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.