Windforge is going to blow your mind. On the surface it sounds like a garden variety Terraria or Minecraft clone with a steampunk coat of paint. Spend an hour with the game and you'll realize it's so very much more than that. Windforge is a sidescrolling role playing game that lets you build and fly an airship and craft tons of items, weapons and parts. Everything in the environment is destructible, giving you a tremendous sense of freedom and making just about every other exploration game look restrictive by comparison.
With the Minecraft and Terraria and other sandbox games going strong, Junk Jack X from Pixbits arrives with a lot of great ideas in tow. It's a sequel to the 2011 Junk Jack release that adds a number of new features and improvements, including multiplayer support for both online and offline play, creative and adventure modes, Retina graphics, and thousands of items to find, treasures to uncover, and objects to be built. It's one of the most full-featured sandbox games on any mobile device and will easily keep you glued to your iOS device for hours on end.
Gather your tools and find a comfortable chair, Terraria has rolled onto iPhone and iPad! The universal app ported by 505 Games shrinks sandbox adventure world found in the PC/Mac downloadable version of the game, rearranging the menus and grafting a couple of virtual joysticks onto the screen. It looks, feels and plays just like the original, and even with its few missing features, it's a solid port of Terraria through and through.
Toca Builders is a sandbox creativity toy created by the team at Toca Boca. Instead of giving you boring drawing tools or other cold, removed contraptions, this adorable game hands you half a dozen robots who each have different abilities. By driving them around, switching between them and using their skills to place and remove blocks, you can construct just about anything you can dream up!
Want to take Mojang's wildly popular sandbox building simulation with you wherever you go? As long as you have an iOS or Android device you can! Though lacking a lot of the content from its desktop edition and multiplayer capability, Pocket Edition is a great way to get your diggy-diggy-hole on whenever you want, or just get your feet wet if you want to find out what all the fuss is about.
The world of creativity games continues to expand, but this time it's on mobile devices! Growtopia, a combined effort from Robot Wants developer Hamumu and Dungeon Scroll creator Robinson Technologies, strips out a lot of the complexities often found in creativity games like Minecraft or Terraria, allowing you to build and decorate your own little world that goes wherever your mobile device goes. Bored on the bus? Growtopia! Don't wanna listen to your boss droning on? Growtopia! Entire evening free? GROWTOPIA!
Scribblenauts Unlimited is a new and improved release in the Scribblenauts line from 5th Cell Media. Giving you the power to create objects at will, you embark on a quest to bring happiness to the world, helping people in need by granting them objects from your magic notebook. That's all fine and good and such, but the fact of the matter is you can create just about anything you want, so while that pedestrian is in dire need of a glass of water, wouldn't it be so much more fun to give her a gigantic angry flying shark instead?
ScrumbleShip is an in-progress sandbox-style game of ship construction and combat simulation, all accomplished using a massive list of building materials and a surprisingly smart heat simulation model. Built around simple block placements, you have complete freedom of movement in this game, allowing you to jet yourself in any direction so you can construct the most accurate (or most hilariously inaccurate) piece of space-faring machinery you've ever seen. Want a tiny escape pod all your own? Done. How about a massive star base? Orbital station? Or maybe even a Death Sta— er, moon?!
The Sandbox is a creative elemental puzzle game for iOS by Pixowl. It mixes puzzles and challenges with good old fashioned elemental interactions, exactly the kind you would find in classic browser games like Sand Sand Sand. Guiding the all-powerful element dropping utility that is your finger, you can mix dozens of unique elements to create fantastic reactions, functioning machines, crazy Rube Goldberg-like devices, or just paint pretty pictures on your screen. There's plenty of room for creativity, but also a fair amount of thoughtful challenge as well!
Just over two years ago from this day, a relatively unknown indie programmer called Notch posted about a work-in-progress version of a sandbox building game on the TIGSource forums. It was called Minecraft, and at the time, people thought it was really very cool. Fast forward to the present and Minecraft has sold over four million copies, been through extended alpha and beta phases, spawned the Mojang indie studio, and gained so much popularity, the launch of its official version took place at a Las Vegas convention dubbed MineCon. That's an impressive feat for any game, let alone one started by a single person. But now, Minecraft is officially out. No more beta, no more alpha, it's here. Time to lose yourself in a voxel world all over again!
We all know Minecraft by now, the massively cool 3D sandbox creativity game that lets you explore, craft, and build anything you like. Then there's Terraria, a game that took the same formula and flattened it into a 2D sidescrolling game, adding combat and some other nice extras in the process. Both titles have spawned similar games on numerous platforms, but so far the mobile realm hasn't been a fertile ground for the sandbox genre. Until Junk Jack came along. This 2D pixel-gorgeous game takes the all-too-familiar crafting, digging, and exploration formula to your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, bringing with it an entire world of possibilities.
Nintendo DS owners most likely recognize the name, but for everyone else, the Scribblenauts series is a relatively unknown treasure. That all changes with the release of Scribblenauts Remix, an iOS version of the phenomenal creativity puzzle game from 5th Cell. The tagline "Write anything. Solve Everything." couldn't be more appropriate, as Scribblenauts challenges you to solve puzzles by typing in words and phrases. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it, so feel free to summon a huge invincible flying pregnant angry rainbow giraffe to fight with Zeus, if you like.
This gratifyingly fun action-platformer by Page52 departs from typical at its very start as your screen fills with intricately interesting sketches and then it continues into the extraordinary, stopping to command: "Draw your own..." weapon, hat, enemy. Although dotted lines suggest the shape of such invention, in your Sketch Quest notebook, you're limited only by imagination.
Take me out to the You Are Games! Take me out to the crowd! Bring me some captions and quirky punchlines, your quip could be featured in an upcoming comic! For it's loot, loot loot you could win if your caption tickles our funny bone, so it's one, two, three strikes you're out, 'cause that frooooooog's oooooooon fiiiiiiiiiire!
Terraria, a new action/adventure/creativity game from Re-Logic, is perfect for a sand emperor like myself. It offers the thrill of discovery mixed with the chance to meticulously construct your own little village, city or empire. And before you think it: yes, it's a lot like Minecraft, only in 2D!
It's your job to come up with an egg-laden pun in this week's You Are Games challenge. That's right, the yolk's on you! Take a look at this unfinished Babylon Sticks comic drafted by resident comicster James Francis. It could use another dipping in the dye batches so it gets some color. But most importantly, it needs a punchline! What humorous quip can you imagine to finish this comic?
Write a HaikCow for your chance to win a free copy of Cow Trouble for iPhone!
For a while now, we've been doing these Babylon Sticks Caption Contests as some of our You Are Games escapades. We've done seven of these contests so far, and we've had seven winners, out of over seven hundred comments. With the proper focus and concentration on the goal, the winning caption may very well come to you.
Everybody Edits is a bare-bones platform game played on the backs of the very people who build it! In this charming retro-looking game, you are given basic tools to place blocks, lay gravity-altering objects, and craft mazes and traps of your own design. All of this happens in real-time, meaning you can move and build at the same time, all while people from around the world run around in your world!
Imagine a bunch of magnetic blocks that you can stick to your refrigerator. If you put them in the right spots on the fridge door, you can drop a marble from the top of the fridge and have it bounce and fly about until it reaches the target at the bottom. That's the basic idea behind this webtoy that won the Mozilla Labs Game On open Web game development competition. And yes, it's cooperative, because you're building just one part of a gigantic, continuous marble run with thousands of other players, like refrigerators stacked from here to the moon.
This week on our semi-irregular You Are Games feature, we ask you to think back to an era centuries ago. It was a time when castles were all the rage and checkerboard designs started popping up on every tapestry and tabletop. If you've got a quirky quip that works well with the Babylon Sticks comic below, post it as a comment. We'll select one as the caption for next week's feature, and we'll award a nice prize along with it.
Following in the tradition of the classic sandbox games (Sand Sand Sand and Powder Game), The Powder Toy by HardWIRED is a small download which stretches the boundaries of what is possible with a few simple elements. In fact, you can do almost anything with it, the only limit is your imagination.
Take a look at the cartoon to the right. Do any funny quips or bits of dialogue spring to mind as you view this unfinished comic? We want you to send them to us! Post your caption ideas as a comment, and yours could get picked to be the caption in the final version of the comic! Prizes and glory will soon follow.
Elemental Box is a brand new physics webtoy from our beloved sandbox game creator ha55ii. Unlike previous releases such as Powder Game or Irritation Stickman, Elemental Box is focused on the physical interaction of solid objects, not so much the elemental properties of them. It's a bit like a building game, complete with a start/stop timer device, that gives you full freedom to let your creativity run wild.
Now, feast your eyes on the giant comic for you to caption. (Giant. Geddit?) What's the funniest punchline you can come up with to go along with the picture? Let us know! Post your caption ideas in the comments box below, it just could be featured in next week's Babylon Sticks, and you'll receive a nice prize for your troubles!
Available for a number of gaming platforms, Max and the Magic Marker is a creative platform game that utilizes drawing to complement its collectathon-style physics gameplay. You play the role of Max, an orange-haired kid whose drawing has come to life thanks to a magical marker he received in the mail. Now Max is running through three unique worlds trying to put a stop to this eggplant menace. It's a game that's as much creative thinking as it is platforming, and it'll tickle your inner child to watch it in action!
Contest time! Nifflas' new game, NightSky, is out, and we're celebrating by giving away ten bundles of the game + soundtrack! NightSky combines a bit of puzzle solving, a bit of platforming, and a lot of physics. You control an orb that has a few special powers that helps it traverse the dark yet beautiful landscape. Enter to win a free copy!
Isle of Tune is a fairly simple webtoy, with a mere six elements that you can control to create a variety of sounds. There's just enough tools available to let you create some rather intricate loops. The pre-made loops are a great way to get an island started, and the simple sharing system is good for spreading your island creations with everyone.
Bubble Tanks 3 takes the series to new heights by combining the best of the Bubble Tanks core gameplay with the customizing features from Bubble Tanks Arenas. The result is a solid sequel to a very popular Flash game series that's a lot of fun to play. The campaign is solid, the user-created tanks keep things fresh and the enemy editor is a ton of fun and will keep this version of the game living for a long time to come.
Take a gander at the festive Babylon Sticks comic created by our resident toonmeister, James Francis. Can you come up with a party-worthy punchline to fit the scene? If you think you've got one, post a comment below and you could win an Humble Indie Bundle!
We've teamed up with Berzerk Studios to offer you a chance to be a part of Berzerk Ball, the follow-up to the Homerun in Berzerk Land! Not only that, you can win one of four iTunes Gift Cards, each worth $25! Continue reading for more details...
Sometimes, a game goes through such a metamorphosis during its development cycle that it's practically a different product from its original release. Thus is the case with Minecraft, a little old building game, inspired by Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress, and created by Markus Persson. Whether you can only play it for fifteen minutes at a time, or end up devoting hours at a stretch (often unintentionally) to it, Minecraft is intensely enjoyable, and an incredible bargain. Minecraft Beta will be out on December 20th, so this is your last opportunity to get the game at Alpha pricing and with the promise of all future updates for free.
Another installment of You Are Games, another installment of the Babylon Sticks Caption Contest. We're asking you to supply a punchline for another Babylon Sticks comic. It's humorous on its own, but it needs a caption to really drive the hilarity home. Submit your ideas as comments, as many ideas as you'd like, but remember to keep them game-related! All entries are due by Monday, December 13th at 11:59 PM (GMT-5:00).
In this installment of You Are Games, we're calling upon you, our loyal readers, to scratch your funny bone where it itches and create the caption for another Babylon Sticks comic created by James Francis. Submit your ideas as comments, as many ideas as you'd like, but remember to keep them game-related! All entries are due by Monday, November 29th at 11:59 PM (GMT-5:00).
We're offering up a caption contest in which you get to fill in the caption for one James Francis' Babylon Sticks comics, made especially for us here at JIG. So roll up your sleeves, put your funny tinfoil thinking caps on and jump start the braincells. It's caption contest time!
Physics-heavy, sandbox-style webtoys are loads of fun to play with, and Ha55ii's Powder Game has always stood as one of the best and most feature-rich. Version 7 introduces several new elements to unleash on your screen of chaos/coolness!
If you ever felt that making breakfast should employ at least a ball, some strong and a winding mechanism, The Incredible Machine is the most brilliant game ever made. It uses the idea of a Rube-Goldberg machine, an overly elaborate setup to achieve a simple task. The Incredible Machine has spawned its own share of sequels, nearly all of which are present in this mega-pack. The idea is simple: each puzzle presents you with a different challenge to construct an elaborate chain-reaction towards a goal.
For this week's You Are Games, we want you to put on your level design tin foil hats and dial them to "R-I-D-D-L-E". We are looking for submissions of one-panel riddle puzzles to create one big honking JIG community riddle puzzle game that we will share with everyone once it's finished. Prizes will be awarded, and anyone who gets their idea(s) into the game will have a place among the credits inside the game.
This week's You Are Games challenge leverages the awesome and unique opportunity being offered by Inexile Entertainment with its new Prius-branded version of a fan favorite here at JIG! Fans of physics puzzles and fuel efficiency, your time has come at last! Fantastic Contraption is back with a new look, new levels, and a chance to win $1,000!
Protonaut is best described as a platform physics puzzler: a platformer covered in a velvety layer of physics, served with a generous dosage of puzzler. The premise of the game is fairly simple: you are a small character (presumably the Protonaut), tasked with collecting all of the gaseous elements in each level. Run, jump, and shoot projectiles to solve each level's puzzle.
Minecraft is a sandbox game that lets you make your own world out of colorful building blocks. Construct a fortress, and then plant tulips on the parapets. Dig a vast network of subterranean tunnels, drop a colony of people down the rabbit hole, and watch them wander. Or, if you're in a particularly metacognitive mood, make a sandbox. Uncage your imagination, and let it take you where it will.
This week on You Are Games, you get to review the games. Send us a review of one of the following games: Upgrade Complete, Minecraft, or Lights. We'll choose our three favorites and feature them on the site! Check out the rules and guidelines in the full article, and remember to have fun. Reviewers, Assemble!
In our inaugural entry for a brand new feature, You Are Games, we are highlighting the latest from Grubby Games: Incredibots 2! Now in open beta, we are leveraging the community and level sharing aspect of the game with a mini-competition instead of a review. Announcing the Jay is Games Incredibots 2 Mini-Brawl!
Shift 4 is now available to play and it brings with it a shiny new iPhone app of the original Shift experience to take with you on-the-go. If you're familiar with the Shift series so far, a lot of the elements in this game will seem very familiar. However, twists do come, as you will eventually find yourself having to control more than one silhouetted fellow. You've now got to use a team of folks to reach the exits and advance.
There's nothing quite like a day on the farm: the smell of freshly tilled soil, tender plants sprouting, and honeybees buzzing in search of nectar. Some call it work, but if you've ever met Alice Greenfingers, you know it's more like play. The lovable pig-tailed girl is back, tending her Uncle Berry's farm in Alice Greenfingers 2, a sequel that does nothing but improve upon the original.
IncrediBots is a brand new physics-based webtoy from Grubby Games, creator of the Professor Fizzwizzle series. Much like Fantastic Contraption and Line Rider before it, IncrediBots gives you a handful of simple tools and sets you free to explore your creative impulses. Draw shapes, connect them with joints, and tweak their basic properties to create living, moving, and functioning 'bots that can perform any task. You can even make movies, complete with text, than can be shared with the IncrediBots community.
There's been an accident in the slime factory and now it's up to you to clean up the mess. In each level you must collect all of the puddles of goo and direct them down one of the available suction vents to make it all go away. To do so, you'll have to push boxes out of the way and mind the arrows which allow you to travel in one direction only.
This is Sand is a lovely little web toy, a nice, gentle way to ease your brain back to life after the weekend. It could hardly be simpler or more elegant: the program converts pixels into digital sand that falls, stacks and layers just like the real thing, providing an endless array of possible designs, landscapes and pictures.
Fantastic Contraption is a physics puzzle game in which the objective in each level is to move all red objects into a rectangular goal area. To do this, you are given a blue rectangular building area and a few different materials in which you can build your device. Standing in your way, however, are a variety of obstacles, ranging from gaping gaps to a sea of circles bent on destroying your red-object-mover-apparatus.
If you've played the original, or the even better update to that one, then you probably will be thrilled to know that Tony has just released a third game in this fantastic series that takes the concept of negative space and turns it upside-down. Shift 3 extends the familiar jump and run, puzzle-platformer formula by adding a few surprises.
One of Spore's most touted and talked about features is how it leverages user-created content to populate the countless planets within the Spore universe. The Spore team accomplishes this by putting powerful and easy-to-use tools to create elements of the Spore universe in the hands of the masses. One of those tools is being released today, the Spore Creature Creator.
Music Bounce is a bit like Breakout, but with an unlikely musical twist. Each level presents you with a different layout of colored bricks. Your job is to wipe them all out by striking them with ammunition from an array of gates on the left side of the screen. And if everything is running properly, Music Bounce can be magical.
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. It's a good, solid, innovative puzzle game, and it's fun.
Blockoban is the latest from JP, 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.
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!
Netshift is the Web-based successor to Blackshift, an action puzzle game download from Rob Allen, the man who brought us the Hapland series and many other excellent titles. Netshift, currently in beta, makes the original game more accessible, and it even includes a level editor with which to create and share levels with the Netshift community.
XSketch is a multiplayer Pictionary-style game with an interesting twist on gameplay and scoring. Players can jump right into any game already in progress and begin to have fun immediately. Points are earned by drawing and guessing successfully, and monthly competition leader boards give the game a real competitive feel.
This update still utilizes the same slick interface and near-flawless gameplay mechanics as before to create a serious action-puzzle challenge. If you didn't play Contour when it was first released, there's never been a better time to give it a spin. Since then, the community embraced the editor and set to work creating new levels. In fact, so many new levels were created that Sean hand-picked some of the best and updated the game.
The original Shift was an interesting platform game that used negative space as an entertaining hook, but it came with a few problems that ultimately made it feel unfinished and experimental. Now, Tony of Armor Games has released Shift 2, which is basically the game the first one should have been. It's not enough of a leap forward to warrant the "2" in its name, really, but it refines and expands upon the original concepts to deliver a smoother, more drinkable dose of run/jump/puzzle distraction.
Every time we review a picross game, there always seems to be a hubbub about what site does it right. Either there's not enough puzzles to solve, not enough variety in the puzzles, it's all too easy or too hard, or the pictures look like someone sneezed on a piece of graph paper. (I'll admit to being among the gripers before.) And every time, there's at least one person who suggests Griddlers.
When you think of what this medium is capable of it's easy to grab for lofty terms like "emergence" or even "organic beauty", but have nothing solid to hold onto. The Powder Game is a rare beacon of hope for those who dream of deep interactivity. It is a fondue of loose goals and free play; creation and destruction wrapped in a tumbling embrace. Oh yeah, this game is that good and will keep you engaged for hours.
Remember Line Rider? That was a pretty sweet webtoy made by a guy from Slovenia. But did you ever get the feeling that Line Rider could have been so much more amazing if there was more of a game to it? Fresh off the CandyStand, we have Line Golfer. It's like Line Rider, but you can golf your way through the mouse-drawn levels instead of watch a character sled through them. Frankly, it's money.
Contour is a clever re-imagining of Marble Madness by Sean Hawkes, creator of several games entered into previous competitions such as Orbit and Clack. An isometric grid is placed over the playing field that holds a ball and a white exit square. Click on individual tiles to raise the ground from that point, causing the marble to roll downhill. The goal is to move the marble to the exit tile by raising and lowering the floor, a feat that requires both intelligent planning and fast clicking.
If you're like me and suffer from "Funky-Chicken-itis" and are looking for a tool to help you shake yo' groove thang, might I recommend a little dance music? The Tony-b Machine is a cool techno-music webtoy to give you just the right beats. Simply slide the sliders and push the buttons to crank out your own thumping creation.
Free Rider 2 is a sequel that continues the more interactive spin on the Line Rider formula. Using a large tool set you can sculpt, edit and decorate the environment any way you choose. When you're done, take to the arrow keys and drive your rider through the stage. It's webtoy-meets-level-editor kind of experience, and it's even better than the original.
From the award-winning Preloaded design team comes a new physics-based game designed for the Science Museum in London. Launchball is a fabulously produced take on the 'guide something to the goal' family of physics games. There is even a level editor with which to create puzzles and send them to your friends.
The next entry is from Damir Srpèiè of Slovenia. You might remember Damir from our first competition with his popular and creative entry, Personal Universe. Roped! implements "ball physics" as well as 'rope physics' in this unique puzzle game that also includes and integrated level editor and save feature.
The Calamity Game is a web toy that combines the complex, physics-based building of Armadillo Run with the free-form creativity of Line Rider. The app lets you craft solid structures, draw, use anchor points, add directed force and connect everything up with springs. Calamity is forming a community of users who are creating and sharing some enormously creative scenes.
A soothing sound toy with which to bathe the aural senses, Pianolina is a beautifully designed and gorgeously sounding Flash application created to introduce you to the sounds of the Grotrian piano. Choose between several different compositions and see how the notes react to gravity as they bounce around the display.
Here, among the roses of red and strange mushrooms, we find Alice. Is she visiting the Queen of Hearts? No, it isn't that Alice. Meet Alice Greenfingers. She doesn't have time for chasing rabbits and general nonsense (save the occasional gnome); she has to take some tomatoes to the market while the demand is still high!
Ha55ii, creator of the previously reviewed Liquid Webtoy, has put forth another addictive webtoy: Powder Game. It bears a similarity in essence to the Falling Sand games, but takes it a step further with the introduction of wind and air pressure.
Acrobots are little 3-legged acrobatic robots that hop and jump around and react to each other. Together they form an unsual webtoy that includes impressive physics as well as some very fluid animation. Very nicely done by the same Vector Park folks that brought us Levers, and Feed the Head.
Free Rider is a brand new take on the massively popular Line Rider, which you voted best web toy of 2006. Pete adds several interactive elements to the mix that actually serve to create an entirely different experience. It's more like Line Rider meets Teagames' BMX series, the result of which is a create-your-own-level style of game.
Paintball is a simple time waster that should prove a fun diversion for an hour or two. Or three. The playing field consists of: a ball, which drops under gravity and bounces; a square, which the ball is trying to reach; pre-set platforms which the ball will roll/bounce on; and custom-made platforms which you draw freehand on the screen. Simpler than some games with this feature, Paintball is unlikely to elicit gasps from its players with advanced physics, but what it does it does very well.
Deadly Rooms of Death is a turn-based puzzle game; one turn being the amount of time it takes Beethro, the central character, to move one square or to swing his sword by 45 degrees. DROD is very much a puzzle game, but unlike any other you may have played before. It is actually the sequel to the critically acclaimed DROD: King Dugan's Dungeon, and both were created by Caravel Games.
Rubicon is an amazing machine-building puzzle game, level editor, and sandbox toy. Gameplay consists of moving crates to one or more targets for each level. Each crate must come to rest on its corresponding target for a green light to appear. Use the component materials provided to construct any machine that will succeed at the task.
In this charming little game, you play the role of a bored tire manufacturing worker named Dink. Dink's tired of his pathetic day to day existence doing the same old thing. In fact, he'd quit his job were it not for his eight starving children and warehouse load of credit card debt. Today though, things are going to turn around for poor Dink as he discovers his inborn talent to make music from old factory machinery.
Personal Universe is a puzzle game that lets you play with physics. Using sets of colored blocks you must build moving machines that help you complete tasks. Just as the name implies, Personal Universe gives you the materials to let you build a living universe all your own. It's filled with possibilities and offers a surprising amount of freedom to explore and experiment at your leisure.
A Break in the Road is a unique game that puts you in the role of a DJ recording sounds throughout the city to mix into a one minute song. An amazingly well-produced cut scene, complete with top-notch voice acting talent, introduces the back story and drops you right into it.
Phase Toy is a simple Shockwave sequencer that allows you to create compositions using a point-and-click interface. Just click on a cell to have the sequencer play the corresponding tone when the 'play head' sweeps over it. Click and drag to add several tones at once. Phase Toy makes a nice little diversion that is as mesmerizing as it is relaxing.
This simple and strangely compelling toy was just released onto Web featuring a primitive drawing interface with which to create a track for a little character to slide upon. Save and load tracks and even try to attain objectives to increase the enjoyment from this creative little sandbox webtoy.
Sand Sand Sand is another entry in the Falling Sand games from Dofi-Blog. This installment incorporates some of the best elements of World of Sand and Hell of Sand into one, allowing you to play with a variety of elements in even more ways than before.
Another brilliantly intricate and well-designed puzzle game from Rob Allen, this one with similarities to classics Rogue and Lode Runner. Use the arrow keys for movement and navigate the player character (I) through each level to collect all of the gold (£) and then make it to the exit (E) safely. Complete with level editor to create your own level designs!
The Dofi-Blog sand and zombie toys are making their way around the Web like a ??? explosion (inside joke), and for good reason: they are quite literally sand box games that allow for a seemingly infinite variety of creative play. And now the author, d_of_i, has released another sand world, Hell of Sand, which appears to be a combination of the previously reviewed War of the Hell and World of Sand.
There is plenty of remarkable work being done over at Dofi-Blog in both the Java and Processing languages. Although the blog is written predominantly in Japanese, there are several compelling and engaging interactive games and toys that should not be missed regardless of your language of choice. Strongly recommended: World of Sand.
It's about Chi power. Lead Artist for Lionhead Studios, Mark Healey, set out to create a video game of his own in his spare time. Over the course of a few years, an innovative and new, gorgeous and outrageous fighting game took shape under the name: Rag Doll Kung Fu. And now, a free demo is available!
la Pâte à Son is an amazing sound toy created in France. This original musical piece and compositional tool was conceived to encourage musical experimentation, and its achievements surpass its goal. Not only is this toy fun to play and experiment with, it is also capable of creating some very beautiful music.
Monsterism.net, a website that Pete Fowler and his creative partner, Simon Pike, built to showcase Pete's outstanding and original monster art. With it you can create a bevy of creatures from the world of Monsterism, as well as mix and match any attributes to create entirely new monsters of your own design. Which monster are you?
Who hasn't enjoyed the simple pleasures of cutting paper into snowflakes on a cold winter day? With Make-a-Flake there is no mess to clean-up and you can even undo cuts gone wrong. This Flash toy is a fun way to express your creativity and get into the spirit of the holiday season.
iSketch is an online multiplayer Shockwave game similar to the drawing game Pictionary, and it works remarkably well on the Web. Players take turns drawing a word assigned by the game. When it's your turn, a basic and simple-to-use drawing interface appears with which to begin drawing. It's very well designed and loads of fun, though it can be terribly addictive so beware.
Scott Shiller is a Javascript and DHTML wizard and to prove it he has recreated the classic arcade hit Arcanoid with all original levels. There is also a level editor with which you can create your own levels and save them for others to play. The interface is slick and simple, and yet looks more like an application program running than code in a browser window. Amazing client-side programming.
File this one under interactive Flash tools for creative expression. Scribbler is just one of many interactive "toys" available at Zefrank.com. This "generative illustration toy" allows you to draw with the mouse in the window, then Scribbler takes over and creates its own drawing on top of what you've drawn. There are even interactive controls that you can set and tweak to your heart's content.
This little Flash avatar creator is a versatile and has several options to help you create very unique characters. Create a face of your own that fits your unique personality, then do a PrintScrn and paste into your favorite bitmap graphics program.
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