Some of the best browser games are also the simplest. Take an interesting idea, make it accessible to everyone, give it a spiffy interface, polish everything to a gleaming shine and you might have a great coffee break game on your hands. This week we have a handful of games that do just that, presenting a simple idea in a nice-looking package.
ShoOot 3 - The 3rd in a series of simple shooters from a game designer who perhaps understands simple browser games better than anyone else, Tonypa. Use your mouse to shoot all everything you can while your little ship bounces helplessly around by itself.
BoomsticK - A shooter with a conversationalist angle, in BoomsticK your worst enemy is your own trigger-happy finger. Blast enemies as they fly on the screen, then collect the ammo they drop. If you run out of ammo you lose, so try taking out several foes with one shot to increase your bullet economy.
Bubble Pop - As simple as the name implies, you play a fish swimming around popping bubbles with its nose. Avoid the mines, grab the power-ups, and, well, don't die!
Pickies - It's make-your-own match-3! Cute lil pickies appear in the order shown at the top of the screen. Arrange them on the grid squares and try to put groups of three together so they'll vanish. Equal parts strategy, forethought, and old fashioned puzzle goodness.
Crumbs! - Mmm, cookies. Crumbs is an arcade-style game where you're trying to eat as much of each cookie within the given time limit. Click and hold the left mouse button to start the circle expanding, then release to take a bite.
Canyon Shooter - You are parachuting out of a plane, guys shooting at you from the cliffsides, and wind keeps blowing you in every direction. Not your most relaxing rainy afternoon. This vertical shooter has some nice pixel artwork and extremely dramatic music to go with its intense action.
I love it when we are like a thousand years away from friday yet, there are the link dumps =)
Well XD on other news, i got 100% on the Cookie thing, too easy to cheat =)
A thousand years from Friday? What part of the world are you in?
...Oh, the part that actually lives Friday LAST. Figures. :p
I hate when hi-score lists are fraudulent. I hate cheaters. Well I don't HATE them, I actually pity them.
Shooot 3 is not as good as 1 and 2. You just can't control whether or not the next circles will appear on top of you, and that's an instant loss of one life. Too random. Also, it seems like after the first few, the waves aren't in any particular order, despite the fact that some of them seem rather harder than others.
For a game with a "conversationist" angle there sure doesn't seem to be a lot of dialogue in Boomstick. Maybe you mean "conservationist"? ;)
I got bored at around level 12 or so (whenever the red shooty ones came around) with 175% accuracy... solid game, but the principle of limited ammo can be applied in much better ways. Panicked zombie-fighting scenarios are always nice for that.
How do you get a million points in Bubble Pop? I mean, I know my precision is terrible and all, but really, dodging mines for a million points? Or half a million every ten minutes?
Link to Shooot 3 doesn't seem to work for me :(
Having said that, Boomstick is so fun, I don't think I want to play Shooot 3 just yet :)
Woah, wasn't shoOot 2 just released?
The link for ShoOot 3 opens up a page on which you then must click Play. Gimme5games has changed the way it displays games, which now requires an extra click from you. Sorry.
As soon as an alternate link is available, I'll change it.
Canyon Shooter is pretty, but ridiculous. It's basically half a Metal Slug clone - you get to aim, but you have no control at all over where you go. This gets really irritating on some levels, where it's possible to get stuck between a pair of updrafts and not progress any further for a long time.
Err, disregard that comment. I completely missed the part about controlling your parachute in the instructions, and for some reason WASD didn't do anything when I tried to control where I was going.
Ah, link is working now - I should point out before it was just leading me to an error page, rather than my being unable to click an extra link.
how on earth do you cheat on crumbs? I only scored just over 50%
I managed to get over 90% in Crumbs by psycho clicking. I don't know if that's cheating, or how you do cheat. Psycho clicking ftw!
I recommend The Putty Puzzle. A devious puzzle game.
"I hate when hi-score lists are fraudulent. I hate cheaters. Well I don't HATE them, I actually pity them."
My sentiments exactly. Except I DO hate them.
racci, you can greatly improve your percentage by frantically clicking all over the cookie, instead of going for 2 big circle bites as I did at first.
Crumbs! is a great casual game - but, again, only if that high score list wasn't there... You've got no chance to get on it with less than 100%. A certain Sue managed to get in the top 10 at least 6 times.(though, probably 7, an "S" is probably also her)... Why???
Yeah, the secrect of Crumbs! is
to have as many small bites as you can. Big bites don't work.
I could do around 98% with this technique.
As for Shoot 3 - Tonya, I guess, has just made another classic. This guy seems to have an excellent eye and brain for simple, yet entertaining games!
Thanks for mentioning ShoOot3 :)
I tried to create game with simplest possible user interaction and see if its still remains playable. Also, the inspiration for it came from Moai games.
I think it's hilarious that every week, there is somebody who doesn't understand how time zones work. Like this week, Mauricio posted at 10:16 pm. I don't know for certain, but worst case that'll be Eastern Time. That means when they posted, it was already Friday for over 70% of the world.
I understand we're all here to play games, but I still find it astonishing.
That Pickies game is deceiving, the object is not match three but to completely fill a vertical or horizontal row. Normally I like match three games but this one doesn't float my boat, even with the adorable little creatures.
ShoOot 3 definitely deserves a full review. In fact, every tonypa game does.
Sorry, little error there.
I want to like Shooot 3, but the randomness spoils it for me. Perhaps if the square started in a safe place each level it would be better, but as it is now it's too easy to die without being able to do anything about it.
I understand the dangers of moving around without control in Shooot3 within randomly appearing rings, however I would like to point out that circles do not hurt you while they are appearing. Of course its not easy and sometimes near impossible but in many cases you can shoot the circles before they are fully grown and become to hurt you.
Crumbs is original but bugged.
A person with a slower computer (where 5 seconds lasts much longer) can just small-bite the entire cookie without much effort. That's why the high-score list is filled with hundred-percenters.
That Putty Puzzle fuzzbox was recommending here earlier yields a "digital signature error" or something to that effect.
So, Boomstick (which I keep wanting to call Boomshine). I seemed to be getting along swimmingly for quite awhile, up through tier 18, and in fact it was starting to get fairly engaging what with the host of things shooting at me, and it not being a sure thing anymore that I could finish the tiers without a net loss of ammo. Slow to get up to speed, I was thinking (and I can certainly see how the first eleven tiers might be boring), but then not bad.
Then tier 19 comes and I get squished. That's it, game over. A profoundly unimpressive denouement, if you ask me. I thought I'd built up some kind of buffer against losing what with having a thousand odd units of ammo, but no. It'd be much more in tune with the flavour of the game, I think, if, like the red enemies, the purple rolling thing sucked some amount of ammo (several hundred, say) from you as it steamrolled you over, and if that left you with any you could lift yourself off the ground and continue on.
(The common trope in platformers that falling off the bottom of the play area is fatal really gets to me in some games, for similar reason. So what if you've worked hard to get schfifty-five hearts and reinforced unobtainium armor? It's all entirely meaningless now that you've taken a misstep off the edge; better luck next life.)
on the crumbs website, there are some other pretty cool games
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