pretty well done, and you can’t help but smile as your opponents do things like fart and moon you to distract your shot.  Each level has a unique competitor with varying alcohol tolerance and a posse of statuesque buddies who like to use ESP to turn the lights off when you are trying to shoot.

The sound effects are pretty minimal, and I would have liked to hear some actual voice acting and verbal taunts, but the animations make up for some of that.  The music, on the other hand, is very repetitive and annoying after a few minutes, and is likely to drive you to drink for real (which in retrospect, isn’t such a bad thing).

The actual gameplay is enough to keep you playing this game till the end.  You simply use your mouse to aim above the cluster of beer cups and click to toss a ping ping ball.  If your aim is true, your opponent will have to drink the beer, and some of the cups have bonus items in them that cause more intoxication, temporary immunity to beer, sobering-up, and the very helpful ’shoot again’.

After your turn is up, the other player gets to aim for your cups and if he hits, you take a drink and gain some intoxication.  The drunker you get, the more your aim is thrown off and your mouse cursor jumps around on you.

When you finally get the other frat boy so drunk he passes out, you get a ‘FINISH HIM’ screen, in which you can draw all over his comatose body with marker, or in the last level, dress him up in embarrassing attire and take pictures of him for prosperity.  It would have been cool if you could go back and look at the pictures, or even post them to some kind of gallery for other people to enjoy.

The game is short (there’s only 3 people to compete against) but that makes it perfect for people who just need to kill a few minutes while they are waiting for the results of their pregnancy test because they forgot to take their pill on prom night.

If you are really bored (or need to get rid of said prom baby), you should drink along with the game for real.  It certainly makes it more fun.  Trust me…

[ Play Frat Boy Beer Pong ]

Orbis Impetus (Latin for “circle attack”) by Kabomb is a cool “snake” type game that isn’t quite like snake.

Using the arrows to move, you guide your bubbley snake thingy to get more bubbles, while avoiding the stars. The great challenge here is that it’s harder to get the bubbles then the stars haha. Very elusive lil @$@W#$s.

With some good graphics and sound it’ll be a nice time waster for those into these type of games, complete with high scores, even with it borrowing from some old concepts.

[ Play Orbis Impetus ]

As Flash has grown as a game development platform, I have seen many fad genres that stand out due to the simplicity and ease they offer the designers and programmers. Mouse shooters, dress up games, stat-based sim games, etc… have all shared their time in the limelight. In 2006 the fad that got the most attention was drawing games.

These games are great for the game designer, because they don’t really need to spend much time on level designs, and can use any basic game engine for following user-drawn lines they want. This lets designers get the games out much quicker then other genres.

Drawing games are great for the user because they offer a ton of variety and control in how a game flows. It’s win-win… or at least that’s how it started out.
Stunt Bike Draw, by FreeWorldGroup.com (creators of the Bow Man games and Deflector), tries very hard to use this fad and it’s proven formula for success to give you a stunt jumping game with crazy user-made jumps and crashes.

The art in the game isn’t quite production quality, but it’s definately well done, if a bit dark and low in contrast. The bike moves pretty well with all the bounciness you would expect, and the tracks you draw show some innovation over other drawing games by actually generating the braces that hold the track to the ground rather then just using free-floating lines.

The sound effects are great too, the engine revs, cashes and smashes all sound as they should. The music however is very VERY repetitive with no variety whatsoever. It sounds like a fast-food employed punk ass kid playing dance music in his 1993 Honda Civic with holes in the floor panels, busted AC and a $3k subwoofer in the back.

The gameplay is what should make you forget the horrible bass beats that the music rapes your ears with, but alas, it misses the mark (not a good thing to do with a stunt game). Drawing the ramps and watching the bike fly is pretty satisfying, but when you realize how hard it is to crash on the landing ramp there is no challenge or fulfilment.

All you need to do here is keep your landing ramps high enough from the ground that at least ONE wheel will land on them. You can completely miss with the front tire, and the back tire will catch on and suspend you safely, like some kind of batman bike might do.

The “level design” in the game is pretty lame. They just add these hopping robot alien water balloon things that seem way out of place, and cars that are smaller than the stuntman himself. Where’s the swimming pool full of sharks? The flaming ring of death? The fat lady that lives up the street?

As with a LOT of less creative drawing games, this one will give you at least 5 minutes of entertainment, but if you like these kinds of games, there are a lot of better choices to invest your time into.

This game isn’t BAD… but it’s not that great either… I think we are due for a new fad.

[ Play Stunt Bike Draw ]

Cat Fling by Mylehyena WAS MADE JUST FOR ME. Well, not FOR ME but for me in the way that it’s easy to get into, has good graphics and you’re throwing a cat. All it would need would be beer and I could live in the flash.

While a lot more could be added to it to make it super cat splating fun, as in maybe obstacles and a hi score board, it overall is a good fun play.

Getting the cat rotating will take several tries at first but once you get going you’ll not want to stop till you get it spinning like a top.

Again, just a simple game, but sometimes those are the most fun.

[ Play Cat Fling ]