Pumpkin's Ballade
From Italian Flash developers Naive.it comes this charming Halloween-themed side-scrolling shooter. Pumpkin's Ballade puts you in the shoes of a witch on a star-powered broom out to shoot anything that moves. Movement of the mouse controls the witch up, down, left and right, while clicking the mouse button fires the weapon. Multiple clicks are required to fire again and again, or hold down the mouse button to power-up a blast that will wipe out multiple baddies. Clear several waves of different types of enemies to get to the boss for each level.
The folks at Naive have done a stellar job with this game. The graphics are gorgeous and offer several different levels with different scenery and enemies for each. Power-ups can grant you a shield, a more powerful weapon, and even life one-ups. The boss fights are unique and challenging, and are an excellent way to establish climax at the end of each level.
The soundtrack could have been better by varying it with each level and providing different sound effects for each of the enemies. As it is, the music gets a tad bit repetitious.
All things considered, Pumpkin's Ballade is a great way to get into the spirit of Halloween. Click.
The artwork & game, from my perspective, run along the lines of N.B.C.-ish & J.T.G.Peach-ish. *Love the simple art.*
Fun to play. :D
I just tried this game and I'm getting this message:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /games/pumpkin/pumpkin.swf on this server.
Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.naive.it Port 80
Even the root domain is "forbidden." I guess you can't really expect all these games to stay online forever.
You're right, Jake, we can't expect these games to be available forever; however, the Naive site has been down before for an extended period only to reemerge. We can only hope it comes back yet again. In the meantime, I have removed their games from the recommended section. cheers!
Update