Filed under: Games

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

IQ Ball is a fun little time waster that casts you as a fuzzy ball with a long, sticky tongue; your tongue serves as a grappling hook, and you must use it to navigate through levels and reach specific targets (or pull them to you).

However, your tongue is only so long; it can't reach everywhere, so you need to try to reach what you can. It also won't stick to everything; you find something that it can reach and stick to, and then use your tongue to walk through the level until you reach the target (or pull it over to you).

In the screenshot above, you can see the level number on the bottom right and the number of clicks that you've performed in the level on the bottom left. On this level, you need to swing like a monkey on the wire in order to reach the target. So, you have to grab and release until you get to the end.

Another nice touch is that the game instantly pauses and mutes when it loses focus. I see more and more developers doing this, and it's a welcome and thoughtful feature. I'll leave you with a tip: on level five, mind the cable car that's going down at the very beginning. If you don't stick to it, the level is lost forever (or until you restart it).

Swerveball is part of a new game called SuperMe. If you think it sounds a bit new-age self-helpish, don't worry: it is. With the rather hopeful headline of 'Be better at life', SuperMe is a collection of mini-games, quizzes, inspirational interviews and 'cheat codes for life'. And, despite it being angled at teenagers, I think there might just be something for everyone on SuperMe.

Anyway, because this is a Time Waster slot, I ought to talk about the actual game: Swerveball. Chances are you've played something like it before, but Swerveball adds another element: reflection. Without giving away the 'trick', not only is the game fun, but it also teaches you a little something about life. The game itself actually gets quite tricky if you fail the 'reflection tests' at the end of each level!

As a Time Waster, Swerveball is great -- but if you want a little more, connect your Facebook account to SuperMe and dive in! And if you have a teenage son or daughter, sit them down and force them to play.

Word on the internet this weekend was that Google has invested a huge amount of money in Zynga, the company that makes Facebook-centered games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille. Rumor has it that the $100 million-plus investment is part of a larger strategy that will end up with the launch of Google Games later this year. There's no more popular, more addictive collection of games on the Web than Zynga's, so it makes sense that Google wouldn't want to compete starting from scratch.

TechCrunch speculates that Google will be able to break up Zynga's partnership with PayPal, and push all those in-game purchases through Google Checkout. Of course, this is also a major development in Google's relationship to Facebook, because Zynga has gathered a massive amount of data from Facebook users, so Google could be using that as a backdoor to buy into Facebook's network and boost its own social offerings (like Google Me, maybe) [Google Me needs games too! -Ed]. In case there was any doubt Google Games is for real, TC also posted a link to a job opening for a Google Games product lead.

Many geeks view daily life and its challenges the way they view a role-playing video game. Clean up your apartment? Get experience points! Go to work? Collect gold! Work out? Increase your strength attributes! Well, a new iPhone app called Epic Win attempts to translate those imaginary points into real points in a game.

It hasn't been released yet, but the trailer shows how the game will work. Completing different types of to-do items offers different levels of XP and loot, motivating you to actually get things done. Your character develops based on what you do in your real life, and traveling to different locations opens up possibilities for new kinds of loot.

What do you think, DLS readers? Would an RPG like this actually help you get things done?

If you loved the classic tank battle game Combat on the Atari -- or even if you're too young to have heard of it -- you'll probably love KnifeTank. In this hand-illustrated battle, you play a normal tank versus other kickass tanks with huge knives attached. KnifeTanks increase in number as you advance in levels, and there are more obstacles on the battlefield to contend with, too. Hit all of the music blocks in a level to advance, but be careful which way your shots ricochet!

The two coolest things about KnifeTank -- other than a tank with a frickin' knife on it, I mean -- are the original 8-Bit soundtrack and the fact that the game's all HTML5. Yeah, that's right: it's not a Flash game, it's entirely HTML5 and JavaScript. That means you need a Webkit browser like Chrome or Safari to get the most out of it, but it also means you don't need Flash.

Of course, those technical details are second to the gameplay, and I wouldn't be endorsing KnifeTank if it didn't have some replay value.

The next version of Flash, amidst growing competition from emerging 3D-in-the-browser technologies WebGL and O3D, will feature support for 3D graphics.

But don't get too excited just yet -- we'll probably have to wait until October and the Adobe MAX 2010 conference before we find out more. There, on October 27th, a Flash player engineer will give a talk about "the next-generation 3D API coming in a future version of Flash Player." How exciting is that?!

It's an interesting move, and I feel that it's just in time too. WebGL and O3D might be exciting propositions in themselves, but they don't enjoy almost-100% saturation -- not yet at least. Every existing Web game maker uses Flash -- and you can be guaranteed that they'd rather code 3D games and applications for a platform they already intimately know.

It sure looks like Adobe isn't going to give up on Flash without a fight. First peer-to-peer transfers with 10.1, and now proper 3D. Assuming the 3D performance is good enough, we could see some very interesting FPS and MMORPG Flash games next year.

I could clamber onto my soap box and rant all day about Blizzard's pathetic, poorly thought-out Real ID implementation - but - as this isn't a games blog, I've been told to keep it short and sweet. So, straight to the diabolical point: Real ID is just the beginning. With StarCraft 2's launch at the end of July, Battle.net will also feature Facebook integration.

Real ID, if you haven't been apprised, is Blizzard's Orwellian approach to policing its community. In one fell swoop it removes the anonymity, agency and escapism that actually make massively multiplayer online games enjoyable. But again, I shan't go on -- read WoW.com's coverage, if you want to find out more.

Battle.net's integration with Facebook is actually quite neat, if you don't mind the whole invasion-of-privacy thing. You'll be able to connect to Facebook from Battle.net and import your friends, rather than having to know your friends' email addresses. Still, with some 2,000 pages of complaints on the official World of Warcraft forums, you can be damn sure that it'll be a while before the community is able to stand back, take stock and analyse at the bigger picture.

Incidentally, if you're a fan of StarCraft or World of Warcraft, and you're opposed to these proposed changes, go and register your discontent on the forum! It's not too late to force Blizzard to rethink their totalitarian technology.