This week's Link Dump Friday is brought to you by the letters H, R, Z, and by the number 642. Look for references to those letters in each game featured below. Then multiply by the square root of pie (cherry). Once you find the solution, let us know by sending smoke signals from your backyard. We'll arrive shortly with a bouquet of beautiful flowers commemorating your efforts.
- Cosmic Crush - One part gravity, one part flailing around in the darkness of space. Cosmic Crush lets you absorb planetoids smaller than you in an interesting cross between Katamari Damacy, Orbital, flOw, and that game where you do stuff in space.
- Mesira: Chapter 2 - A nice-looking RPG with a good soundtrack and classic role playing gameplay. It's the second part of a series, but you don't need to play them in order to know what's going on. This installment is actually better than the original in many ways. You can always check out the first chapter just to feel like a good person.
- 5 til - It's 4 Second Firestorm, but not really. You're a spy doing typical spy-like things. Complete each task in the alotted time while attempting to be half as cool as James Bond.
- Paso Doble - A 3D java game where you control a puppet in a wooden maze who's trying to reach the goal. The trick is... you can only move two steps at a time. Brain hurt +10.
- Bubbles Revenge - It's a tribute/clone of Manuel Fallman's brilliant Bubbles game that we reviewed/mentioned here a very long time ago. This one was created by a fellow RIT student, Andrew Ray, and he tells me he spent almost a year in production with it. We can never get enough bubbles, bring 'em on!
And that wraps up another link dump. Ooh pretty.
cool new games
(woot first post ever is a first post for a game)
I sent my smoke signals two hours ago! Where are my flowers!?!
I like daisies. Thank you.
great games btw... the puppet one made my brain leak from my nose...
Uh, I really disliked "5 til"... it starts out ok but it really got on my nerves that you have a time limit while your avatar is moving about as fast as the Eurasian continent.
Another complaint is that in the "Defend yourself" stage, your gun doesn't even shoot where you click.
In my opinion, this one does not deserve a full review.
All those games seem to be pretty average this friday.
Though hang on.. I'm sure there was no link to "Bubbles Revenge" 20 minutes ago!
Checking it now.
Cosmic crush would be a lot better if you just had a larger field of view. As it is, it's far too easy to blunder into clusters of larger planets before you really have time to react. It's rather frustrating.
Does anyone know the name of the song that is used when you get the Hippie powerup in the bubble game?
So is the Bubbles Revenge link another obscure Link Dump Friday funny, or what?
albert--i am not sure what that one is, but the mock star-wars theme when you get the black bubble and reverse gravity is even better ^o^
OK, let's do the first two..well, first.
Cosmic crush - nice idea, but laggy and as someone already mentioned the restricted field of view makes the game frustrating and rather unplayable.
Mesiria is a Zelda-wannabe with rather nice graphicsbut bland and boring gameplay. Chapter 1 is more or less a series of luck-based fights with no real choices at all. It's also quite short. Chapter 2 is more Zelda-like, sports an improved interface yet could use more content, quests and generally be much more interesting then it is. All in all, Link is a much more interesting guy then Gustave and his wacky adventures.
Cosmic Crush is a neat idea, but the game isn't that exciting. I think the worst part is that once you build up to a planet-sized level, if you crash you can actually hear the individual screams of the billions of inhabitants. There must be some bug in the program because I still heard them after closing the game, and after turning off my computer. I hear them even now... accusing me, asking "Why? Why didn't you save us?" Sleep is no respite, for their tortured shrieks haunt even my dreams.
But hey, that Bubbles game looks fun!
Mesiria is quite fun, if rather hard. There is a lack of decent flash RPG games, so I am glad to see this. It's too bad I am regularly getting my ass whupped though. I can't seem to get ahead of the curve in this game.
Cosmic crush is also pretty fun for a bit, if you figure out two things: The big planets tend towards the middle of the playing field, and you can detect them by seeing the effect of their gravitational field on you. I got to the point where I could easily tell where the big planets were without every seeing them. But eventually I got bored.
Paso Doble's levels are a little too random, Bubbles Revenge is just kind of meh, and I didn't even bother trying 5 til.
lol! sorry about my previous comment, i thought it was another fake game cause the page was not attached to the game :P
kind of fun tho
Yay! The Bubbles link is fixed!
The link to the first chapter is the same as the second chapter. Oops!
I think a fair comparison to Cosmic Crush is the game Fish, except instead of eventually making you die because you can't escape the giant fish due to your size, you die because you accidently wander into the gravitic field of a large body of mass, and can't escape its horrible, vicelike grip. Even the slingshot method which would usually work to escape a gravitic field doesn't help, and the only warning is a slight change in your direction. The field of vision needs to be much, much bigger to avoid dying repeatedly and without any hope of escape.
Fixed the link. Thanks weirdguy.
Alex, if you want to beat Mesiria, you need to build up cour character before venturing into more serious fights.
Chapter 1 is seriously broken, because those snowbirds can spawn at will and 90% of the time are impossible to beat. The trick is to walk hither-tother on the beach a gazillion times and kill the slime creatures so you can build up to level 6. THEN go to the lever and to the boss fights.
Chapter 2 is even harder, but at least there is a heal&save point. The same trick works here - walk around the savepoint like an idiot and kill the skulls until high enough level.
Tip for level building in Mesiria Ch 2 (jay, note how it's spelled. Heads up?):
Actually, once you hit the switch in the underground cave, thar be a certain yellow glowy spot that is good for gaining fast exp if you know how to fight well. Just make sure you have full hp and run around in that spot.
A few more Mesiria Ch 2 hints (I really think Ch 1 is not worth the trouble):
Heal&save point restores your HP, MP and specials. Ditto leveling up.
Before talking to the priest, search around the town and then buy yourself a nice leather jacket.
You know you can run away from the fight right? Also, it's common knowledge you can chain Boost and Double attack, right? Right?
Sometimes running in circles is your best friend.
Never say YES until you're sure of it.
There. Happy Mesiriing!
Forgot to comment the other ones...
5 til - link doesn't work. So I cannot comment on this. Maybe it's a perfect game. Maybe it's the best game evar. I wouldn't know.
Paso Doble - Umm... nah. This is one of those games best played on paper, but since it's 3D it's kinda hard to actually put it on paper. I guess some puzzle freaks will like this, but not many of them.
Bubbles revenge - Yep, it's bubbles all over again, a little bit slower then before and different music. Same old same old. Additional points for "Requiem for a dream" reference, tough.
So there it is. As it turns out, Mesiria (or Mesira as Jay likes to call it), with all of its shortcomings, is still the best of the bunch. Go figure.
In Bubbles Revenge it still works to follow the strategy from the original, in which
you avoid the regular bubbles and collect only powerups and (when you can) mines, which don't grow your bubble. Granted, this gets hard quick since in BR everything speeds up with time. On the other hand, depending on how contracts work, it might be possible to shrink your bubble to nothing with a lucky sequence of contracts -- what happens then?
I was hoping BR would not reproduce the collision detection of B, but alas it does: however circular it may appear, your bubble is really a square. I consider this a flaw. It's really frustrating to be trying to squeeze past a mine and die because you catch it on the invisible corner of your circumscribing square.
aaaarrrggghhhh. Cosmic Crush is the most infurating fishy clone I have ever played. I spent 10 minutes to get to the 2nd level, then 5 times I died because everything was stuck in a hude clump about 1 screen wide. This meant that if I went anywhere near it, I started to move towards it at a pace that increased so fast after about half a second it was too late, and I was being pulled in so fast I couldn't pull out. I didn't even get the chance to become the 3rd form, whichever is after earth.
As others have said, even just being able to zoom out so I could make everything half as big and I could see twice as much would make the game far far easier, and mayvie even possible.
Excellent idea, just too many flaws (huge amount of lag, planets gravity "ganging up on me", smaller planets hiding behind massive ones that take up the SCREEN >.<)
Cosmic Crush: You're playing it wrong if you're stumbling into planets. Take it SLOW. Play by feel. You will start to feel the tug way before you see the planet. Move a little and sit. Move a little and sit. Only use the arrows occasionally, and to escape dangerous gravity wells. If you are zooming all over the place, you're doing it wrong.
It's a fun game; it needs expanding. I'd love to see your asteroid turning into a planet, into a star. The kind of planets you swallow determines whether you turn into a gas giant or a rocky, earthlike planet, and eventually determines how big your star gets before it goes supernova.
Yes, but taking it SLOW actually takes FOREVER. The only viable way to play it is slowly and painstakingly sweeping the playfield, stopping occasionally to see if the alien gravity has an effect on you. Needless to say, this is quite boring, repetitive and generally not very fun.
What I was complaining about it how everything you CAN get its stuck right next to everything you CAN'T get, and then everything you CAN'T get is stuck in a msssive pile with the gravity adding up to make something that as soon as you get pulled in the tiniest little bit its too late to escape. this makes every level 2 I played an impossible trap right from when you spawn.
I went back and tried playing it by moving a tiny bit at a time, but it just makes the game get boring even faster. this game had excellent potential, but was basically ruined in many ways.
For Cosmic Crush, the biggest planets are always grouped in the middle. So if you want to beat each levell all you have to do is work your way around the edge of the playing field and each time you complete a circuit (and have grown larger) move a bit closer towards the middle and go around again. Keep working your way inwards in concentric circles like that and it's not difficult at all to beat the game.
Or rather move your mouse arrow around the screen 12,375 times. You'll get approximately the same amount of fun out of it. Perhaps more if you shout "Weee!" every time around.
I completed Mesiria 1 and 2, and I was wondering if anybody could suggest similar games. I'm not familiar with RPG and don't know where to start. Thanks!
I think the Mesiria series deserves more highlight than a simple link dump; it's probably the best RPG I have had so far on Flash. Reminded me a lot about the old timers. A very detailed review about it is here:
http://how-to-kongregate.blogspot.com/2007/11/max-mesiria-chp2-rpg.html
I specially like the part about musics. Enjoy!
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