Let the games begin

Well, I can officially take 22 five-year-olds in a fight, but I can't tackle one block of HTML in Blogger. By deduction, Blogger is made of at minimum, 23 five-year-olds. In any case, now that I'm certified as safe from more than a score of midgets (which is good, there are an unusual number of kids around the library tonight), I can safely review a couple of my recent freeware/browser game finds:

Battleships Forever: Easily the best of the free offerings I've come across so far, this is a top-down space strategy game. It has superb graphics (for freeware) and excellent gameplay. The look is quite stylized and almost wireframe, but not as rough-looking. The weapon and explosion effects are great, and seeing the ships split into their constituent chunks is immensely satisfying. The gameplay is a mix of standard RTS movement/attack with an emphasis on positioning - for instance, lots of ships have deflectors, which make certain parts of the ship completely invulnerable. So, you have to get behind it, or flank it, all while outpacing the ship's turn rate. The only flaw I'd say is that it actually goes a little too fast for a game with as much tactical depth as it has; I'd like a game speed bar. Still, I highly suggest this one.

Warning Forever: Neat little arcade-style game that was the stylistic inspiration for Battleships Forever. I got bored after a half dozen levels, but then I do with pretty much all arcade games. Warning Forever's neatest feature is the fact that each level is basically a progressively harder boss fight, with the catch that each level, the boss adapts to the way you beat the previous boss. Also, you have the option to change your ship's arc of fire, which is a very nice feature.

Really Rather Good Battles in Space: They're really rather not. Granted I only played the first three missions, but that's half the game and then I stopped out of a combination of boredom and frustration. The ship designs are kind of cool (they're weirdly organic), but as far as I can tell there are all of two kinds, and both of them would suck absolute ass in any approximation of a real space battle. There's the carrier, which has a few squads of fighters and bombers, and then there's the frigate, whose only purpose seems to be to fire ineffectually at the strike craft before being blown to pieces. Seriously. If you like carrier battles, and I mean if you have a serious fetish for them, you might get farther than me, but I kind of doubt it.

Endless Zombie Rampage: Not quite as solid a zombie slaughterfest as Boxhead, but good for a change of pace.

Flash Portal: This came to me highly recommended, but I just don't like it that much. The control scheme seems far more fickle than that of Portal itself, and when a flash game is harder to handle than a full-blown Valve-spawned FPS, something is wrong. Still, it's a good puzzle game and you guys would probably like it, especially if you don't have Portal.

Travian: My browser-based strategy game du jour, it's been good so far. Nothing revolutionary in form: you build up your village with warehouses, walls, markets, and soldiers as you expand your resourcing operation and defend against attacks. I managed to stumble into a pretty active alliance which definitely improves things. The mechanics do encourage cooperation though, with a lot of trading and mutual defense options. I'm on there as Blackfish on the 3x (triple speed) server, if anyone's curious.


Well, that's it for now...I'll save the rest for my next bloated post. Oh, there is one thing of note: I've been asked to stay on here at the library for another year. This requires some good old-fashioned pondering.