Ten scary online games
Wooooooooh. Woooooooooh. Yeah, it is halloween again, and - surprise surprise - we have some scary games for you to play. Well, I say scary but, to be honest, they are nowhere near as frightening as my trick or treaters.
I'll be honest here. Halloween absolutely terrifies me. No, it's not the prospect of being inundated by witches, undead and evil spirits that concerns me. I have become very adept at dispatching such gruesome wickedness in games like Left 4 Dead and Silent Hill. No, what fills me full of dread are the feral little kids who play trick or treat on me each year. The first time they came a-knocking at my door, I answered their question of "trick or treat, madam?" with no little nonchalance. "Oh, trick sounds so much more fun," I said, daring them to do their worst. I was not feeling so cocky the next morning when I heard that my granny's house had been burnt down, witnesses reporting four evil-looking urchins cackling to themselves near the scene.
Thankfully, Nana was out at bingo at the time. So no serious damage done. But it meant that the next year I was a lot more careful. No sooner had they started knocking on the door than I was there thrusting a brand-spanking new X-Box games console into their grubby little hands. That should get them on my side, I thought, as I quickly closed the door on them and retired trembling to the tent I had made out of my duvet. It didn't of course. The next day, as I entered into my car for work, I noticed the words 'PS3 rules' etched neatly into the window screen. I don't know what I am going to do this year. Maybe I'll give them a bottle of whiskey in the hope they will get drunk and forget me. Or perhaps I will simply leave the country.
Published by Tasha on 29th October 2010
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New Game Round-up
Yet another crop of great new games, including a sequel to one of 2009's best point-and-click games, an underwater game based loosely on Herman Melville's legendary novel Moby Dick and an unusual game that aims to unleash your poetic potential.
We really are living in a Golden Age of online gaming. Our hardest task when compiling these new game round-ups is not finding titles that are good enough to be included, because there are literally hundreds. No, our biggest challenge is sifting through all the great new games out there to ensue that we pick only the most brilliant.
There are simply too many fantastic games being released, to make this an easy job. Take The Trader of Stories (the latest point-and-click game from the legendary Mateusz Skutnik and his studio Pastel Games) or Fragger: Lost City (the sequel to one of the most popular physics games ever). Both of these are seriously slick, well-produced games. But they don’t even make it onto today’s main list.
Published by Alex Kearns on 22nd October 2010
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Top ten launching games
There is something about the idea of wantonly launching objects - in particular small animals - into the air that tickles human beings. We would never do it in real life, of course, but give us a game that let's us do it, and we simply can't stop playing.
This list of games will probably get me in trouble with the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Campaign to Save Shopping Carts and the League Against Meanness to Trucks are also unlikely to have me in their good books after reading this. The games we are featuring today are totally irresponsible. Anyone who did in real life what you can do in these games would be severely punished. And rightly so.
But, in their defence, there is [giggle] something insanely entertaining about launching a hedgehog into outer space, blasting a turtle [snigger] into the unknown using a nuke or driving a truck up a ramp so fast that it flies like a bird [suppressed guffaw], before crashing destructively down on some buildings. And what self-respecting student has not dreamed of launching themselves into the air in a shopping cart when drunk.
Published by Tasha on 20th October 2010
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Best One Button Games
It is amazing how much fun you can have with games that use just one button.
There is something almost magical about one button games. You would have thought, given the simplicity of their controls, that these games would not offer much in terms of game-play. What, after all, can you do with just one button. And yet, in spite of this severe limitation, one button games can have surprisingly complex game-play (just look at the fully-fledged RPG in this list). Not only that, some one-button games - Poto and Cabenga, for example - can actually also offer a very stiff challenge to gamers.
This ability to unleash complex and challenging game-play using the simplest of controls is what makes one-button games so magical and fun to play. Here, we present you with what we consider to be the ten best one-button games that can be played online.
Published by Tasha on 14th October 2010
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Top 10 robot games
Robots make great characters in games. Don't believe us, then check out these ten great robot games, all of which can be played in your browser for free.
According to Wikipedia, robots are "virtual or mechanical artificial agents guided by computers to do tasks on their own". Yawn. Could you possibly make them sound more boring? That bone dry description might be true at some base level but it does not do justice to what robots really mean to us as human beings. What robots really are are devices through which we can explore our own humanity. They are blank canvases on which we can sketch out simplified or extreme versions of ourselves.
Take Arnold Schwarzenegger's terrifying android in the first Terminator movie. With its calculated ruthlessness and unwavering murderous intent, it was a terrible parody of a person, all the worst aspects of humanity assembled into one machine. Then, to contrast, there is the sweet-natured rubbish-cleaner drone in the 2008 Walt Disney film Wall-E, again a parody, but this time taking many of our more generous, child-like attributes.
Published by Tasha on 10th October 2010
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Top 10 running games
Don't fret, you don't need to be fit or athletic to partake in the fun. Just sit back in your couch, fire up your favourite browser and play ten of the best running games available for free on the web.
I once made the mistake of going for a run. It was shortly after the Christmas festivities and I was feeling bloated from all the rich food and wine I had consumed. A friend guilt-tripped me into going jogging with her. Never again. Within minutes of setting off, I was suffering terrible hot flushes, I felt on the verge of vomiting and I was quite clearly in the midst of an epic coronary. That I survived the experience is a miracle in itself.
Needless to say, I haven’t gone running since. Now, whenever I feel the desire for some exercise, I switch on my computer and play some of these great running games. They provide all the thrill and excitement of running but without any of the pain. Perfect.
Published by Tasha on 26th September 2010
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The Best 30 HTML5 games
HTML5 is set to revolutionise the creation of online games over coming years. Here, we present you with the longest list of HTML5 games available on the internet.
We love Flash. Until recently, it has provided the easiest and most powerful way of creating the online games that we showcase on this blog. It is not going too far to say that Flash spawned the online casual gaming industry. Without it, game studios would have found it almost impossible to provide online the slick animations, vector graphics and lightning fast interactivity that gamers demand.
They would have been forced to resort to the old way of doing things, painstakingly creating games using difficult-to-learn operating system specific technologies. These games would be expensive to develop, would only work on one operating system (so if you were on a Mac, you would have a problem) and users would be forced to download the games to play them.
Published by Alex Kearns on 10th September 2010
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Best point-and-click games of 2010
A bit early maybe, but we think our point-and-click-obsessed readers are going to love this: the best point-and-click games of the year.
We were planning to wait until the end of the year before publishing this list but such has been the demand from our readers for more point-and-click games that we decided to bring it forward. This article is a follow-up to our list of Top 10 point-and-click games that we published at the end of last year.
2010 has thus far proved to be a pretty good year for point-and-click fans. It has not perhaps yet reached the heights of 2009 when two of the greatest ever point-and-click games - Machinarium and Little Wheel - were released. But there have certainly been enough great new point-and-click games in 2010 to keep even the most voracious point-and-clicker sated.
Published by Tasha on 20th August 2010
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Top ten war games that won't ruin your life
Indulge your military fantasies with our selection of modern-warfare games that can be completed in an afternoon.
My friends and I have an agreement. We will never play THAT multiplayer online war game again. I am not going to share with you what THAT is, because I'd feel very guilty if you then went off and got as addicted to playing it as we did. All you need to know is that the game is pure, unadulterated evil, and that if you start playing it, it will rob you of every minute of spare time you have. That's one of the biggest problems with many multiplayer online war games - they are so huge that you pretty much have to invest every waking moment in them to succeed. So how then can you indulge in your passion for online war games without sacrificing your life?
The answer, we hope, is our list of Top ten war games that won't ruin your life. These games, like most games we write about on this site, are casual games that can be played in your browser for free. They can be completed in a couple of hours or less. And yet they are packed full of all the war strategy and action goodness that any self-respecting military commander could want. For this list, we have focused on games with a modern warfare theme (ie, guns, tanks and planes rather than arrows, cavalry and swords or lasers, quantum canon and light sabers). Historical and futuristic war games will be covered in upcoming lists. We hope you enjoy the games.
Published by Alex Kearns on 18th August 2010
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Top 20 music games you can play online
Get into the groove with our compilation of the best free music and rhythm games on the web.
Rhythm games, compose-your-own-music games, memorise the tune game, even music fighting games... we have them all and more. If you like music and you like gaming, then we hope you will enjoy our list of 20 music games that can be played in your browser for free. Without further ado, to the games:
We hope you like our list of games. If you think we have missed out any brilliant online music games, please tell us all about them in the comments section below.
Published by Tasha on 1st August 2010
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