As I sit here, barely coherent and adrift on medicine that will hopefully free my nasal passages, I reflect on all the good times we've had together. We've ridden around in tanks made of thread and shot money out of our foes. We've eaten raw meat off a dirt floor together while we flung pitchforks at squealing demon thingies. We've climbed enormous blue towers and freed our friends with our butts. Good times, my friend. Gooooood tiiiimmmes.

... what? Of course that's not the medicine talking! That's really how I feel! See for yourself:

• Dream Tower - Visually impressive, if a little light on content, this adorable little platformer has you running around an enormous tower, gathering stars, bouncing on enemies, and freeing your fellow critters who have been caged. It's sort of Mario meets Kirby meets early Sonic meets d'awwwww. With a little more variety to the levels, this could have been a serious contender, but as it stands, don't you still want to hug it and pet it and name it George?
• Stitchland Conflict - There's just something about a shooter that looks like it was made out of merit badges you have to love. Roll through the unique landscape shooting down enemies and earning cash for upgrades. It's a bit disappointing that the gameplay isn't as unique as the presentation, but who amoung you cannot tell me you have always wanted a merit badge for thwarting a missile strike with a shotgun?
• AliBaba 40 Thieves - Minoto's surreal point-and-click puzzle-ish rendition of the classic tale features a monkey, a gorilla, a doll, and, of course, Santa Claus. Is it just me or does this sound like something Bugs Bunny might have come up with? It's cute, it's weird, and it's exactly what we've come to expect from Minoto, who should probably be illustrating wonderful, silly children's books right now.
• Onslaught - While not the deepest game out there, this little retro arena game deserves some recognition for being made with Javascript. Survive as long as you can against waves of enemies, snagging coins to improve your score, hearty chunks of meat to improve your health, and various sharp implements to improve your face stabbing. The controls feel a bit stiff and the enemy variety is limited enough that you'll start seeing repeats long before you die, but who can say no to throwing pitchforks at squalling goblin thingies? I know I can't.
• Fish - A very simple but very cute little game where you play the perquisite salty fisherman with an awesome beard and what I hope is a corncob pipe tooling around in his boat, using different lures to catch different fish. The variety of fish you can catch is unfortunately a little slim, but it's adorable while it lasts and could do with some more fleshing out.

Some things will never change. Undefined's Protector series is clearly not one of those things. Little Protectors, the latest release, is still a tower defense game, but apart from the control scheme, that's where the similarities end. Ready to fight some Big Butts and Burny Men?

The game primarily uses the mouse, plus the [shift] to place multiples of the same unit and [spacebar] to cancel placement. You still face down waves of elemental-based enemies, hire your units with gold, and you have a set number of lives each level that decrease if an enemy reaches the other side of the map. Fend them off, and you'll gain treasure and ultimately a skill point to boost your unit abilities.

That's where the similarities with the rest of the series ends. Now, you have three basic units: the warrior, the mage and the archer. Little Protectors does away with the level system of its predecessors and replaces it with items, or toys as they're called in-game. Each class has their own specific weapons and equipment and all of the items have their own effects. In addition, most items add to the unit a buff that could slow enemies down, steal lives or teleport the enemy back to the start of the path. How do you get these toys? Well, that's Little Protector's biggest change.

Before you just had gold to worry about, now there's four additional resources: wood, metal, crystals and souls. Except for souls, which you earn by killing enemies, you get some resources to start out with, but they'll run out quickly, so you'll have to have units harvest them by attacking resource points on the map. When you have enough resources you can click on a unit, hit the craft item button and make yourself a new weapon or piece of equipment. In the beginning, there won't be a lot to choose from, but as you complete maps more and more blueprints become available and you get more and more options for customizing your units. Accessories can be looted from enemies, and you've even got a mana pool and some spells on hand to help knock them down.

Analysis: Gameplay is so different it almost feels like it's from another series, and luckily the changes are all fun and put a new spin on the series and the genre. This time around there are no flying enemies, which means there's no longer rounds where your warriors will sit there like lumps. Also, no more paving! You can put your units anywhere the grass is green.

In addition to all those new features, Little Protectors brings in a brand new aesthetic in the form of a top-down view and softer environments that are reminiscent of SNES graphics. The enemies are look cartoony, to be more suitable for the li'l killers, and instead of flying eyeballs and rats, you get pink elephants and snowmen. A lot of attention has been paid to small details, too. The weapon a unit holds changes to reflect the weapon you equip it with and the armors can radically change a unit's appearance.

There are a few annoyances. There's only a handful of achievements and they're very generic, most concerning how much of a resource you have or how many times a unit has attacked. A more gameplay-pertinent problem is if you equip an item on a unit, it's marked as belonging to that unit and can't be equipped on a different unit. This makes sense from a balance perspective. Since you can equip your units while paused, you could easily pass a damage boosting accessory down the line as needed. However, sometimes you'll get units with the same name on a map, so if you're switching equipment out you have to figure out which fire elemental spellbook belongs to which Jorrell. A bigger annoyance is the fact that only one unit can be harvesting resources at a time. This means you'll have to decide which resource you need more and you'll often have units out of enemy range doing nothing because the resource you need isn't near them. Finally, it feels like you never have enough mana to make it worthwhile. You'll get a few spells off, but then it's spent and the regeneration rate is so slow that it rarely works its way back up.

The biggest drawback to Little Protectors is difficulty. The game can be absolutely punishing sometimes if you're not playing it the way it wants to be played. You can get stuck on maps if you aren't using the "correct" strategy, and it doesn't help that there's a ton of variables that could be tripping you up. Are your skill points invested right? Do you have the right equipment for the map? Are your units placed in the best positions? It can be discouraging, but fortunately you can always reinvest skill points and try another method.

Fortunately, with so many ways to customize a unit it can be fun figuring out the right way to beat a map, since unlocking new blueprints is a great motivator. Even nicer, as we saw with Protector IV Undefined is very open to player comments. As a developer they've shown that while they want their games to be a challenge, they also want them to be enjoyable for everyone. If everyone seems to be in agreement about something in the game, it won't be surprising if Undefined gives it a little tweak.

The Protector series has always had this strange power. It can knock you down, endlessly beat you and call you stupid, but you keep playing it because it's a good game, and despite the punishment it's a lot of fun. All the new changes just make it more fun to feast on Little Protectors' knuckle sandwiches. Enjoy it and remember little protectors our are future, teach them well and let them lead the way.

Play Little Protecors

Bouncing on buttons and flipping some switches, pressing reset when I'm stuck in some ditches, magical doors and some shiny blue bling, these are a few of my favourite things... Arvi Teikari (Hempuli) really knows the way to a girl's heart! Doooors is a puzzle/platformer where you play a rotund little fellow in a blue onesie trying to get a number of glowing blue crystals. Each stage has one, and while you don't have any enemies to fear, that doesn't mean nabbing it will be easy. Hope you ate some fish today, because you're going to need the brain food.

Move with the [arrow] keys, jump with [S], pick up objects with [D], then hit [D] again to throw them. (Or hold [down] while pressing [D] to set them down nicely.) What can you pick up? Lots of things. Experiment! Doors with identical numbers are connected to each other; walk in one and pop out another, along with whatever you were carrying. Of course, you can only pick up certain types of doors, and you can't carry a door through another one. Get stuck in a spot? Just press [R] to reset the level. There are no penalties, no lives, and no time limits. Just you, a series of deceptively simple obstacles, and your glowy crystal thingamajig, tantalisingly out of reach.

Doooors is one of those games that lends itself to long periods of staring at the screen with a furrowed brow. In fact, I'd find it a lot easier to be mad at if it weren't so darned cute; I mean, lookit that round widdle blue belly! It's not perfect; tossing things onto higher ground can often be annoyingly fiddly, and the controls occasionally feel a bit "slippery" when running or landing. It's also fairly simple, if not easy.

Which makes sense, since the game was intended to be challenging. All the levels are unlocked at the start, and you can actually play them in any order you like. Of course, if you're like me, and a chronic goody-two-shoes you'll feel guilty about skipping and spend long minutes staring forlornly at the screen instead until you puzzle it out. Some people will love it. Some people may not. But Hempuli's first flash game is a welcome treat for puzzle fans, and anyone else who likes that sensation you get when the light bulb goes off in the back of your head.

Play Doooors

A custom casual gameplay comic created exclusively for JIG by Babylon Sticks creator, James Francis. Follow Babylon Sticks on Twitter: @babylonsticks.

YouTube videos and Flash games are probably the two biggest distractions on the internet. If someone were to combine them, it could be the most glorious and destructive thing to happen in this modern era. Companies would go bankrupt from the loss of productivity. Well, the addictive union has arrived, and it's an art game called Howard Glitch.

Howard Glitch is about a space shuttle hurtling into the maw of a monster. You're on the shuttle, along with several other passengers, but there's no driver or controls. The shuttle is being controlled far away by someone who isn't paying attention. While you're rushing toward your doom, you have some choices to make. The first: should you sit by and await death, or delve deep into your mind to escape reality?

Designed by Robert Allmand, Howard Glitch takes place entirely within a series of YouTube videos. You'll get a bit of sparsely animated story and then be confronted with a choice or a puzzle. Click on your choice or what you think is the solution and you'll be taken to another video. What emerges is a strange little game that's one part choose your own adventure with a twist of an escape game.

Analysis: What Howard Glitch is all about is doing something new. First attempts at something different can be hit or miss and are always looked at with a skeptical eye by us, the general public. When you think about the limitations of making a game via YouTube. it's surprising Allmand was this successful. By the very nature of the game, puzzles are somewhat limited in scope, although one involves using the mute button, which is kind of clever. You can see a lot thought went in to each turning point in the game.

Looking beyond the artistic portion of the game, Howard Glitch doesn't offer a great challenge, nor is it a very long experience. That's almost expected, as watching a YouTube video generally doesn't tax your brain too much.

Howard Glitch probably won't spawn a new wave of YouTube games, but Allmand says he intends to turn this into a series, so perhaps the concept could be further refined into something even more interactive. Until then, browse YouTube in a way you've never done before, and see what a modern Choose Your Own Adventure novel might be like.

Turning a collection of YouTube videos into an interactive experience (we like to use the word "game") is a lofty goal. Howard Glitch takes a few steps away from passive entertainment and engages you a bit more, asking you to make choices, hunt and click hotspots, change settings on the video, skip forwards and backwards in time, etc. You'll be hit with a lot of "oh, neat" moments during the game, smiling at the novel use of video controls and how well they're integrated into the experience. And the story Howard Glitch tells is a good, miniature psychological thriller, which is a genre I can never get enough of.

One question remains at the end of the day: which side of the line does Howard Glitch walk? Is it a game or is it a bunch of clickable videos? You would really have to open up that old chestnut about games being art to define this one, but I'm confident saying Allmand is taking the postmodern art approach to game creation, using new media in new ways to shake up an old industry. It provides something a little different from the rest, and while Howard Glitch may not be "different" enough or "game" enough, the end experience is a good, though not perfect, one.

Play Howard Glitch

Thanks to Robert and Simon for sending this one in!

For fans of frenetic top-down arena shooters with a retro aesthetic, Pixel Purge by Epic Shadow has plenty to offer. The fictional land of Pixela-RT witnessed years of prosperity. Now, a dark portal spews forth endless waves of Space Invaders inspired monsters intent on destroying all that is good and pixely. Luckily, volunteers from across the land take to the sky in small white spaceships to fend off the menace. Endless waves of enemies face down your small white ship on an apocalyptic top-down battlefield.

Beyond an overblown opening cinematic, the story disappears in favor of pure blasting. You control your ship with [WASD] movement and mouse aiming, allowing for strafing and precision avoidance. Enemies approach from all sides of the arena constantly. Each one you blast awards you points. Collisions with the invaders drain your health bar, which ends your quest for a highscore. The game starts out with a storm of basic enemies, and the longer you survive the larger and more dangerous they become.

Pixel Purge isn't simply a bare-bones survival shooter though. Each destroyed enemy drops "pixels" as a form of experience points. Gather enough to level up your ship and spend a skill point in one of eight attributes. The attributes fall into four categories: Offense, Defense, Bullet Effects, and Score, allowing players a small degree of customization. Along with dropped, temporary power-ups, gathering pixels for upgrades becomes a necessity to survive. As the fray becomes swamped with different enemy types weaving in and out of your attackers towards one more level-up becomes a white-knuckle affair.

An unlockable bestiary and trophies offer replay value as well. After defeating a certain number of each type of enemy the game reveals their stats and behavior. Large scores and avoidance perfection awards trophies for bragging rights, and a full set of trophies gives bonus skill points at the start of a new round. Beyond that, a highscore is the ultimate goal, with chain multipliers and massive invaders to fell.

Analysis: Pixel Purge looks great. The unique spin on the retro ascetic keeps enemy types clear when gameplay speeds up to the max. The battleground itself looks eerie, with lightning effects and particle enemy explosions keeping things interesting. Those looking for a narrative or ending will be disappointed that the intriguing atmosphere adds nothing to the story, which itself only provides a context for this shooter.

The gameplay is also great, but falls short of perfection. The upgrades themselves seem unbalanced. The fast pace eventually makes health recovery upgrades obsolete, and everything moves too fast to show if upgrades to bullet effects make much of a difference. I would have liked to see more inspired trophies too, as many are simply grinds towards larger multiplier chains and scores. However the core gameplay works great, and makes grinding for a spot on the leaderboards worth a try.

Despite its flaws, Pixel Purge is a great example of the arena shooter genre done up in a nice pixel package.

Play Pixel Purge

In 1993, a small gaming company called Wizards of the Coast published a novel card game developed by college professor Richard Garfield called Magic: The Gathering. Originally intended to be something of a casual game to be played in between the larger campaigns present at gaming conventions, Magic's popularity almost immediately exploded. In the seventeen years since, not only has the game maintained its popularity, but it has also spawned a number of other collectable card games, each in their own turn serving as the source for novels, manga, and Saturday morning cartoons. There have even been a number of browser based collectible card games including Elements, a surprisingly deep and well rounded offering from Zanzarino Design.

In this fantasy themed collectible card game, you take on the role of an elemental, a kind of mystical spirit composed of one of the twelve elements, or fundamental building blocks of existence. As an elemental there are a number of skills available to you that you can employ to test your might against other elementals. If you are very good and very lucky, you may even prove strong enough to challenge beings claiming to be invincible gods.

Before you even think about annoying deities, though, it might be wise to familiarize yourself with the basics. In your standard duel each elemental begins with 100 health points, and your goal is to reduce your opponent's health to zero. You'll accomplish this using three basic card types: creatures, spells, and permanents. Creatures will attempt to attack your opponent each turn and sometimes come with special abilities that can further give other elementals severe headaches. Spells are cards that produce their effect once and are then discarded. Permanents, as their name might suggest, are played and continue to produce their effect permanently throughout the game (unless, of course, another card is played that negates the effect or destroys the card).

Of course, playing these cards isn't free and that's where "Quanta" comes in. Most cards require a certain amount of element specific quanta in order to come into play, and to get that quanta, you'll need to play special permanent cards such as pillars and pendulums. While we're covering quanta, it's also worth mentioning that often times the special abilities of some monsters also requires the usage of quanta to activate. Manage your quanta and knock your opponent out before he gets you, and you'll win some Electrum (that's the in game currency), and maybe even win a card.

Like all good collectable card games, the nuances and mechanics of Elements could go on and on, and also like all good collectable card games, the best way to acclimate yourself to them is to get in there and play. In between matches you'll be able to manage your deck, visit an oracle that gives you money and sometimes cards and special abilities, embark upon quests (which act more like a tutorial than anything else) and you can visit the bazaar where you can buy lots of cards and build up your deck. Happily enough, unlike real card games, you won't have to save up a week's worth of lunch money doing so.

Analysis: In many ways, Elements manages to capture much of the spirit that I once felt when I used to play its spiritual ancestor over a decade and a half ago. It sparks the imagination and puts your vision and strategic mettle to the test. It can suck you in for hours at a time, but with each match lasting hardly more than a few minutes on average, Elements can be as casual an experience as you like. There's even plenty of camaraderie to be had as you chat with other players over strategy, which card is the best to upgrade, what elements work best with each other, etc.

In truth, Elements plays much like a streamlined version of Magic: The Gathering, but it is important to note that there are plenty of differences at work here to make Elements its own game. Here, the complexity of the game's structure as a whole is minimized; however, the interplay that goes on among the dozen different elements creates a breadth of diversity and possibility that lends a wonderful capacity for complexity in strategy and deck building.

And yet, with so many different elements available, this game manages to maintain an admirable balance. No one element is "better" than any other element. Instead, each element has its own personality. Entropy relies heavily on instilling chaos and status effects, Death focuses on poison and capitalizing off of creatures removed from play. There is no single winning element, nor is there any guaranteed successful combination of elements. Monochrome decks can put a serious beat down before the other side has a chance to act, but Rainbow decks can be particularly brutal when crafted right.

Like so many collectible card games, deck building is a major part of Elements, a fact that has its positives and negatives. Elements provides a wonderful support system to take advantage of in between duels from an in game store to an unlockable upgrade service to an oracle that can be visited daily for money among other things. I think the biggest thing lacking here is a way for players to barter cards directly amongst each other. This is particularly true when you start earning rare cards that don't really fit well in your deck. Another downside to how much emphasis is put on deck building is that once you get to a certain skill level, it becomes almost necessary to have an extremely focused deck. The problem with this is that while deck building is intense, actual matches can end up feeling like they are being played on auto-pilot as your deck only revolves around a single strategy.

It does take a while to get to this point, of course. Before you're playing at a truly competitive level you'll go through no shortage of grinding and thankfully there's a solid amount of skill stratification amongst computer opponents. You'll start at level 0 as you learn to play, but with patience, imagination, and skill, you can work your way up to playing the False Gods that inhabit level six. One of the best parts of collectible card games though is the ability to play real live players, and the bragging rights that comes from taking them to school. With a loyal and extensive following, you'll find no shortage of flesh and blood opponents to test your deck against. Unfortunately separating live opponents by skill level could have been done much better here. Unless you have someone specific you are going to duel against, PVP (player vs. player) matches are divided amongst upgraded decks and non upgraded decks. The problem here is that there's nothing stopping a highly skilled player from developing a deck without upgraded cards, meanwhile someone who finally has been able to upgrade their first card will likely get destroyed by someone with a fully upgraded deck. Creating PVP skill levels based on games played or record might give players a chance to enjoy more evenly matched games.

From a technical standpoint, Elements rates fairly well. There's a suitably large library of unique and rare cards each with its own gorgeous artwork. Meanwhile, aside from a little lag when playing PVP matches, the interface is mostly intuitive and responsive both in and out of matches. My largest complaint is that the game could do a much better job of indicating certain status effects. Sometimes when an effect is cast on a creature it will receive a marker indicating that the creature has that effect, but some effects don't leave markers which can lead to confusion if you aren't paying attention, and sometimes lose you a game if you don't realize an effect is in play soon enough.

Collectible card games can be something of an acquired taste and Elements is no different. Sure, it can be a very casual game, but you'll learn that to go much further beyond the beginner levels will require a level of dedication that is anything but casual. But Elements ultimately strikes the right formula that makes it easy to slip from a casual indulger to a devoted enthusiast. A solid mechanic supported by strong balance, versatility, and tons of creativity and possibility help make Elements an undeniably addictive offering and a respectable addition to the online collectible card game genre.

Play Elements: The Game

Thanks to Matt, Nixx, Sethum, Jb, William, Charles, Alex, and Will for sending this one in!

Once upon a time, there a was a young llama with a dream. A dream and $200 adorably clutched in his hoof. With that hoof-ful of dollars, he would take the wretched turf left to him by his father and become... KING! King by plagiarizing all the neighboring cities, but still. In A Llama, A World and a Plan, a building simulation from StefanT, you can become a Lama glama and make your every ungulate wish come true.

The tutorial is excellent. You start out with a blank piece of land and the $200. You're a rather empty headed lamoid, so instead of trying to come up with ideas of your own, just clop clop over to the next town and click on some of your neighbor's buildings to copy his ideas. You thief. It does take a little money to copy it, however, so maybe there's some kind of licensing going on here.

Ideas copied, return to your homestead and click on the lego block like icon to build. Once you've built several places, click the exclamation mark to work. Some buildings will get bubbles over them indicating that they can be collected from. Collect from all the buildings because they will change color to red and eventually disappear.

To get to be king, you need to progress through several goals, which you can find by clicking on the book icon in the upper right. Goals include advancing buildings up to three stars and building 3 of each kind of plant. The fourth goal will unlock the castle, and once you build the castle, you need never work again! Hip hip hooray! Or as the llama says, "Mwa mwa orgle." I'm just working from Wikipedia here, folks.

Analysis: ALaWaaP (the acronym flows trippingly off the tongue, doesn't it) feels more like the proof of concept of a great game than an actual, fully formed great game. The lack of save is the most significant drawback, and the tutorial is unskippable, so you have to go through it again every time you play. Save, casual game developers! We players actually really, really like this function!

That said, the furry little llama heart of the game is solid. I really did want my idea-pilfering llama who "doesn't know what buildings are," but somehow perfectly understands money, to achieve his life goals. Any ruminant with an opposable thumb deserves to have his dreams come true, in my opinion. The art and music has a lot of charm, with some cute little touches like the "Apricot" store selling cell phones. Rough cultivation, to Chinese restaurants, to disguised versions of Apple: civilization in three easy steps, y'all. The game interprets the sandbox theme into a world that feels like playing with a sanbox, only instead of heaps of sand, there's outdoor toilets and fast food. (If there are cats in your neighborhood, then it's like playing with a sandbox, only somehow you're making money from the outdoor toilet in it, and the food is burgers instead of dead birds.)

While we'd certainly love to see the game improved, it was a wonderful and enjoyable entry in the Casual Gameplay Design Competition 8, and I know all of us at JIG will be looking forward to StefanT's continued efforts in the future.

Play A Llama, a World and a Plan

So it's Wednesday again, and usually that means you manage to get locked in a room somewhere. But not this week, no! This week you have a plan. This week you're going to go out to dinner with a dear friend and then lock them in the restaurant! After all, you're tired of being the hapless, helpless victim locked up in various rooms, offices, bars, spas, and underground spaces. This time, dear reader, you will have your revenge, and a lovely meal to go with it. Now dinner is over and you're just waiting for your companion to get back to the table and you can put your plan into action! Hey, your friend has been gone a while, perhaps you'd better go check on him? Wait, is that door locked? Not again! If you're thinking, "Only one person would come up with such a crazy room escape scenario", well, you would be correct. Tesshi-e is back, and it's time to Escape from Restaurant Minshio. Welcome to Weekday Escape!

Now you're locked in the titular restaurant, attempting to get out. All you need to do is phone your friend and they can come open the door for you. No problem. Navigate the beautiful space with the help of arrows at the sides and bottom of your screen, open a few cabinets, solve a few puzzles, pick up and use a few items, and, oh dear, perform a little construction and you'll be home in no time, plotting a better revenge. Presuming, that is, that you can get out. Fortunately, a restaurant isn't the worst place you could be stuck. Especially this restaurant.

Escape from Restaurant Minshio has all of the bells and whistles we've come to expect from a designer as good as Tesshi-e. Gorgeous backgrounds, lively music, tricky puzzles, unique use of found objects, and a slight amount of pixel hunting can be found in this amusing little room escape. Easy to use inventory control, mute for the music and sound and a lovely save feature round out the features we have come to expect from Tesshi-e. And yes, there is a happy coin escape.

So you think to yourself that, yes, yet another escape from Tesshi-e. The games are fun and all, but there's nothing new here. Au contraire, dear reader, au contraire! To begin with, this, the 50th of Tesshi-e's games appears to be a collaboration with Democratic Osan. So while you will find such classics as the standard construction of something useful out of random found objects, you will also find new touches here and there. But most of all, dear reader, you will find some pretty decent English.

Yes, Tesshi-e has found someone to translate Escape from Restaurant Minshio who actually has a pretty decent grasp of the English language. The result is that the entire game, even random clicking, will get you English phrases that actually make sense and help you along with your escape. This is a game designer that doesn't rest on their laurels but continues to strive to create better and better plots, puzzles, and an overall experience. Teach Tesshi-e how to program a changing cursor and, well, tomorrow the world!

With the only minor quibble being the slight amount of pixel hunting, Escape from Restaurant Minshio moves Tesshi-e ever closer to that elusive goal: the perfect room escape. Fantastically fun, challenging, and more accessible than ever, Escape from Restaurant Minshio is about as perfect a mid-week experience as you can get. You even get a yummy meal and maybe even a dessert out of the experience. Time to escape! And, maybe, learn something about ill-advised revenge schemes.

Play Escape from Restaurant Minshio

From the creator of Windosill, Acrobots, and Levers comes a quiet, creative romp through an imaginary world. Seasons is a gorgeous piece of interactive art that lets you explore half a dozen scenes with Thomas and his unicycle. Pedal through the snow and see which animals pop their heads out. Shake the beehive and see where the bees go. Take a dip in the lake and watch your reflection in the water. Seasons is nothing short of beautiful, and its relaxing, webtoy-like presence will captivate your curiosity for longer than you might expect.

You control Thomas, the little egg guy riding his unicycle, by waving the mouse around the screen. He goes wherever your cursor goes, stopping when you stop and pedaling to the next scene when you pull beyond the sides of the window. Interact with parts of the environment by bumping in to them or by rolling nearby. It's that simple to move around in the world, but you'll uncover plenty of neat things in your journey.

The visuals in Seasons are detailed down to the slightest movement. Even Thomas' wiry little legs move with fluid ease. Objects feel like they have an actual presence in the world, making it all the more satisfying when you learn you can affect them. Leaves and flower petals even bend when you ride over them! Soaking in all the visual details is a key component in Seasons, and you won't run out of things to see any time soon.

We could sit and pick apart the game, question whether the unicycle is responsive enough, wonder if there's enough going on to keep you interested, but at the end of the day, Seasons is about beauty and about change. It's about exploring your world and discovering the wonders hidden in the grass, under the snow, or inside a blooming flower. Take a little unicycle ride across the seasons and see what you can see.

Play Seasons

Ah, the cosmos. It contains the whole of everything that is, was and shall be. It is filled with the awe-inspiring beauty of the nebulae, the quasars and the familiar stars. Science cannot know how big the universe is, nor can it count the number of planets or star. Every time we get close to an exact figure, a giant space whale, dubbed Harmony Keeper, starts devouring celestial bodies to maintain the balance. Or at least, that's what this latest action/arcade title from MoFunZone teaches us.

In Harmony Keeper, you take control of this space whale using the [WASD] or [arrow] keys to move. When you put yourself near a star or planet the whale starts to eat it; how long this takes depends on the size of what you're trying to eat. The goal of each level is to eat the target planet. Each level also has option challenges that range from easy, like eat 25 stars, and to seemingly impossible, like killing a boss in one minute.

You won't be able to just swim, er...float, your way to your goals, because for some crazy reason people don't take kindly to whales devouring their homes. Now, despite its size, the Harmony Keeper doesn't have any defenses of its own. So, you'll have to hit the [spacebar] and use your mana to summon little creatures called guardians. Guardians automatically attack the enemies around them, but you can guide their fire by holding down the left mouse button. With five guardians to choose from and six available slots, you can pick which ones you can build your army based on what you need at the time. Guardians can be upgraded temporarily using mana during the levels and you can also set whether you want a guardian to attack the nearest, farthest, strongest or weakest enemy.

As you eat planets and stars, your Harmony Keeper gets more mana to summon and upgrade guardians, and it also gains experience. With enough experience, you level up and gain skill points. In between levels you spend those points to either beef up your whale or to increase the chances that your guardians will use their special attack.

Analysis: Harmony Keeper scores some major points right out of the gate by having a unique premise. It might be the only game that combines elements of shoot-'em-ups with, well, eating. It is definitely the only one to feature a turquoise space whale. Complimenting the concept is fun gameplay. The first few levels may seem somewhat minimal, but soon you'll be dividing your attention between dodging enemy projectiles, eating stars and aiming your guardian's fire. The guardian system is neat and allows for quite a bit of customization.

As the cherry on top, the game looks good. It has a unique cartoony style that fits the game just right. The bosses are huge and change as they take damage, which shows you that you're making progress and gives you something new and cool to look at. Even small details have been included, such as your guardian changing appearance occasionally when you upgrade it during a level.

Harmony Keeper isn't perfect, however. The music isn't great, but even if it were it wouldn't matter because the sound mix is so uneven that gunfire quickly drowns out the music. The game is also short, only six levels, although you can keep playing after the end, with a new guardian added to your summon menu, to try for any challenges you didn't get. The difficulty curve is a little funky with the first three levels being almost too easy and the last three becoming noticeably more difficult. If you're having trouble, you might have to go back and grind earlier levels so you can beef up your health and guardians. Additional difficulty comes from the fact that your whale isn't exactly svelte. Sometimes you won't be able to dodge incoming projectiles, you'll just have to plow through and hope for the best.

Overall, the good far outweighs the bad in Harmony Keeper. The unique gameplay concepts and excellent art design should be more than enough to get you playing. Just remember what Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff... and star stuff is whale food. Technically, we're all whale food." Really makes you think, huh?

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Light Up 2 is a physics/puzzle game from the creator of the original Light UP. This chill, relaxing game is all about moving circles around the screen to light up dark orbs, hence the name. You do this by turning neutral orbs into colored orbs that reflect certain types of orbs, creating a little bit of controlled chaos that will (hopefully) settle in to a fully-lit arrangement of circles!

There are initially four kinds of orbs: immovable gray orbs, white orbs you can click to remove, glowing orbs, and dark orbs. Your goal is to get the glowing orb to touch the dark orbs to light them up, a task usually accomplished by removing white orbs and letting gravity do its thing. Objects only have to touch to interact, not stick together, and once you light a darkened orb, it can be used to light other dark orbs, which comes in handy in later levels.

Soon, you gain access to new tools in the form of blue and green bulbs. Blue bulbs reflect glowing bulbs and are created by holding [ctrl] and clicking on white orbs. Green bulbs can be made by holding [shift] and clicking on any white orb. Dark orbs bounce off of green orbs, so use them to move what would usually be the target towards the light. The number of green/blue bulbs you can create is marked in the top left corner of the screen, along with the number of white orbs you can remove.

If it all sounds like a big mess of bulby/orby confusion, believe me when I say it is anything but. Light Up 2 is a relaxing, thoughtful experience filled with soothing sound effects and quiet puzzles. Clicking and creating orbs becomes second nature a few levels in, and determining the right time to change the color of or removing orbs is your key to success. It's never quite as easy as it seems.

There's just one drawback to the whole Light Up 2 experience: unreliable physics. Identical actions rarely produce similar results, so if you turn one orb green something different will happen each time you restart the level. This saps a great deal of the strategy and puzzle elements out of the game, leaving trial and error the only true course to victory. This isn't an unheard of problem in physics puzzle games, but it's a few degrees more severe in Light Up 2. Workaround? Try, try, and try again. Four leaf clovers won't hurt, either.

Despite its technical shortcoming, Light Up 2 is still a worthwhile experience. Its short, 30-level run will take you less than half an hour to complete, with the only real stumbling block being the unreliable physics engine. However, the smooth presentation and calming set-up crafts a lovely mood that's worth checking out.

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