Sushi Cat 2

Remember that one game with the fat cat that kept growing fatter and fatter as he continued to eat? It was called Sushi Cat and it has a sequel.

Sushi cat 2 is a cutesy little pseudo luck based puzzle game that plays just like its predecessor, with a few shiny new bobbles. It features twenty-five levels, four power ups, and a cutesy storyline that actually provides incentive to play the game.

the game starts out with sushi cat's stuffed animal/girlfriend being taken by bacon dog. He tries to give chase, but finds himself unable to use the elevator because he can't reach the button panel. Since he is conveniently in a grocery store, he decides to pig himself out in order to get big enough to reach the buttons, and this is where the game starts.

Much like Burrito Bison, this game is very minimalistic on playing, and you spend more time watching than actually controlling sushi cat. The difference is that sushi cat's boards are laid out so that there is a huge amount of strategy in what amount to moving your mouse and clicking once. The wonky physics do add quite an element of luck to the game, but are generally predictable enough to accomplish your goals, be it collecting a power up, golden sushi piece, or just a mound of sushi. The power ups also add a small additional amount of control; bombs let you blow up sushi to collect it, the fist power up lets you charge through anything, including solid objects, the pinball power up lets you temporarily turn sushi cat into a game of pinball, and the shopping special lets you click sushi to collect it for a short amount of time.

As far as the art goes, the game is unbelievably cute. If you can honestly look to the left and say that that cat isn't cute, you have no soul. The cut scenes are like something out of a child's storybook. The sun, the mountains, the shopping mall and pretty much every other large inanimate object has a face, and the story can only be described with the word "d'aww".

Sushi cat isn't a short game by any means however, its probably in the hour range for most people. It has 25 levels, and some of them (or maybe just the last one) will take multiple retries to accomplish. The power ups really speed things up, and give you a way to combat the physics engine's constant toying with you. It's not to say the game is difficult, but the most efficient route to getting all the sushi isn't always obvious.

Sushi Cat 2 is a really enjoyable game to watch, though little player input is actually required. The game has a decent length without overstaying its welcome, and its always fun to see just how big your cat will get. Definitely a worthwhile game if you have the patience to sit down and watch a get grow fatter and fatter on his way down a pachinko table.

Sugar, Sugar

Sure you may have your meat boys, and killer oranges, but what about the sweeter side of the flash game food chain? What about that all important pure white, pixel high morselette that is the common sugar cube? Fear not, for sugar, sugar is here to remind us of how important that tiny cube is, and how much of a chore it is to pour out of the end of a comma.

Sugar, Sugar is a game developed for Armor Games by Bonte Games. Sugar, Sugar's basic setup is that you have to get sugar into a cup by drawing lines. Using a simple physics systems, the sugar pixels glide down the paths you make and into the sugar cups. The challenge of the game comes in three parts. The first is that you can't remove a line once you've created it. The second is the fact that certain cups need cerain color sugar, which must be passed through goal posts to change the color. And the third is that the comma contains finite sugar. A fourth challenge that isn't intended by the game is the fact that lack of being able to draw smooth lines with a mouse can royally screw you because of the way the physics system operates. A straight line tool would've been much appreciated and made the game twice as easy by removing the fake difficulty of having a high sensitivity mouse.

The puzzley game is fun, until you realize that you are spending 90% of the time waiting on sugar to move. The sugar physics apparently does a collision loop and friction test of every single piece of sugar in a mound, meaning that large sugar piles will roll down hills at a speed of somewhere between a crippled turtle, and snail with a pebble tied to it. naturally, spending 30-60 seconds waiting on each mound of sugar to slowly roll down a hill does not a fun game make, and the less steady the line you drew, the more time the sugar takes to settle.

For a game that uses only sixteen colors at a time however, it looks pretty damn spiffy. Its all pixel art, naturally, but the way the sugar flows just looks so...right, and the sugar can pretty much fill up anything with a pixel wide gap in it, with no visual problems. All the backgrounds and foreground blend perfectly, and there is never any visual miscommunication.

As far as the actual puzzles go, they are rather clever, but about half of the levels feel like repeats. I think thirty was too high a number for the developer to shoot for. I personally only hit twenty-five before I stop playing, as I realized I had watched the same piles of sugar fill the same cups before, each board only changed slightly. I think twelve to fifteen unique levels would've been a better idea for this game.

Overall, I think Sugar, Sugar is a game with a hell of a lot of wasted potential because of how unpolished it is. If it weren't for the fact that sugar took forever to settle and that I was essentially being punished for having an unsteady hand, this game would be an amazing puzzle game. But as it stands its annoying, tedious, and probably not worth your time.

Elephant Quest

Yesterday, I reviewed Treadmillasaurus-Rex, a game by jmtb02. Today is another, more recent (as in, this morning it released) game, Elephant quest. As the title informs you, jmtb02 is finally getting back to what he knows best, elephants. Elephant quest is a mishmash of platformers, RPGs, and metroidvania games. You play as an elephant who was robbed of his hat by a large mammoth, and naturally goes on a long and dangerous quest to get the hat back no matter what the cost. Why would you do all that for a hat? You obviously haven't seen how sweet that hat is.

The controls are pretty simple, and the game is both arrow key and WASD friendly. You start out with one turret, and the ability to jump about 5 blocks high. Through doing side quests you can unlock normal sentries, and flying autoguns which greatly boost the damage you are capable of. The basic goal of the game is to go to the 4 corners of the world (literally) to obtain four blue keys, so that you can unlock the door that holds wooly, and your sweet hat. Depending on how many sidequests you do, the game can take anywhere from 15-40 minutes, it honestly could have used a bit more length, as it had a good skill system in place, and all it would've taken would be more unlockable areas and more NPCs.

On a graphical note, I'm actually rather impressed. jmtb seemed to go far above his standard artistic fare with this flash game and it shows. The way the enemies health bars slide along the screen and display works well, the crazy physics of the turret string is cool to watch, and everything looks and feels like you are in some perfect magical world inhabited solely by Elephants (and bison).

The stats system is rather complex, and relies a lot on forethought about levels to come. You start out only being able to upgrade to one of four stats, each of which branch off further, ala dynasty warriors. There are also a few +15 bonuses scattered about and four huge +50 bonuses, on in each corner of the skill chart. As far as actual skills go, you without a shadow of  a doubt need to get 100 int first and foremost, because int has a skill increases the amount of points you gain per level up. Other than that, the jump skill is probably the most important, as the final boss would be ridiculous with the default jump. Damage is also nice, as is speed, and minion summons, though they are by no means required, and you can spend points on whatever you feel would benefit you the most.

The questing system is what you'd expect ofjust about any sidequest from an RPG, and there are three quest types:

1. Talk to Person X
2. Go find item X and bring it back to me
3. Collect Y number of X's and show them to me

None of these are difficult, and in actuality, you can probably pop of nearly all of them without doing any real backtracking.

All in all, Elephant quest was probably one of the most fun flash games I've played in a while. Everything runs smoothly, and it feels very professionally done. Its the type of game I could see being up on the iPhone or android app store for a buck fifty or two bucks.

Treadmillasaurus Rex

Imagine a game involving A T-Rex, on a gigantic treadmill moving at over thirty miles an hour, while mines roll across it...and the front and back of the treadmill are covered with lasers of instant death. Not enough to grab your attention yet? Okay then, now imagine there is a wheel behind the treadmill that spins every few seconds, and it can reverse the treadmill, increase the mine speed, and many more things that would likely prove lethal to Dinosaurs. What I have described is Treadmillasaurus Rex, in a nutshell.

Treadmillasaurus Rex is a game from that clever armorgames Elephant developer, jmtb02, and was recently featured on Kongregate's front page. In Treadmillasaurus Rex, you naturally play as an Elephant a T-rex on a treadmill. It's a very arcadey game and how quickly the game decides to kill you depends on the almighty random number god and his wheel of suffering.

There are two types of wheel effects in the game, neutral ones and bad ones.

Neutral

• Random fact - Tells you a random fact about T-rexes
• Hat - The best powerup in the game, it gives you a completely useless top hat
• Party - Adds disco lasers, background color lights, and other pretty things
• Confetti - It rains confetti

Bad

• left laser/right laser - the lasers inch a bit closer to you, not much to worry about.
• gamespeed increase - this increases the overall speed of the game. No technical disadvantage here save for the game becoming more reflexively intense.
• +1 all obstacles - Mines get faster and lasers scoot in closer. Not the ideal spin.
• +Treadmill - The treadmill gains a large boost in speed. This can be very bad depending on the timing, but isn't really a problem once you readjust to the speed.
• +wind - Adds or increases the wind speed. Wind is pretty much a treadmill effect that still aroks while you are in the air. Watch the confetti to gauge the wind speed.
• spike speed - faster spike mines. Spikes cause your death 9/10 times, so this matters quite a bit as it effects your jumping paces.
• reverse treadmill - This power up was designed to kill things. If you get hit by this an a bad time, hitting a spike or laser is pretty much inevitable, because you have to keep adjusting until the treadmill has completely reversed itself, then you have to set up your spike jumping pace again.

On graphics, the game is nothing special, but it accomplishes its goal. The lasers are lasery, the hat is hatish, the confetti is identifiable as confetti, and I can conclude from what I see that I am some type of carnivorous dinosaur who is on some type of moving belted device which is being rolled over by spiked circles.


There really isn't much more that can be said about this game, other than that you should play it. A game takes five minutes, tops, and its a fun little time waster that serves as a nice buffer between trying hard to look like you are working, and staring out the office window.

Gunball Arena

Do you like guns? How about balls? Do you get a thrill from arenas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then have I got a game for you! Gunball Arena is a new game from Armor Games that pits you and your little ball, and his gun or sword against huge waves of enemies. The game is by no means hard, and has some rather annoying bits to it, but it is definitely worth playing.

The basic game play is simple, you have two type of weapons, melee and ranged. Melee weapons are short range, high damage, and lack recoil. Guns are longer range, but the damage is much worse, and though the more powerful guns can nuke half the playing field, they also send you flying back from recoil. In addition, you have three special powers the can be used infinitely, sans the individual cool downs. Unfortunately, two of the three abilities are neigh useless, berserk increases damage, but spins you around in an uncontrollable circle, and teleport teleports you about 5 feet away and seems to hit everything in between you and the teleport location. Slowdown on the other hand, functions like a bullet time mode where everyone but you slows down, and is incredibly useful.

On the weapons front, the game has quite a few, and there are no down sides to buying a weapon since they sell for exactly what you pay for them. The fact that your weapons are specifically glued to the front, back, left and right of you is rather annoying though, as it means you can't focus fire on where you put your mouse, and instead have to aim sideways to use side guns, or slot up your sides with shields/mine layers instead of actual guns.

While playing I did encounter a pretty game breaking bug after I'd bought all the upgrades. As soon as I sold my sword, my money displayed as NaN(not a number) and I wasn't able to buy anything. Nothing I could do fixed the problem, so I was essentially stuck with no weapons at all.

Another disappointing facet of the game was a lack of a final boss. The beginning plot has you set up to enter a tournament to fight the king, but even after beating every level and fighting all five bosses, you never have a final boss to fight. It wouldn't be that much a problem, but your character accepting the king's challenge to a fight to the death was the entire premise of the plot, and it just seems really weird that it never played out in the game.

Overall, Gunball arena is a damn good game to play if you want an easy, fun game, but be weary of that bug, because not being able to change your weapons is no fun at all.

Bubble Tanks 3

Bubble Tanks 3 is another bubble tank game by hero interactive, of armor games. If you've either of the prequels, the gameplay should be familiar, as should the sandbox environment with little to no objective. In the first game, you played as a tank that slowly grew in size as you collected bubbles from fallen enemies. The second game included a branching tree of tanks that emphasized either speed, rate of fire, or damage per second. The third features an even more robust system in which you unlock ship classes with the bubble collects, and allows you to build your own ship, which is limited only by the amount of gun points and ship class.

At class one, the speed are incredibly fast, but lack the firepower and special abilities that a higher class would have. At class six, you inch along at 30% of the speed that the class one moves at, turn at a snails pace, and have little in the way of dodging abilities, but in turn can have a massive amount of firepower, shields, radar, and anything else you might want to outfit yourself with.

The enemies in this game seem more annoying than in previous bubble tank games, particularly single bubbles on non hostile levels, which are nearly impossible to hit, and the various enemies that shoot out both purple and green bubbles. When hit by a purple bubble, your speed slows to a crawl, making dodging hard as hell, and when hit by a green bubble, you cannot shoot. Combine these two against a high class ship and you've pretty much created an infinite stun lock combo that can only be rid of by leaving the area you are in. There also seems to be a distinct lack of boss type enemies like those introduced in the second game in the series, which is a disappointment.

On a technical front, the game seems to be slowing down or locking up completely for many people. While I haven't had this problem to nearly the extent of others, I do get lag that oftentimes persists until I kill everything in the room I'm in, which is quite frankly ridiculous with 4gb of ram and a quad 2.12ghz of processing power. There are also bugs with certain abilities, most notably the apocalypse gun, which obliterates the entire room you are in, and occasionally freezes you inside a feedback loop, forcing you to restart the game.

My favorite part of the game had to be the tank creation mode, I probably spent more time designing a tank than actually playing the game. Every ship has a class, and in order to move up a class your ship needs to take up more and more of the total area of the playing field. Personally, my favorite class is class 3, 80% move speed isn't horrible and at class four the guns function as rotating turrets rather than mounted weapons, but to each his own.

All in all bubble tanks 3 is a fun creation game with a few bugs, major lag problems, and an interesting sandbox type game at its core. I'd recommend you play the second one instead of this one if the creation aspects don't interest you, as the gameplay is far smoother.

K.O.L.M.

Remember your horrible childhood? Remember how you were constantly abused by your whore of a mother, the one who constantly told you how much of a disappointment you were to her, and that you were a worthless individual since you were crippled and blind? If so, K.O.L.M.(the acronym is a secret) will bring back every childhood memory you could ask for.

As for the gameplay, its typical metroidvania fare. Collect shit, go to new area, collect shit, return to old area, rinse and repeat 50 times, beat game. The real draw here is the story, which is pretty much takes GLADoS, gives her a child, and then beats all of the subtlety out of her as she derides her child for being a disappointing wwalking for about 75% of the game. The platforming is slow and repetitive, and requires no more than a speck of ingenuity to figure out, but the real downer is all the required backtracking. Yes, its a staple of every metroidvania game, but the difference between backtracking in a game like zero mission compared to K.O.L.M. is that not only were there new hidden areas in zero mission, but they also held rewards, which made backtracking an adventure instead of a chore.

Ultimately, the game's weakness is that it has no real strength. The story has ben rehashed dozens of times, the gameplay is neither challenging or or fun, and one's time would probably be better spent playing other games that do both platforming and narrative better, such as Company of Myself.