FraidIt's Because of Quantum | Submitted by costik on Thu, 10/09/2008 - 16:37. |
Fraid is a quick parodic riff on Jonathan Blow's brilliant Braid. It features completely impenetrable "puzzles" that you essentially "solve" by doing random things until something happens, along with vaporous story text with the illusory feeling of literary depth but that ultimately means nothing.
It's short -- five, ten minutes at most -- and far from deep, but a cute little goof from our own Patrick Dugan.
WTF?!Go Kill Ten Rats, Comrade | Submitted by costik on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 02:23. |
It's a World of Warcraft screenshot, right? Well, no -- it's a screenshot from WTF?!, a Flash-based sidescroller parodying WoW. And it's note-perfect, too -- every interface element and the backgrounds and characters look like they're ripped straight from Azeroth.
SyobonJust When You Thought It Was Safe To Return To The Mushroom Kingdom... | Submitted by RobertAugustdeMeijer on Mon, 03/10/2008 - 16:31. |
Syobon Action hates you. You’ll find this out the hard way: every jump, platform, mushroom, pipe... even the cloud in the background is out there to kill you. In time you will hate Syobon Action. And that’s why you’ll love it so much.
You may, from your youth, remember ball labyrinths: wood boxes with knobs on two sides you use to tilt a platform above the box, with the platform consisting of a wooden maze--with holes or slats in some areas which your ball, if you aren't careful, will fall through. You start at one location on the maze, and by tilting it carefully, try to get your ball to the exit. (The things we used to do for entertainment before videogames...)
Hazard Ball obviously owes a debt to those old puzzles; you control a ball in a maze, with the arrow keys; it has a degree of momentum, and the longer you hold a key down, the faster it goes, which is useful getting up ramps and such. Points are earned for collecting (running into) jewels and other objects, and there's the whole panoply of things you expect in straightforward videogames: gates opened with keys found elsewhere, powerups that give you special abilities, hazards, moving opponents who try to damage you or knock your ball into a hole or an opening into space.
