If "retro" to you means huge chunky pixels, bleeping and blerping sounds and gameplay that doesn't lead you by the hand, Joshua Smyth of Tiny Frog Software has just the game for you: Attack of the Meeplings. And if you think this Java-based shooter is going to explain what a Meepling is, you're sadly mistaken.

The game opens with a brief rundown of the controls: [arrow] keys move, [Z] shoots and [space] drops a bomb. The [A] key also acts as autofire, which sounds like a typical shooter to me, and that's exactly what it is.

Comprised of only three levels, the game eternally loops, getting slightly harder and faster with each go round. The pick-ups dropped by each destroyed enemy do nothing to increase your firepower or ability to maneuver brilliant, complex bullet patterns with ease. Each enemy destroyed is worth a mere 1 point. Collect one pick-up and their destruction grants you two points. Collect a hundred and, well, you get the idea. As a result the game rewards you with a higher score the longer you play, and along with that, the ability to gain a higher score with ease.

Analysis: The game is glorious, retro-styled fun from top to bottom, including every pixel and the tough but fair gameplay; however, the real stand out is the music. Usually I find myself playing with the sound muted, but with this game I couldn't play without the music. It is an important part of the experience. Everything meshes well; the bullets' pew, the destructive kssh, the pick-up pwing all go hand-in-hand together to create a nicely layered experience.

The sounds, by the way, were apparently created with this nifty little device called SFXR by DrPetter, (a 50kb download) and is well worth having a play around with especially for the game developers out there.

In short, Attack of the Meeplings is an excellent and enjoyable throwback to the days of old where gaming was a little bit tougher, but was, for some inexplicable reason, a whole heap of enjoyable. Play, and attempt to survive, the Attack of the Meeplings.

Room Fake, presented by Place of Light, is just one of those games that makes me smile: a good-looking, nicely thought out room escape game with difficult but not confounding puzzles, a save feature(!) and not too much text to exacerbate the language barrier. It is also somewhat reminiscent of Japanese developer Neutral's offerings with its clean, pre-rendered 3D model surroundings.

In Room Fake, shockingly enough, you find yourself trapped in a room with an eclectic collection of objects, both whimsical and useful: among other things, a painting depicting nursery rhymes, a toy dog statue, a number puzzle and the usual collection of screwdrivers and keys all aid you in finding a way out. The puzzles are mainly intuitive and of moderate difficulty, a nice way to spend a lunch break or unwind from work. And, to what I am sure will be the delight of some and the disappointment of others, the [tab] key cheat has not been disabled. You probably won't need to make much use of it, though; except for a few instances, pixel-hunting is no where to be found.

Room Fake is admittedly not quite as ingenious, nor quite as pretty, as the absolute best and most innovative escape games out there. It is still, however, quite good and more than worth a play through.

For those hankering for a nice, tasty escape-the-room steak, Room Fake might be just the perfect burger: Play Room Fake!

Cheers to Eric for sending this one in. =)

Room Fake walkthrough now available!

If you happen to have spent the dry summer of 2003 in north-western Montana, you might know the feeling of watching a roiling forest fire tumble down a hillside at you at 3:00 AM. It's a paralyzing breakfast combo of beauty and horror, like being stung between the eyes by a gold-plated scorpion, and I highly recommend the experience if you are the sort of person who likes having experiences. I never considered the possibility that fire might be a calculating force, driven by evil intelligence to ravage maximum wilderness. But this is what video games are good for—letting you see things from somebody else's perspective. In this case, the perspective of fire.

Scorching Earth is an intriguing turn-based puzzle game in which you control the actions of an inferno as it seeks to devastate 50 levels worth of landscape. The levels are composed of square tiles, filled with various types of terrain—grasslands, water, trees, and so forth. Your goal on each puzzle is to destroy the required number of tiles. Since you are playing the role of "fire", you must obey some unique restrictions. Basically, you gain power (represented here by "Burn Points") by consuming resources, and then spread to other tiles by expending that power.

The "Burn!" button is the end of your turn. Pressing it causes each active flame to consume part of its square, adding to your Burn Points. Some tiles, such as forests, will allow you to burn them for longer, and yield more points over time. In between turns, you may spend those points on your abilities. The one you'll use most often is "Spread", which costs 2 points and simply expands the fire from one tile to an adjacent tile. Click the flaming space, then the Spread command, then the target space. You can also call down rainstorms to put out rival fires (which are, bizarrely, purple), and meteors to strike far-away spaces and start fresh burns.

Scorching Earth is the first release from letsmakeagame.com, another petal in the current blossoming of websites dedicated to community level design. As with BonusLevel, every game that designer Rowland Rose uploads onto Let's Make a Game will feature a level editor, so that users can add to the games' growth and re-playability. If you make a popular level, it might even end up in the Community Edition of the game later on.

Analysis: This is the sort of game that can easily pass you by, because it looks so unassuming, and its mechanics are so unusual. The instruction page is really not very helpful, so expect to mess things up the first couple of times you play. If you persevere, though, you'll find a highly versatile puzzle engine chugging away. There are a couple of awkward design decisions—the flames are so large that it's difficult to tell what terrain they're sitting on, and it takes too many clicks to cancel a half-finished command—but the basic struggle of Fire Vs. Everything is gripping enough to keep you addicted through 50 levels worth of challenge and variety.

Have I mentioned that there's 50 levels enough times yet? I think it's important for these Web 2.0 games to have a well-constructed group of official levels that teach the player all the ins and outs of gameplay, rather than relying solely on the creative efforts of beta-testers. And Scorching Earth's official level set is stellar, both at introducing concepts and at challenging the human bejeebers out of you. If you're a hard-edged puzzle-holic, this is what you live for.

So it's a good, solid, innovative puzzle game. But I'm mostly fascinated by the way it makes you feel like you're actually controlling a fire. Sometimes you'll hold onto a forest for several turns, gathering strength for a last-minute push across the prairies. Sometimes you'll cut a controlled burn across a choke-point to keep the purple flames from advancing. It's fun being in charge of a natural disaster, following natural disaster rules, attending natural disaster after-parties, caring not for the ashen husk of a world you're leaving behind. It's fun, and if you've ever been close to a real forest fire, kind of grisly. Play Scorching Earth.

Scorching Earth walkthrough now available!

Killawatt is a game about stacking speakers onto a truck with a wobbly, aerial crane. It's the latest addition to Samsung's arcade of surprisingly solid advergames, featuring Sammy, a conspicuously anglo, canine mascot. This time, however, Sammy has his black snoopy ears in a dreadlock-esque style, and he's gone rasta.

The interface consists solely of clicking and waiting. Sammy is hanging onto a crane toward the top of the screen, the crane moves over time, wobbling all the while, and precisely timed clicks will drop those speaker blocks in a pattern that makes further stacking feasible. Each level of stacking you manage to lay will give you increasing bonuses to your score, the initial level gives 200, the next gives 400, all the way to 1,000. But be careful, the whole thing can come down late in the game, taking your high score all the way down. A three minute time limit is also in effect.

Analysis: Once you play through the game a few times, you realize that the major limit to your potential score isn't the time limit, but rather the structural integrity of the speaker towers you're setting up. Then you shift your strategy toward carefully laying a strong foundation, as opposed to just spamming speakers. I think the developers could have done a better job of implying that, as time limits usually are the primary factor limiting your performance. The other balancing issue is the speed at which the crane moves left and right, it'd be nice if the position of the mouse more clearly altered the movement of the crane, and if the relative distance increased the speed of the movement. As it stands, waiting for the crane to get into the position you want is about as exciting as watching a stock ticker, which since you're not making money, isn't very exciting.

Overall, a charming, solid, and surprisingly deep exploration into catastrophic physics and cool reggae. Play Killawatt.

For a similar game, check out the previously reviewed Tower Bloxx.

Brain Cell is the brain child (pun definitely intended) of Ryan Gibson for the U.K.-based development team DESQ, an organization devoted to the development of Web-based and digital learning projects. In a recent attempt to contribute to casual gaming, DESQ released Brain Cell in the hopes of enhancing your typical room escape game and taking it to the next level. In many ways, it succeeds; featuring a gorgeous (yet bandwidth-intensive) take on the usual point-and-click, room escape genre.

Like many other games of this kind, you awake in a strange room, clueless of who you are or how you got there. In the case of Brain Cell, you begin in a futuristic cargo hold, (sort of "space marine" setting), surrounded by cryogenic hibernation beds and strange spaceship-like gadgets. Controls are fairly simple; [arrow] keys to move, [N] and [M] to strafe and the spacebar to use/interact. The most prominent aspect of the game that immediately catches the eye is the 3D rendering and modeling. You have a third-person view of your character, with a beautifully textured environment surrounding you, complete with dynamic reflections and lighting effects.

When you approach an object you can interact with, a magnifying glass appears in the upper-right corner, signaling you to push the spacebar. Depending on the object, 3D cut scenes or mini-games appear. Cut scenes give you clues about the object or your surroundings, while the mini-games are the means to help you escape. Similar to other games in the genre, Brain Cell never hints or nudges you in the right direction. Although linear in game play, there are no road signs along the way to make your job any easier. The mini games can be frustrating at times (although they require critical thinking, the underlying logic isn't wrapped up into a pretty box and handed to you).

Analysis: Brain Cell's puzzle-solving elements are nothing new to the genre, although the 3D engine allows much more immersion into the game than older classics like Crimson Room. Unlike its predecessors though, Brain Cell seeks to break the mold somewhat, attracting gamers who might otherwise not give "escape" games a chance. The whole "Starcraft/Warhammer40k/Doom"-style of the character and environment lends itself nicely to the third-person feel of the game, enticing new players of the genre to give the game a shot, which is what the developers were striving for. On the flipside, such a graphically-intensive flash game requires lots of bandwidth. The game can be launched in a 9MB low-bandwidth or 13MB high bandwidth version. Either way, however, expect to wait awhile, even with a broadband connection. Even more annoying is that the cut-scenes and mini-games aren't cached into memory, meaning when you click to interface with one, it takes even more time to load in-game. Waiting for these elements to load gets tiresome, and distracts from the overall experience.

All-in-all, Brain Cell is a commendable effort, hopefully paving the way for more third-person games of this genre. After all, wouldn't a Flash-based, fully-3D, first-person escape game be something to see some day? Play Brain Cell.

Bestowing a name like Deep Chalk on your game is not a frivolous undertaking. "Deep" suggests layers upon layers of meaning, complex undercurrents carrying bits of knowledge that are almost as satisfying to examine as the currents themselves. Deep Blue. Deep Purple. Deep Dish Pizza.

On the other hand, "chalk" doesn't bring much to the table. Besides teaching tool, sidewalk decorator, and athletic friction reducer, we don't really have that much use for chalk. Rarely is it considered a plus for something to be described as "chalky".

You can begin to see the clash of ideas that are suggested the the juxtaposition of these two words. Likewise, the game itself encompasses a dual nature, though perhaps not by game author Zack Stone's design. On the deep side of things, we find a charming and interactive point-and-click, in which you clear the way for a powerful crystal to escape its confines, presumably to reach a higher plane of crystallinity. Certain game elements, rather than activating when you click, respond to the very touch of a cursor; others require more of a karate chop. Otherworldly music sampled from Boards of Canada permeates the black-and-white Samorostian landscapes. No guidance is offered; it is up to the player to figure out what can and what must be done.

Ah, but now we come to the chalk. Yes, I suppose you could say that the white line-objects on the black background suggest chalkboard imagery, the mouse-over interactions reflect the transitive nature of chalkboard doodles and so on. Fine. But there's also a certain dryness to the game that seems to stem from a lack of empathy with the crystal. We don't understand why it's so determined to get wherever it is trekking towards. Similarly, the puzzles also feel dis-connective, making Deep Chalk seem at times more like a find-the-hotspot game.

So, while on the surface Deep Chalk may appear to be a worthy contemporary of Samorost, it doesn't quite reach that level in the end. Not that I'm trying to undersell it — the atmosphere is captured fantastically, augmented by the complex and shadowy visuals. To be fair, the three short levels are only the first installment of the game, so Deep Chalk may yet reach its potential. Nonetheless, they are certainly worthy of a play in their current form, and we'll be looking forward to further installments from Zack. Play Deep Chalk.

Cheers to Graeme and Michelle for sending this one in. =)

Blockoban is the latest from JP (pepere.org), who has just launched a new website that features user-created content, called Bonus Level, along with fellow game designers, Wouter and Tonypa. With names like that attached you can expect high quality, and Blockoban delivers. It's a game where you slide blocks around and try to match their colors to specific spaces. That simple mechanic is fleshed out with challenging level designs and high quality production values, delivering an experience that will keep you hooked.

Simply click on one of the blocks, and then click in the direction you want it to move. A striped rectangle will pulse out of the respective side, like a cardinal gel—a nice touch. When you click, the block slides in that direction until stopped. Located on the board are dots that fit neatly into the donut hole in the center of the movable blocks. Your goal is to move all blocks onto the dots of the same color. Easier said than done—solutions often require tricky uses of a one block as support for another; in a way that allows all of them to settle on their final resting place.

Analysis: Puzzle fans, particularly people who enjoy Sokoban variants, will get a kick out of Blockoban. Those of us less familiar with block-moving mechanics may be put off by the difficulty. A puzzle can persist like a knot, teasing with its apparent lack of an out, and then suddenly something that seems obvious, yet hidden, presents itself and you solve the level. A major strike against it is that levels can only be unlocked serially, so the more casual player cannot sample the content and skip puzzles that seem too difficult. Another strike, and this is a general sin, is the inability to turn off the audio, which while loaded with 70s disco charm, isn't something you'd want forced on you. Fortunately, the level editor is easy to use, allowing you to contribute to the game in the same session length that you'd devote to playing it.

Slide those blocks around like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, when he's wearing socks and there's the music, you know? It's like that. Play Blockoban.

We have another Eyezmaze game! Recovered from an illness that delayed the game's creation (but produced Grow Nano Vol. 3), On has finally released Meet In ver. 0. You control four individual family members, each in his or her own screen, and are trying to guide them through the maze of puzzles to be together once again. Simply click on the square you want to control and use the [arrow] keys to move. We'll be back with more later, so until then, enjoy Meet In ver. 0!!

Meet In ver. 0 walkthrough now available!

Our main course this evening is a heaping plate of voxels served on a bed of romaine and topped with bits of rock from an underground jail cell. Following that will be a tiny space ship served in bite-sized pieces that must be consumed within three seconds.To wash that down feel free to eat as many bugs as you see fit.

Voxelstein 3D (Windows, 30MB, free) - A remake loosely based on the classic first person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D, using Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine. For the uninitiated, Voxlap is build around voxels, pixels living in a 3D world that function as building blocks in much the same way as polygons. Voxelstein 3D is just one short level but serves as an excellent showpiece for the engine. Having an almost fully destructible environment makes for a very fun time!

Made in Wired (Windows, 1MB, free) - Similar to the Four Second series of games (or Wario Ware, if that's your cup of tea), Made in Wired features a series of lightning-fast minigames centered around a shmup theme. You only have a few seconds to understand and complete each game before you're thrown into the next, so you might want to take a deep breath before firing up this game.

Bullfrog (Mac, 8.3MB, free) - Bugs. Never liked 'em. Frogs seem to love them, however, which is a bonus in this game. The six legged critters have invaded your home, and as a mighty bullfrog you must devour as many as you can. It's a cute, simple, relatively easy and kid-safe arcade game.

Family Feud: Dream Home is another television game show to make the leap to the casual gaming world. The classic "guess the most popular answer" formula is as exciting on your computer as it is on TV, only now it's much more interactive than just yelling at the screen. With over 3,000 questions to ponder and a tacked-on home decorating game, you won't have a hard time finding an excuse to guess what the "survey says".

Family Feud: Dream Home functions just like the television game show, exuberant host included. One hundred people were surveyed for each question, their answers recorded and arranged by popularity. Guess the more popular answer and you'll earn more points, but give three wrong answers and you'll have to move on. It's that simple. Beat your opponent in team play or the average score in single player mode and you'll enter the Fast Money round where you'll fire off responses in an attempt to raise your score above the 200 mark.

The interface in Family Feud: Dream Home is text-driven, so you'll be doing a lot of typing. In order for this to work, the game must be able to interpret your answers in context of the possible responses. For example, entering "siren" is the same as saying "turn on the sirens", so as long as you're in the ballpark of the right answer, you'll hit it big.

As for the "Dream Home" part of the game, winnings you earn from playing Family Feud can be spent on furniture and decorations to spruce up your empty house. The decor isn't as exciting as in Home Sweet Home, but if you enjoy design you'll get a kick out of this mode, even if it has nothing to do with the main game.

Analysis: Tons of questions, an announcer that always encourages you, and equal parts fast action and serious thinking. Family Feud Dream Home is a great package that's even better with a friend. The interface doesn't bog you down with awkward stalls, keeping the action fairly fast-paced. And some of the animations are strangely riveting, such as when your score is tallied at the end of the game. I could watch those numbers fly around all afternoon.

One slight disappointment is the integration of the "Dream Home" portion of the game. The two function as completely separate entities, the only connection being your earnings from the gameshow allowing you to buy furniture. It leaves you with a big "huh?" feeling, as it doesn't add much to the game and just feels out of place.

And then there's the game's vocabulary database. Sometimes I was amazed at how well my answers were interpreted, while other times I wondered just how smart this program really is. Typing "black" to one of the questions was hailed as a miss, yet when the answers were revealed "wearing black" was a response. Maybe I was too vague, this isn't a word guessing game, after all. But sometimes my half-hearted attempts at guessing yielded spectacular results, so it can be a hit or miss experience. Overall, however, the thesaurus does a good job.

Simple interface and highly addictive gameplay. Family Feud: Dream Home is a great little gaming package on every front. You can also try out some of the other Family Feud games to really get your surveying fix.

Windows:
Download the demo
Order the full version

Mac OS X:
Not available. Use Boot Camp or Parallels.

Family Feud: Dream Home is available to download from these affiliates:

It was a foggy day when Mateusz Skutnik took the pictures for 10 Gnomes #4, and the setting is one of the longest buildings in Europe. You can read more about the project at Pastel Games.

Get your hidden object fix with the latest installment of this episodic game in which you must find all 10 gnomes in 10 minutes' time. Ready. Set. Click! Play 10 Gnomes #4.

• Play the entire series of 10 Gnomes games.

10 Gnomes episode 4: Foggy Flat walkthrough now available!

This week on Link Dump Friday: Nitrome likes boogers, your castle is being attacked by evil letters, a centipede is after you, and we trap you in a burning Atari 2600 house. Fortunately you have your glamorous life as a video store clerk to recharge your batteries while you contemplate the origin of life as we know it.

• Snot Put - The latest diversion from Nitrome is all about flinging the gooey green stuff from a giant nose and seeing how far you can throw it. It's a pretty basic game with some wobbly liquid physics, but it's the only place you can play with snot and not get in trouble.
• Alpha Assault - It's Bookworm meets strategy RPG in this unique blend of word spelling and Risk-like tile domination. Create words to keep the evil red tiles away from your castle. Earn gold to buy letters and power-ups to help you along the way.
• The Life Ark - For anyone who had any doubts about how life began on this planet, Free World Group has the answer to it all as explained in The Life Ark, an amalgamation of On's Grow graphics and Rob Allen's Hapland gameplay. Apparently the Earth was a dry and barren land before aliens came and populated it using an ark and several ginormous tea pots.
• Survivor? - What better way to learn fire safety than with four color visuals (ok, maybe there's a few more than that) and blocky graphics? None, I say! Survivor? is a short but tricky game where you must escape the burning house with your family. Very Atari-age. Warning: this game makes the most annoying sound possible for like 30 seconds straight when it loads.
• Race to the Bottom - A one button game where you pivot around a constantly shifting point to evade the centipede and reach the bottom. Sounds easy, huh? It's not. The techno soundtrack is a great touch.
• Video Store Clerk - Live the glamorous life of a video store clerk, just like you've always wanted! Try and guess what each customer rated the target movie by looking at past films and their scores.

Tainted Kingdom is a lean, tactical warfare game from Krinlabs, the creator of Sonny. You play a young nobleman assigned to a front-line unit in a lamentable war, only to find that your superiors are not who they seem. The gameplay is taut, playing out as a real-time dance of rock-paper-scissors match-ups. Do you have the skill to lead in battle?

The game alternates between a map of the battlefield and a diorama view of individual skirmishes. At the battlefield map, you can choose to attack an adjacent outpost, fortify one of your own, cultivate the land and get a bigger tax and population yield, or build troops. Building troops involves dropping a small, sunk-cost into a building that houses certain types of units, with accompanying upgrades, and then spending population and gold on those various options. Building a farm allows you to convert population into gold, or vice versa. The game's skirmishes involve spending a unit by dragging its icon onto one of three rows, the unit then walks across the screen, fighting any enemies it encounters. Your goal is to get a certain number of units across the screen safely, doing one point of damage to the enemy base, before you run out of deployment points which limit the number of troops you can enter into battle. All this is slightly more complex than what you're used to, more so than Sonny for example, but once you get your head around it, it's fast and easy.

Analysis: Tainted Kingdom is a solid game with great production values, yet it suffers from a few notable flaws: The game could be better balanced; the down-time buffer that keeps you from deploying soldiers at the same space consecutively could be slightly lower; and the blocking effect could be more lenient. The free hit allowed for by a soldier dying could have been done away with simply by letting troops walk past dying soldiers, as it is it's somewhat cheap. The plot is also left unresolved, like in Sonny, and it uses narrative devices that feel manipulative in the context of a game, where you expect to have some control over the course of events. It would also be nice to have surviving soldiers re-enter your ranks, rather than having to recruit everyone for a single skirmish each, which is kind of silly when you think about it. However, the mathematical poise of what remains under these scars is still striking, and the trade-offs you'll have to make on a moment-by-moment basis will keep you jamming the hot-keys. Play Tainted Kingdom.

Mat from Nitrome sent over a short preview video of Skywire 2, the upcoming sequel to one of their most popular games, Skywire. So far it looks like it will be bigger and even better than the original, and is that 2-player versus split-screen I see?! Take a moment and check out the video while we all anticipate the imminent release of this great looking sequel. Watch Skywire 2 video.

Ha55ii, creator of Powder Game, Liquid Webtoy and Irritation Stickman, has released a new webtoy designed to steal your afternoon and be a playground for your creativity. Earth Editor uses similar particle physics and materials as previous games but adds a unique twist: centralized gravity. Drop some sand on the screen and it's pulled to the middle. Add water and you have yourself a little planet. Then you fling some meteors and watch the fun explode!

With version 1.1 of Earth Editor there are only a few materials to play with, including sand, water, walls, and the destructive meteor. Sand and water mostly just stack on each other and try to form a round ball. Drop meteor into the mix, however, and things get hectic pretty quickly. You're limited to drawing 40,000 "dots" at once and can set materials to both the left and right mouse buttons. You can also erase portions of the screen, change the size of your drawing tool, or just reset the whole thing and start from scratch.

Earth Editor is very similar to Powder Game, but the focus on gravity gives it a great new twist. Hopefully ha55ii plans on adding mini-upgrades in the future as has been the case with previous titles, as more materials to play with are the bread and butter of this webtoy. Even with just a few tools at your disposal, Earth Editor is an alarmingly fun way to spend your time. Play Earth Editor.

Cheers to Motzo for sending this one in! =)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if there is a law that forbids it, there should be a game that promotes it. Take, for example, using love-heart power to fly into the sky and urinate on goal posts. I love doing that, and thanks to the Adventures of Alex, from the presumably like-minded developers at Hangame, I can now enjoy this activity without all the lawsuits, and so can you! What an age we live in.

No, seriously, that's what this game is about. Actually, Alex has to go to the cheese shop to buy some cheese for his mother. What a nice boy. But the cheese shop is high in the sky and is being defended by flying chickens and people with magnetic headphones. You must navigate past clouds and various enemies, while collecting coins and heart energy, on your way to the holy cheese place ...and back.

The controls are simple enough: [up], [left] and [right] arrows are the only keys you'll need, coupled with a whole heap of stamina. You see, Alex's adventure is not an easy one. If he runs out of heart energy before reaching the top—or on his way back down—he (you) will have to start again. As in, from the very start of the game at the very first level. Did I mention the cheese costs thousands of dollars? So be sure to collect all of the coins that you can on the way up, or you won't be allowed in the shop. There are fifteen levels in all, and each one presents an incredible challenge.

Analysis: Take note, the game is cute as a button, but is severe in difficulty. Your heart reserves enable you to float for about thirty seconds and there are plenty of pick-ups to be had, so that's not the problem; however, the clouds that you must navigate around are nasty. They suck energy fast and if you happen to get stuck inside one, you're pretty much dead, especially on the way down. The enemies are all individually annoying, but can be carefully maneuvered around with practice.

The thing is, as punishingly difficult as it is, there is something oddly compelling about the game that makes you want to keep on playing. It may be the "I'm sure I've heard it before" music or the delightfully fluffy graphics, but there is something—probably the urinating on the goal posts at the end of every level—that keeps the desire to play quite high.

If you're up for a bit of laughably fun, adorable arcade-style cuteness, all with a bunch of peeing on goal posts, urine for a treat. I think you'll be hooked, too. Play Adventures of Alex.

And so eerily begins The Fog Fall, the newly released point-and-click adventure from Pastel Games and Mateusz Skutnik, creator of favorites such as the Submachine series, Covert Front and Daymare Town. You are an unnamed, unknown survivor of a nuclear holocaust, eking out a meager existence with your family in a bomb shelter-like house, struggling against the inevitable knowledge of your own impending mortality. A lonely life, really, sadly mundane. Until, one night, you wake up with a strange feeling in your belly, and look out to see the house surrounded by fog....

This is a fantastically atmospheric game. Mateusz has proven himself to be a master at creating wonderfully creepy, claustrophobic environments that lend themselves perfectly to the deeply enigmatic nature of his stories; with Mateusz, finishing a game is generally less of an "escape" and more of an entry into a new cage. Maybe more than any of his other creations, The Fog Fall, with its references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1950's gone awry, meshes beautifully with Mateusz's style. It is a vision of an alternate outcome of a frightening, uncertain time; even more than half a century later it, to be frank, gives me the jibblies.

Analysis: The Fog Fall plays much like Mateusz's previous offerings; same graphical style, same spare soundtrack and ambient noise, same largely code- and machine-based puzzles. Basically, it feels almost exactly like playing another Submachine. And hey, who am I to complain about that? I'm a fan of the tried-and-true Murtaugh style, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Also like the Submachine series, however, I did feel at times that The Fog Fall requires unintuitive leaps of logic (though, judging by how quickly some JIG readers have pulled together walkthroughs, that might be a personal failing). I'm all for thinking outside of the box, but a few of the game's puzzles had me using the unfortunate "try everything with everything until something happens" method. Although, now that I think about it, perhaps a certain amount of frustration is integral to the full Murtaugh experience? He wants us to empathize with the games' protagonists!

Despite any minor criticisms, The Fog Fall is another excellent, good-looking, entertaining production. With story by Karol Konwerski, the artwork of Maciej Palka, music by Brian Wohlgemuth, and programming by the game master himself, Mateusz Skutnik, all the pieces are in place for yet another fantastic escape game experience, as well as an entirely new series of games not to be missed.

Escape the, um, apocalypse: Play The Fog Fall!

Cheers, Graeme!

The Fog Fall walkthrough now available!

With thanks to Owl for reminding me about this classic Flash gem of a turn-based strategy game created by Brian Cable. When I first came across the game in 2004, I held off on posting it to the site and instead contacted Brian asking if I could help him update the graphics since they look a bit rough when compared to its sparkling gameplay. He agreed but I dropped the ball, and the project languished. Fast-forward 4 years and the game is still excellent and worth mentioning, and it even earned Brian 3rd place in a recent Microsoft game design competition.

Proximity is somewhat like a cross between Risk and Go. It is a surprisingly simple game to learn and it takes about 5 minutes to play. You can play against the computer, or against a friend at the same computer. No multiplayer version of the game yet exists, unfortunately.

Two identical sets of tiles (one red, one blue) are made up of random numbers from 1-20. Both sets are equal in size to the number of turns you have for the board. Each turn, a tile from your respective set is chosen at random and removed from those remaining. Your turn ends when you place the tile onto any free space of the game board. If the number on the tile is larger than the enemy tile(s) you place it adjacent to, the color of those tiles are turned into your color, and the total sum of all your tiles is updated accordingly. The (default) objective is to have the largest sum at the end of the game, though this can be changed to the most territories instead in Game Setup.

Quickstart gets you into a game quickly, with the computer set to "beginner". If you want a more significant challenge, enter setup and change the difficulty: beginner, skilled, expert, or human. You can even set both players to computer AI and sit back and watch as they play.

Proximity is a brilliant casual game design by Brian Cable, and if you haven't yet played this excellent game, you're in for a treat. Play Proximity.

Kullors, created by Jon Bartram—a Web design student from Bedford, UK—is a cute new puzzle game in which the objective is to mix and match colors to remove all the cute little kullors from each level. Just click on one to select it, then click on another of a matching color to pop both off the board.

Matching the kullors looks super easy at first (and it is!), but the real challenge comes when you run out of matching colors (and you always do!) and must begin to mix colors to make just the right combination of kullors to clear the board.

A color wheel is provided to help with the mixing. It is easy to become familiar with if you remember that Red, Green and Blue (RGB) kullors mix to produce a Cyan, Magenta, or Yellow (CMY) one, and vice versa. It's simple to see unless, of course, you have some form of colorblindness.

Analysis: Presentation wise, Kullors does everything right with its appealing saturated colors, eye-popping animations, and lively soundtrack. However, the time-based gameplay is dependent upon color perception and is therefore not a game for colorblind folks, nor for people who enjoy a relaxing, casual puzzle game. The color-dependency, the timer and the limited tries you get before the game ends reduces the accessibility of this game quite a bit. But give it a try. It's cute, easy to learn, and the soundtrack is quite charming (for a bit) and will likely have you dancing in your seat along with all the little kullors. Play Kullors.

For most games, the term "derivative gameplay" is a criticism at best. Not so for dRive by Alex Snyder of Twig Games, the only calculus-themed entry into our 5th game design competition (CGDC5) and quite possibly the first calculus-themed game to get a review on this site.

Hang on, though, don't go fleeing for the high country quite yet. Yes, dRive is based in calculus, but that doesn't mean it's going to make your brain hurt. You don't need to understand the math to play the game, and if you've been having trouble with the math, playing dRive might even help.

At its core, dRive is a simple "catch the falling objects" game. Use the [left] and [right] arrows to move side-to-side, and catch the falling squares. Catch several in a row to start a combo, which increases the value of each square you catch. The larger squares are worth even more points, but don't touch the big dark ones, or you'll lose a life.

When you first start dRive, you're playing on the left-hand third of the window. After you rack up enough points, the board will upgrade, giving you a second screen, and this is where the math enters in. Use up and down to switch screens, but you can only control one screen at a time. The other screen is still active, and its movements are based on the screen you're on. If you're on the left screen, your movement changes where your ship on the right screen is. If you're on the right screen, it's your position that affects how the ship on the left moves. If you do know the math, you'll understand when I say that the left screen is position, and the right screen is its first derivative, velocity. If that went over your head, just play with it a bit and you'll get the basic rules of movement before long.

Once you've done well enough with two screens, dRive adds a third, acceleration, on the right. The same rules apply as before, but if you're on one of the end screens, you have no direct control over the far screen at all: everything gets filtered through the center screen. As such you may be tempted to control only the center screen, but if you try it, you may find that the right hand screen offers you more control. And there's an extra bonus to controlling that one directly: it's worth 4x as many points as the left screen, and twice the center.

As you play dRive, you'll also run into three more types of falling blocks. The (+) increases your speed, but only when you take control of the screen you caught it on. The (-) decreases your speed in the same way. And the smaller pink squares are extra lives, catch them to keep the dark squares from knocking off your screens.

Analysis: In some ways, dRive is hard to classify. Although it certainly acts like a game in many ways, the simple graphics, slow pace early on, and the fact that there are only 6 types of falling objects all combine to give the impression that it's more a learning tool or toy than a full game. This does not, however, mean that it's boring, especially if you expand your attention to all three screens instead of focusing on one and letting the others fend for themselves.

If there were a category for greatest innovation within the competition, dRive would have won it hands-down. It takes a lot of chutzpah to turn what many people consider a difficult subject into a game, and a lot of talent to pull it off. And the math geek in me rejoices at the thought that some time spent playing dRive might help struggling students get a visceral feel for the basic concepts of calculus.

It may not have won any prizes, but dRive is still innovative and fascinating, and we hope to see more from Twig Games in the future. Go ahead, give it a try. Despite its shortcomings, it's fun, and who knows? You might actually learn something. Play dRive.

Update: Well, maybe it won a prize after all! Lars A. Doucet has donated $250 of his 2nd place prize to dRive. Way to go, Lars, and congratulations to Alex!

The Hapland-meister strikes again with a wacky new puzzle game,