Avalanche

Avalanche is simply the best web-game I've ever played. You know how Diablo took the hack-n-slash mechanic, distilled it, then put it to an endless field of beautiful stochastic patterns, dungeons and bosses and special weapons? Avalanche does the same, in a simpler way, to platforming. You control what appears to be a block of tofu; you can move left and right, you can jump, and most importantly you can hang-slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them, like a tofu ninja (perhaps recalling memories of that secret mode in Resident Evil 2, speed-running with a knife, a sentiment not removed from hardcore play of Avalanche). You've got an endless torrent of blocks, big and small with trivial color variations, coming down from the sky, and an ocean of red liquid rising beneath. Get as high as you can without getting crushed or touching the liquid.

Playing this to the Battle's song is key, a nice replacement for the grating MIDI that comes default (and can't be turned off) -- Atlas paces the gameplay and theme better than any music/play combo I've ever experienced, and this is coming from a guy who once got blazed in Gunstar Heroes while blasting Beethoven's 9th.

The game's depth only comes out after about twenty seven plays, when you start to see a range of randomly arrayed level designs emerging from the randomly falling blocks. The spots you'll get stuck in, like being under an over-hang too long for you to jump around (jumping around, then hang-jumping off the lower corner is pretty key in this game), will scintillate your fingers to new feats of timing and dexterity. I call these scenarios being "boxed-out," when the falling blocks actually impede your ability to climb farther, usually after a succession of nearly congruently placed blocks bifurcates like a tree, with you stuck on the trunk. Usually you have to wait for a savior block to fall and re-bound off of it at just the right time.

Getting crushed because the slide-physics of horizontal movement tucked you under, or getting boxed in, is an unnecessary frustration, so there's definitely room for improvement. A pro, of course, will systematically hone her muscle memory away from these traps, and strive for high scores at 1000 meters and up. There's a really key function in this: at the start the background is blue and the liquid is a light pinkish color; but as you get higher, the background blends red, then eventually pitch black, and the liquid becomes pure stark red. This transition only applies to the first 700 meters or so, however; the stratosphere of high scores is all straight dark from then on, and the pace suits it. The delayed play loop of climbing, then waiting, then climbing and on and on, eventually straightens out to a hectic, rapid fire of climbing for your goddamned life, or desperately waiting for a pillar of blocks to fall while the liquid rises almost to your position. A key trick of the super-pro is, of course to bounce off blocks as they fall, in order to recon whats coming your way and stay ahead of the current in those tight, marooned events.

You should save this for a Saturday or something; you'll lose workdays to it.