20/10/08 - CNET top 25 flash games (2)

Continuing from where I left off yesterday.

Bow Man - A simple artillery game. Click and drag a line to choose angle and power, then release to fire an arrow. Your goal being to hit your opponent, a random distance away. Unlike most games of the sort, you won't actually be able to see your opponent while you line up your shot, so the first shot is completely blind. The area is completely flat, though you can turn on a random-sized wall and wind to mix things up. It's a nice distraction, but there really isn't much to keep me coming back.

Desktop Tower Defense - As with all tower defense games, you have a small square area with several entrances, and a place that must be protected from waves of incoming monsters. To do this, you spend money placing towers within your area. Different towers have different attacks, and costs, so strategic spending is the key. You can also upgrade existing towers.

Now, in this particular one, you have to stop the enemies getting from one side to the other, though you can survive a few. They don't attack your towers, so you can basically herd the monsters in the direction you want, though you're not allowed to block them.

Using this, I formulated a strategy to tunnel them towards the end, then placed a tower in the way, causing them to turn around, then removing it before the next wave. This worked for a while, but one group of tough enemies took too long to die, then the next wave spawned, bypassed my blockade, and pranced past my weak outer defenses. The final swarm had me madly switching between 3 gaps. It took a while to finish, but none of them got through.

In this game, there aren't many tower types (6), and some of them don't seem to make much difference. Some of the enemies seem to take an unreasonable amount of damage before dying, so you need to have a good strategy ready from the start. Oh, and I'm saying that, even though I only played this game on easy.

Neopets Hasee Bounce - You get two little creatures, one on a see saw, one on a branch above. You can manouver either a little via the mouse, and when you click, one goes down, then the other goes up. The point is to move them with the right timing to get weird fruits that float across the screen. Kinda interesting as an idea, but for me, it's just too fiddly moving the mouse back and forth to get each creature into position, and it takes too long to go through the jumps.

Linerider - Ah, I had a look at this a while back. Draw a bunch of lines, then push start and watch as the little sledder tries to traverse them. There's a bit more to it than that, but I didn't go into it much, I found myself drawn, instead, to the videos of other people's works. There are some big, impressive courses to see, all of which would have taken ages to design, I'm sure. Quite amusing, and probably addictive if you get into making courses.

*To be continued*