Filed under: Fun

If you have a soft spot for trajectory games, Crush the Castle 2 won't disappoint. Share your accomplishments in the comments!

Ricochet Kills 2 is a splendidly violent physics-based puzzle game. In the game, you need to kill all the "bad guys" on the screen in each level. Nobody moves, including you, and the only way to do them in is to shoot them directly, ricochet a shot off of something else, or influence an object to fall on or explode near them.

The early levels of the game are very easy, and in my opinion, the game takes a little too long to ramp up in difficulty. It's worth it, though, once you get to the harder levels. The game offers just the right amount of difficulty and satisfying (yet very simple) graphic effects and sounds when you do manage to kill the baddies.

This isn't a game that I would introduce my children to, but as far as physics games go, it's actually a pretty good one. I scored 279 on my first playthrough. I have no doubt you all can do better, so let us know in the comments!

When Lee posted about Fantastic Contraption back in 2008, I literally lost multiple days playing through it, mastering it, and then retrying levels in interesting and creative ways. It was, and still is, one of my all-time favorite physics-based games.

So I was delighted today when a friend sent me a simple link over IM, and when I clicked it to find out what it was, I was greeted with its sequel, Fantastic Contraption 2. Now, I'm not going to claim that it's new, but it's certainly new to me, and we haven't posted about it before.

I recall that there was another attempt at a sequel that was far too complicated to be fun. Fortunately, though, Fantastic Contraption 2 retains the simplicity of the first one while introducing a new gameplay mechanic: magnets.

I've only just dipped my toe into the fantasticness that is Fantastic Contraption 2, but I can tell right now that I'm going to be losing hours to this thing all over again. Yes, it's that good.

Side View Generator is a clever little Web application that turns words into other words. So, ... what's so clever about that?

You feed it with a word or two (up to ten letters), and it does its magic by taking your text and creating it in 3D. This is the tricky part, really: each letter is composed of multiple voxels, and each voxel is located at a certain point in 3D space.

Viewed from one angle, you see your word exactly as you entered it. Turn the view around, and suddenly you see a jumble of points. Keep turning it, and a completely new word morphs into view. DLS becomes SLY, and Ezuk becomes Nude. (I am not making this up; I didn't put it in the screenshot because I wanted to keep it all SFW.)

The word is always a real word, and as you can see, it doesn't just shift the letters around. You could say it's a 3D anagram of sorts.

Also, you gotta love the Engrish. As they say, "The 'DLS' that saw from side might be a 'SLY'."

In a way, Futility is a soothing time-waster. It's soothing in the same way that Fight Club is soothing; there is absolutely no way that you're going to win.

It's a short and cute game with a distinctly philosophical message (which I disagree with, but it still makes the point). It starts off as a normal platformer; you run and jump around, trying to skip from one platform to the next. You die along the way, but you have multiple lives, so you just reincarnate and keep on moving briskly through the level.

On and on you go, ... until you finally reach The Boss. It doesn't actually have a name in the game, but if it had one, that would be it. The Boss is a huge ball that basically bounces all over you, killing you repeatedly, until you run out of lives.

Then, it's game over. I could find no way to defeat the boss or even escape it; once you reach the end, that's it. Am I missing something here, or is this the message?

Normally this one would fall just outside the Download Squad perimeter, but who doesn't enjoy chuckling at an unlucky criminal? And besides, there's software involved -- which you'll be able to download at some point -- which does kinda make it relevant!

See, this particular thief strolled up and nabbed an iPhone out of an unsuspecting woman's hand. Unfortunately for him, the phone was in the middle of a demo -- which happened to be for a realtime GPS tracking app with camera and mic support. The app -- Covia Labs' Alert & Respond -- was pumping out his position on a map of San Francisco as he made his escape.

Once the woman notified police, it took all of ten minutes to arrest the "thief" -- who probably could have saved himself some embarassment by looking at the iPhone's screen to see what it was doing.

At least Covia was kind enough not to turn on the mic or camera -- they didn't want to alert him.

Man, wouldn't it have been sweet if they had?

[via San Francisco Chronicle -- original image by Flickr user dbking]

NSFW alert! But hey, it's after hours, we starred out all the f-bombs, and the site is pretty hilarious... so we had to share it!

What the f*** should I make for dinner is an extremely advanced website, obviously lovingly crafted by major design gurus with singular skills in the culinary arts.

You go there, and it tells you to COOK UP SOME ****** KOREAN BEEF WRAPS. All-caps included at no extra cost! You can then click the KOREAN BEEF WRAPS part and be transported to the myrecipes.com page for that recipe (I am sure myrecipes.com enjoys massive brand benefits as a direct result of this link). Sometimes it takes you to recipe.com, too.

If you don't like the sound of the random recipe, you can always click the subtle I DON'T ****** LIKE THAT link, and get another recipe suggestion. Another particularly advanced feature is the I DON'T ****** EAT MEAT button, but it falls beyond the scope of this post. Okay, maybe it doesn't, but you can probably imagine what it does. Let's just say that once you click it, it changes to I AM NOT A ****** VEGETARIAN.

So... what are you waiting for? GO COOK NOW.

When PixEvo - The Fountain first begins, you're a tiny, blocky pixel. You can't walk -- you can only skip from place to place, using the up arrow keys and then the left/right arrow while you're airborne.

So you start helplessly bouncing around the screen, doing the only thing that you can really do at this point, which is "eat" the tiny dots. Suddenly, something happens! You grow bigger! Now you can jump farther than ever before!

Justifiably enthused, you take the challenge and start hopping farther and farther, eating all the tiny dots that you can reach. Suddenly, you get legs! You're no longer constrained to hopping around; now you can walk. So, you start walking and trying to eat even more dots in order to see what ability you gain next. As you see, it was at this point that I took the screenshot. I had eaten six dots, and I had ten more to go before I gained a new ability.

This is just about when the game got really frustrating; if you miss a jump and land incorrectly, you often have to take a whole series of smaller jumps to get back to where you were. Then, if you miss again, you have to do it again ... and again. The good part is that you can't die, so you can just keep at it until you succeed.

... And when you think about it, the frustration factor often makes for rather effective time-wasters.

Still havingdifficulty coping with the skeletons in your closet? Maybe you need a thicker door -- like the one Ex-blocker can bolt on to your web browser!

Head over to their site and enter detailed about your exes -- you can add up to five, which should be plenty. Enter the required details, and Ex-blocker generates you a customized plugin which helps fade them into the background, away from your still-misty eyes. Or your rage-squinted eyes, whichever.

But hey, even if you're totally cool with all your exes, there's still a reason for you to check out Ex-blocker. Tired of reading about certain people online? Justin Bieber, perhaps? Bored of the whole LeBron James saga? Add 'em to your ex list, and let Ex-blocker shroud them in its cloak of near-visibility!

I didn't say invisibilty because Ex-blocker's not perfect. It's certainly a good start, though, and it's a good way to quickly filter your web browsing with minimal fuss.

I am really enjoying watching HTML5 come into its own and mature into a full-fledged platform for video, Web apps, and now some games, too. Entanglement is an HTML5-driven puzzle game, and it feels just like Flash.

It's a simple brain teaser. You start with a hexagon in the middle of the board. An orange line comes out of that hexagon and touches another hexagon right next to it. That other hexagon shows several possible paths that the orange line could take, depending on how you connect it. You can rotate the second hexagon using the mouse wheel or arrow keys. Once you hit the space bar or click the mouse button, the orange line "flows" into it, and the path becomes longer. You now get another hexagon to rotate and connect.

The goal is to make the path as long as you can without going back to the source point, allowing the path to cross itself, or touching the side of the board. My record is 23. Post your (undoubtedly higher) records below!

As you can gather from the title, Crack Attack is not a Flash game. It's a time waster that you have to download; we don't see too many of those around here. Having to download a game is a pretty hefty barrier to entrance, so a downloadable game has to be really good for me to cover it.

This one is. In fact, my girlfriend (a leading authority on Crack Attack) goes so far as to describe it as "engaging and breathtaking." Your goal is simply to join three blocks of the same color and make them vanish. This sounds like the same old same old, but Crack Attack manages to make the process really interesting.

Granted, the single-player mode is not that much cooler than your simple Tetris or Bejewelled. You need to keep the screen clean while the blocks keep rising, and the blocks that you clear keep turning into "garbage" (which is just bars, really) of various sizes and colors that falls on you from the sky. There are three different types of garbage (red, blue, and gray), and as you will find out, it takes a different trick to make each kind vanish. This gets more challenging as things start to move faster and faster, and the bars keep stacking up.

This probably isn't really very 'Download Squad', but as Lee's not around to stop me posting this, I thought I'd share.

In just two minutes the geniuses at Taiwan's NMA news agency describe the entire iPhone 4 reception/antenna/free-bumpers-for-all debacle. They tell the story using Sims-like CGI, it features Steve Jobs, Bill Gates _and_ evil Sith Lord Palpatine-esque hand-lightning.

Also, if you're already at work, you can watch this one without sound because unfortunately the commentary is in Chinese.

Now to write some proper news...

[via Gizmondo]

Some instruments are fine to play on your own. For example, if you play the piano, I think it doesn't get boring very quickly. But some instruments can get really boring when you practice by your own, like the bass guitar. It's a great instrument, but I think it can be less than engaging to practice for hours on end.

Boredom aside, sometimes it's important to practice alongside something other than a metronome. For those cases, ChordPulse seems like a very handy solution. The program has a free and a paid version. I tried the free option, of course. You pick a simple chord progression, click a musical style, and let it play.

You can easily change each chord in the progression, change the BPM, and the relative volume of the drum, bass and piano chords. The GUI seems carefully thought out. All in all, it's a pretty neat music application.

In Black And White you control two cats, a black one and white one, which move simultaneously in opposite directions as you use the arrow keys (and Z to jump). The goal is to bring each cat to its own door (the black cat goes to the black door, while the white one goes to the white door).

The only problem is that the cats are inseparable. Every movement made by one is mirrored by the other, and this gets tricky because the way to the door is not always the same for both cats. The cats sometimes have to help each other: one cat would hold down a button, which would then disable a wall so that the other cat can move through it. But then, as soon as you move the other cat through the wall, the first cat (who was holding the button down), also moves. And then the wall becomes solid again. Pretty tricky!