Greetings, traveller. Your coming was foretold since ancient times, when the great turtle carried the universe upon her back, and closed her eyes to dream of the Chosen One. He (or She) who would rise up above the shackles of the dreary work week and play some totally awesome games about zombies, dragons, and robots! No, really, it says that. Well, I don't know where, in an ancient forbidden tome of prophecies! No you can't see, it's forbidden for a reason! Just take our word for it and play these games. Oh! And, uh, the forbidden tome also says it was foretold that you would buy us all milkshakes. So, um, chop chop!
Zombie Farm - People think farming zombies is easy. Well, let us tell you, it's not! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to cultivate a proper crop of the undead? How noisy all that moaning and groaning from the fields gets at night? Not to mention all the protective head gear you go through at harvest time? Sort of makes a person want to unleash a zombie epidemic upon an unsuspecting world. Not that we would ever do that. Again.
Skyfyre - Commute got you down? Then start your day off right atop a laser-spewing dragon! Impress your friends! Make your boss say, "Wow!" Attract waves of enemies that need to be blasted side-scroller style so you can gather your gold and upgrade your skills! All the kids are doin' it!
Bloat - Bloat is a game that will change your life. Bloat is a game that will touch you, deeply and profoundly. Bloat is a game that will usher in a new era of peace and love. Or it could just be an adorable little puzzler about cute little beasts with stampy, stampy feet who try to eat each other. Which is just as good, really. Heeeeee, lookit its stampy widdle feet!
Hover Bot Arena 2 - Finally, a game that appeals to the robot-buildin', enemy-blastin', bot-upgradin' machine in all of us! You know, I hear this is how that Mythbuster with the walrus 'stache got started. So get started on your irresponsible death machine today! It probably won't net you a television show, but darned if it won't be therapeutic.
Teddy Goes Swimming - Hmmm. This is pretty suspicious. What does a teddy bear want with gold coins and treasure chests? And since when can they scuba dive without getting all manky smelling? No, no, this doesn't add up at all! Sure nothing appears to be overtly sinister about this simple little side-scroller, but when the teddy bear regime is strong enough and rich enough to strike, I want you to remember that I totally called it.
Love you Dora! You're the best!
Link Dump Fail. x_x
Links fixed. Sorry folks.
Believe it or not, the one I enjoyed the most was Teddy Goes Swimming. Although it was simple, it was pretty fun. The rest had major flaws, most notably Bloat, which registered my mouseclicks about as often as a hooker goes to church.
How do you even play Zombie Farm? I can't tell what's happening.
I swear I tested all those links before I put it up. Well. Nothing else for it now.
*sighs, readies katana, begins laying down rice paper* Sorry, folks.
Click detection aside, I liked Bloat, although it was too short!
While you're still with us, Dora -- "Bloat" asks me to download it rather than opening it up in the browser -- is that supposed to happen?
Thanks so much for telling everyone about Bloat.! i would really love it if you could change the link to our site instead of Casually Hardcore (CH is run by my industry pal Nelson Yu). Here's the preferred link:
http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/05/05/bloat/
Here's a post about the creative process behind such a deeply personal and emotionally engaging game as Bloat.:
http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2009/05/05/the-making-of-bloat/
I concur with JIGuest; Zombie Farm seems quite broken.
By its own rules, low-military/high-rural populations are most susceptible to attack.
So, you attack the most-rural, lowest-military country.
And get wiped out 100%. I tried seven times, no variance.
So, maybe you're supposed to build up your forces. There doesn't seem to be a time limit, so let's spend 20 turns building up more zombies, higher attack numbers, etc.
Wiped out 100%, right away. There's no way that's a fluke; this is just broken, or requires some obscure mechanic ("strategery"), not even hinted at in the game. Nice Fail, very subtle.
Changed per request, Untoldent. Hopefully this fixes any issues people have had with the game trying to be opened as a download, too.
Zombie Farms earned itself a spot on the LDF because it had charm and was interesting, but yes, the randomness of your success is definitely skewed. By contrast to Gobsmacked's issue, I wiped out several towns on the first go 100% of the time, only to start failing 100% of the time even with a low threat level, even after fiddling in the lab. It could have been a really clever little time waster, but as it stands, it doesn't do enough, well enough, to really stand out.
Gobsmacked, the proportion of rural to military isn't nearly as important as how populous the town is. If you have 5,000 zombies, they're going to have an easier time taking out a city filled with 2,000 soldiers than they are a city filled with 20,000 farmers. So, the best thing to do is start with the smallest cities, not taking the military so much into consideration, then work your way up as each city you infest adds to your zombie army.
zombie farming takes time... and you can click the lab buttons as many times as you wish. I just beat the game with in 464 days with 79000 zombies and 10 million points
Hum.
I was playing Bloat, and starting to enjoy it, when the page randomly took me to Interrupting Cow Trivia. While apropos, perhaps, I lost my Bloat progress and have no desire to play the early levels over.
I liked Zombie Farm once I figured out the days really don't matter. I only leveled up to about 80 days and was able to beat it in 98 days. Ehh. Could have been better.
I really like Bloat though. It was cute and quick, which are my favorite kind of JIG games. I wasn't having the problems with my mouse not clicking (or clicking too much) like it seemed other people did.
Teddy was alright, although it was incredibly repetitive. Cute though. :)
Good links this week!
It looks like Zombie Farm got pulled.
[Edit: Thanks. I've updated the links. -Jay]
bloat was looking really promising but I couldn't get past the macaroni tutorial because I couldn't click anything :(
nice selecton though, thanks Dora :)
Goshdarnit, why are people having trouble clicking with Bloat?! Running FireFox on XP here with no issues. The only possible suggestion I would have is to update your flash player if you haven't recently, but that's just voodoo debugging at that point. I apologise for not being about to provide a better solution, especially since Bloat is one of my favourites.
Dora sad. :(
Fun games! I had no trouble with Bloat, and Zombie Farm was rather fail. Oh well. Oh, and NO DORA, DONT DO IT!!! YOU HAVE SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR!!!
Is it twisted that I really enjoy killing Teddy? :)
bloat update: was pulling my hair out, tried it with firefox and even on another computer and still no clickage... until I realised that you need to kinda hold the button down a while before they grow!! now I'm realising that = happy days :) it's great little game.
Thanks for your concern though Dora but it was my clicking abilities that were iffy, not the game.
Skyfyre goes nowhere after the loading screen. It goes black. Can still access the console, though. MacOS, both Firefox and Safari.
Skyfyre works for me, although the amount of bullets being spammed around in later levels is frustrating - the hitbox is tiny, sure, but it's really disorienting to have it right at the front of your sprite.
Whoa. SkyFyre went from seemingly-unchanging Nintendo Hard to tic-tac-toe easy (well, relatively) across a reload. Maybe your upgrades/levels-up don't actually take effect until the next time you load the game anew?
RE: Zombie Farm -
My big question: How do you increase the total population of uninfected people?
Anyone have any thoughts?
A few things to note:
1) Final score equation and implications:
Final score = (# infected * 150) + (# killed) - (# days * 2500) - (# lost * 100). You can get total # killed and lost to 0 easily, so to max out points, you have to find a way to max out the population available to infect. As long as the total population increases by 17 per day, the number available for infection and the days spent to increase that number evens out.
2) How upgrading attack/defense affects final score:
Killing your zombies to increase attack/defense doesn't count against you in final score. I confirmed this by playing a game where I lost a total of 300 zombies through upgrades and 0 through infesting. Final screen showed 0 lost.
3) One component to maximizing points:
It is absolutely worthwhile to keep rage/hunger down at 0 for every infestation as long as you find a means to increase the total population.
Zombie Farm's got some odd bugs in it. One deals with rage:
Rage becomes -1% which ends up increasing the total population in the game (and you get negative kills for them).
Also, not sure if it's a bug, but the way that the number infected is calculated seems off. I played one game where that number wound up being 200k+. Maybe you get an unreported bonus?
Update