Filed under: Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Shareware, Freeware, Mods
Halloween Screensavers, the good, the bad, and the ugly
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Oct 23rd 2005 at 5:00PM
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...
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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
