I am dissappointed in you. I am severely disheartened.
I’ve just looked at our stats, and the most played game this month so far has been…. Aquarium Scoop Hotshot.
Aquarium Scoop Hotshot.
Really? Is that what you want? I gave you Gamma Bros. and this is how you repay me? Did you hear the soundtrack? Did you see the glorious 8 bit graphics and the parralax scrolling – that game is a masterpiece of the flash developers art and you’re playing aquarium f***ing scoop hotshot? This is about the Majesty Of Colours again, isn’t it!!!1!11! I was going to post a game for you, but I’m not sure you deserve it now…
Well – OK. Gosh darn it, I just can’t stay mad at you. Just know that before you start whining about it, in 1993 I actually went down to the corner shop and spent actual money on this game. You guys honestly don’t know how good you have it. Zool is a pixelly platformer with annyoing music that someone lovingly coded, line by painful line, probably in basic or something. There were no modules, no physics engines to plug into your game production back then, it was men with beards in Leamington Spa, coding basic by day and drinking real ale by night. They were the pioneers of gaming. They were the Elite.
And if you don’t like that stuff try this for some classic arcade style jollity: Portal Defender I can’t tell you what I’d have paid for a game like this back when I was playing Dizzy on my Amstrad…
I am secure. I am content, happy, and even smug. Here is a flash game of such startling excellence that no-one will be able to deny it. If you can’t finish it now, you will come back, if you can’t come back you will weep hot, salty tears at the thought that you have missed out on the glorious satisfaction of shooting the last, laser toting, brain-in-a-jar-in-a-spaceship boss out into the unforgiving vacuum.
Pick either the ginger one or the black one of the presumably adopted Gamma Brothers, let the little worm guys launch your personalised flying saucer from the mothership (why they can’t use the mothership to fight the horde I don’t know), and battle with a swarm of tricky, varied, rewarding enemies. This game has seriously got it all, powerups, boss fights, a great soundtrack, acid-vivid 16 bit colours, and a happy ending: you can even bring your mates back from the dead.
If you needed any confirmation that your knowledge of global geography is embarrasingly inadequate, here it is in a fun point and click style. Expose your ignorance of the location of world cities and countries where hundreds of millions of people live, realise that you never payed attention in Geography at school, and that people are essentially selfish and unaware of anything that doesn’t directly affect their daily life! Have a cry! Get a sense of perspective and change your life forever – all thanks to Globetrotter XL.
Collect sandwhiches, shoot… things(?), battle aliens and surfing robots in the action packed pandemonium that is, Selami Stardust!
Play as a bus(?) with a rocket attached(?) that can shoot(?) as you navigate this scolling shooter world full of dangerous mysteries and things I (really) can’t explain!
A great game that has reminded me of my Nokia 5210.
3D Paradise Paintball is the latest development in gaming via SNS. It has been presented by the Chinese company Cmune who develop games and applications for social networks. 3D Paradise Paintball has been listed in the top 5 Apple Widgets and the company have been awarded ‘Start-up of the day’ by Microsoft.
The game itself is a first person shoot ‘em up. It surprised me in many ways as being much more advanced than I had expected. The 3D rendering, map sizes and designs rival those of early millenium top-end development releases of the same genre, which, in my opinion, is already a triumph for a free online based and hosted game.
I was also impressed by the loading time, I was expecting to have to download a series of random plug-ins and watch a progress bar for the next 30 minutes, but even this ‘hunk of junk’ desktop of mine was in-game within 3 minutes.
All this mechanical and technical effort is let down slightly be some actual game play issues. The rather strange avatars leave something to be desired and I found it difficult to differentiate between friendlies and enemies at a glance.
The absolute, most important aspect of an FPS, for me, is the hitbox activity, which unfortunately seemed almost non existent. I mean, every time I actually managed to hit another player, I would decrease their health by the same value where ever the shot landed (apart from maybe the head, its quite difficult to tell where you hit). On another occasion I wasted several shots trying to ‘pwn’ this ‘n00b’ that was running away from me, despite my cross-hair landing perfectly in the guy’s back for at least 10 shots, I failed every attempt. Years of gaming experience would suggest to try shooting slightly ahead of the character to account for ‘bullet time’ but this too was without success. Truth is, I just couldn’t work out (bearing in mind I only had the chance to play for a short while) where, how and what affects the hit-boxes. But hey, its not like its trying to be Call of Duty or CS:S is it.
Overall, 3D Paradise Paintball is years ahead of it’s ‘Flash’ game competition and will only improve on their next project. I have every confidence that the Cmune team will be big news in years to come. Good job guys.
Description: Control your Rubber ducky by pulling its rubber band. Collect all the flowers, but make sure to do it in the right order, and don’t run into the wasps or whirlpools!
