Every Thursday evening when Jay lets me out of my kennel to give me my scoop of nourishing gruel while he checks to make sure the shock collar is still functioning, I take the time to pen you, our beloved audience, your Link Dump Friday with a trembling malnourished hand... hah! I'm totally kidding, it's the best here. We have a Hawaiian shaved ice maker in the break room, and every night Jay reads us a bedtime story and gives all the characters funny voices. This week we have broken down ponies, sun burns, alien junk mail, mountaineering, and the world's least safety compliant roller coaster. Enjoy!
Sheriff Sam - This arcade/defense shooter hybrid contains a horse with a broken leg and other stuff you probably shouldn't laugh at. When Sam's trusty steed puts a hoof wrong, you'll have to hold off buzzards, aliens, and more until help arrives. Just point and click to shoot, and upgrade your abilities between waves. But while the gameplay may be nothing to get that excited about, I have a special snug place reserved in my heart for the writing, which is both weird and funny in an effortless, breezy way that makes you laugh when you least expect it.
PostMan - I'd always heard the post man rings twice, not "the post man has to retrieve your alien mail from elaborate point-and-click puzzle contraptions with little instruction as to how to go about doing so". Literature lied to me! Despite its relative shortness, this little puzzler is big on charm, and thankfully lacking in Kevin Costner.
Epic Coaster - How do you ride roller coasters? Do you throw your arms up over the hills and loops? Or do you blubber until it stops and have to be escorted shakily off the ride so you can lay down for a while under the t-shirts in the gift-shop? Heavily inspired by Canabalt, this is a stylish game where you try to keep the coaster on the tracks for as long as possible while racking up a high score and various bonuses. There's a good chance you'll lose interest long before you actually fall off the tracks, and the jump button occasionally seems to decide it doesn't like the way you pressed it. Still, if you're looking for some flash in your day, you've come to the right place.
Holiday Sim - This snarky retro-looking point-and-clicker, choose-yer-own-adventure-ish game claims to be a simulation of a holiday, but I hope for your sake it isn't. Explore your surroundings, get achievements, and partake in such fine activities as gambling, sand castle building, baking yourself into a fine leathery crisp, and shark fleeing. Hooray! Forget Universal Studios, I know what I'm doing for my vacation this year! Painful peeling sunburns and expensive unpalatable tiki drinks all the way, yo!
Mt. - Have you ever wanted to be a mountaineer? Sure you have. The bracing winds. The terrifying drops. The chapped lips. The itchy woolen socks. The ... wait, being a mountaineer stinks! At least in this tricky little game you can experience all the thrill with none of the discomfort. (Unless you count wanting to break your monitor discomfort.) Just type in the name of anything (mountain or otherwise), hint [enter], and climb away! The controls are definitely an acquired taste, but there's something addictive about it anyway.
I think Postman sometimes doesn't obey my clicks.
As always, the real story is somewhere in between the two extremes.
They're gruel-flavored snocones. And the voices aren't funny at ALL. :C
I agree Pesky :/
In the very first scene of Postman I can access the clue, but only once was I able to access the means to solving the puzzle. I've been clicking on it for ages. Going to try a different browser and see if that helps.
Postman: I did it. One thing is impossible to guess: when you finally do need to do something with the letter you don't click on the letter you click on
the postman.
Changing from Firefox to IE helped.
The ending to Postman is so "Awwwwwwww....".
I had to laugh at the controls in Mt. Also, try Mt. Easy and Mt. Everest.
Holiday Sim is really funny - I love it!
Postman was rather cute and straight forward, it just took me some trial and error clicking to get everything right. The only thing that stumped me was the end, and then I managed to figure out the clue.
Cute ending and good game. :)
Whatever you do, dont try Mt.itsatrap . Its the most... eurrrarrrarrerrr *dies* mountain ever.
If you have trouble jumping in Epic Coaster, use the left mouse button, it's easier.
Holiday Sim has just the kind of humor I like. I sort of wish it was more like a graphical CYOA though.
just beat mt. itsatrap, not that tough
At the end of the postman I can't get the light at the base of the signal to turn red. The light at the top turns red, but not the one on the ground.
Holiday sim was awesome
As for Mt... can't get past the dodgy controls
POP -- I was misinterpreting the clue in the final scene of Postman.
It isn't meant to be read like a comic strip. The positions on top correspond to the actions on the bottom.
"Hold right mouse button to swing from a rope." Harrumph. Some of us don't have right mouse buttons.
Up to that point Mt. reminded me of Adventure of Cat, in that "I'm rolling back down the hill again" feeling. The crazy controls seem like the point.
[Most Apple mouses these days support right-clicking, though you will have to enable it in System Preferences -> Mouse, if you haven't already done so. -Jay]
I really like the way Mt. is done, but I started on Everest (which is ironically not that hard) without realizing that there was a tutorial. Been trying different names since then, but it's a little repetitive after a while. I think it needs some variation on difficulty.
I agree that Mt. gets a bit repetitive, but there are still ways to create easy and very hard mountains. Mt. Everest is fairly easy; try Mt. Zyzzyva if you want a real challenge.
I really like Holiday Sim. Anybody figure out how to get the "best holiday ever" award?
Haa! I love the "swimming away from the shark" music. It made failing at everything much more hilarious than usual.
Ah, nevermind, I see the walkthrough link :)
I sympathize with the Mt. player with no right mouse button... because when I see that message, THERE'S NO FRIGGIN' ROPE! grrr. That and the frequency with which the game lets you hit very firmly feet-first and STILL slide all the way to the bottom makes me hate it.
Also, I'd love to know if the Firefox users can actually play Postman or are just teasing, because my cursor only changes (to a little finger-pointing-icon) over one tiny part of the screen, and clicking does nothing, anywhere, ever. Yes, I've methodically tried as many pixels as I can reasonably distinguish; it's broken.
I don't know, Mt. has really grown on me. It's a very good game for playing while listening to a podcast or something similar.
The controls take a little doing, that's true, but when you get used to them it's an interesting challenge.
I like the idea of being able to send mountains to my friends, as well. Try Mt. Bunnybread-- it's got some weird formations going on.
I have found that sometimes I get stuck and am unable to use my rope, but I figured out that if you hold the RMB and move the mouse around a little bit while pressing the directional buttons, you can get it to work.
Overall, a cool little game.
I can't play PostMan, it loads and then says "SWF Loaded", I understand that mean it's 100% without moving to the game. Any ideas? I played in Safari and IE8. Thanks and great games!
[Try updating your FlashPlayer and disabling your browser extensions. -Jay]
Mt love, why you so hard!
Thanks Jay, that's why I like this site :D
Technically I don't have a mouse -- laptop trackpad with one button. So no right-clicking for me, and thus no swinging from ropes in Mt. I was having enough trouble getting to the point of Mt. Tutorial where that came up, so it's probably for the best. (Thanks for the tip, though, as its the sort of thing I'd be very likely to overlook.)
Oh hey, ctrl-click works. Unfortunately, the tutorial text is mostly off the screen, and I can't tell how to let go of the rope. Do I have to burn it?
In PostMan I can't figure out how to
get the cannonball out of the contraption.
Mt. : At first I was like, "What fumbling ape came up with this control scheme?"
Then I was like: :D
When your playing Sheriff Sam, try pressing Escape. It makes a mini version of the game. :D
Oh, and SomeGuy, just wait, that happened to me and I went to check here but it was working when I got back. :/
@Chris
The red dots are actually entry points for the pump. Why the gaping hole doesn't work... "it frustrated me" would be an understatement.
I tried Mt. Olympus and fell of it:D. I was falling in gray sky for a while, now I'm floating in white sky.lol
Mmm! Bedtime stories, eh? You got it good, Dora! But I didn't find any kind of trouble with jumping in Epic Coaster, did you find the up arrow? Also, anyone know how to get
the rockstar ending
in Holiday Sim?
Postman was glitchy in Firefox; I couldn't get out of the first screen. Switched to Safari and it worked fine. Easy but cute.
Another Mac user here who'd love to know how to let go of a rope in Mt.
@TheMusicGirl
Drink some cocktail and swim
Somebody know, what's the name of the song when you're swimming away from the shark?
@Chris/@John
Note the condition of the cross-tubes
since you have already passed that section, perhaps something could be re-used?
move one of the X shaped patches to the third tube and pump again
Sheriff Sam: Well, I'm not one for point-and-shoot action. I tried this, liked the writing, but was annoyed by the gameplay. Shame, because I would have enjoyed this otherwise. (Also, as mrsico says, Escape is awesome. It's so completely pointless!)
Epic Coaster: I'm such a sucker for achievements. I played this far beyond the normal boredom range just to catch 'em all. Of course, I didn't actually get them all...I'm not very good at it. Still, surprisingly fun!
Holiday Sim is good for a short time, but failed to get me to play it more than twice. I think I've had enough of games with sarcastic humor and minimal gameplay. I've played quite a few.
Mt. is unplayable on my Linux laptop...it says "applet not initialized". Sounds fun though.
I think Mt. Rick Roll and Mt. LOSE are impossible. At least without ropes :p
When playing Mt. the rope never works if I'm on the side of a cliff, and WASD don't really do anything. :\
It sounds like a fun game, but I can't get anywhere because of this. :(
I'm using Firefox, normal mouse, btw.
Are there any instructions on how to play the Mt. game? how do you swing on ropes?
on postman I pushed : white, blue, red, blue and the key lights up but when I go back to the box nothing has happened
Reached Mt. Kilimanjaro. The last part is a real challenge!
Epic Coaster is unplayable thanks to the lack of a quality button and abuse of gradients and the movie clip blur filter. Hello, lag spike!
@ ghost
Olympus has a cool little statue at the top lol
Mt is now officially the worst game of all time. If the tutorial is unbeatable, then something is seriously wrong with the game design.
My first try to get to the rope instruction place took 20 minutes. I should have guessed at that point the futility of climbing a vertical wall... Derp! I slipped! There goes another 20 minutes to get to the instructions. The subsequent attempts took less than 20 minutes, but seriously [I still can't scale the thing].
Clicking instead of holding down the LMB helped a ton, but that @$(*&@$ just won't stop spinning!
I tried this last Friday and it was working properly. But now I can't seem to jump higher than a few millimeters. I think the game is broken.
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