Halloween Screensavers, the good, the bad, and the ugly

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Shareware, Freeware, Mods

Halloween Screensavers, the good, the bad, and the ugly

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Oct 23rd 2005

The last screen saver I can remember paying for was Berkeley Systems' classic After Dark. But apparently there is still a market for such things, because they regularly fluff up my "new downloads" emails. Some of the more popular screen savers also appear to be holiday savers, so I decided to take a look at a few.

Guess what? There's a lot of really bad Halloween screen savers out there. Too many linkfarm honeypot sites claiming "free" screen savers like a rogue's gallery of misbegotten Flash projects and curious Director projects— if you can download them at all. There should be more creepy screen savers out there. And whatever you do, don't go to blogsearch.google.com and search for "crazy flash halloween saver." Not even the movie "Corpse Bride" has a screen saver for Pete's sake!

So there are really only a couple of legitimate, fun screensavers that I would recommend. Useless Creations makes "A Horribly 3D Halloween Screen Saver" that is a lot of fun. Kids enter a 3D graveyard, where ghosts end up chasing them around and stealing their candy. The characters are well animated, with little personalities, a selection of costumes, and the saver works well across a variety of machines (it's for Windows and Mac). There's a crazy 3D saver for the Mac called Vampz, which is just a bunch of 3D Elvira-knockoffs flying around your screen. And although it's a little pricey (nearly $15), for pure visual effect it's hard to beat the generically named "3D Spooky Halloween Screensaver 1.0." Very good looking, with fog and great 3D models, and a good cycle of animation. Still, with all the choices, I just end up using VLC to play any Halloween movie I can full-screen on the PC in the den...

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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