Marcel Volmaro's Flashxed, while centered around a basic match-three (well, two) formula, manages to breathe a little life into the familiar puzzle theme with a new mechanic: block dragging. You're presented with a set of bricks with colored orbs sparkling inside. Using the mouse, drag blocks left or right one at a time, keeping in mind that gravity tugs them down at the earliest possible chance. If two or more blocks of the same color touch, they smash and crumble away. The challenge comes from knowing when to keep blocks around to serve as place holders to slide stranded colors to their peers. It's extraordinarily perplexing at times, but that challenge is what makes it so fun.
At the bottom of the screen are a few buttons you'll become familiar with very quickly. You have a limited number of moves to solve each puzzle; this is displayed on the far right. Exceeding the limit results in a lower score. The Undo button takes back your last move, allowing you to use a little trial and error without resetting the entire board. An interesting addition is the Solve option that, strangely enough, solves the puzzle right before your eyes. You'll lose points, of course, but get to keep your sanity, which is infinitely more valuable.
Flashxed has a simple mechanic, visceral sound effects that make you feel the block dragging deep in your gut, and a polished presentation. There are literally hundreds of puzzles to complete as well, giving you plenty of reasons to scratch your head in bewilderment. And best of all: it's a very forgiving game that lets you play and experiment without any real penalty. It's just about everything you could want in a simple, casual puzzler.
Cheers to John for sending this one in.
About the dialog box that pops up when loading the game: This information taken directly from Adobe's website explaining how Flash games and movies store data on your computer:
"By default, Flash Player allows each site to store only 100KB of data in a local shared object on your computer. If a site needs more than that, you will see a dialog box requesting that you allow more space."
What the game is asking to do is completely harmless. Since the default is only 100KB, this particular game needs up to 1MB of space to store your saved data for all of its thousands of levels, and so that is why the dialog is coming up.
Jay, at the beginning of the game and each board I get a message from adobe flash saying:
"www.extremefx.com.ar is requesting permission to store information on your computer.
Requested: up to 1 MB
Currently Used: 0 KB"
with Allow and Deny options. I hit deny each time, and the level played fine.....but what is this request?? I don't get this request when playing other games!
Thanks, glommie
Glommie: It's asking if it can save a minor amount of data on your computer (like a saved game or something similar), and hitting allow lets it do that. Its probably pretty safe just to hit "Allow", I've never heard of malicious information coming from a game save!
Seeing that it wanted to store up to 1mb of data, I got really paranoid and hit Deny... I really wish the author would either get rid of this dialog box, or at least explain why he wants to store info on my computer. Gonna have to say I'm not going to play this until either of those happen.
This game is so simple an entertaining, I could play it for hours. What I do wish it would do is tell you how many levels you have done so far. I'm up to "Kona Chip" right now, whatever that is. and I haven't had a problem solving one yet.
About the dialog box:
This information taken directly from Adobe's website explaining how Flash games and movies store data on your computer:
What the game is asking to do is completely harmless. Since the default is only 100KB, this particular game needs up to 1MB of space to store your saved data for all of its hundreds of levels, and so that is why the dialog is coming up.
More information can be found here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/articles/lso/
And you think it's normal that a game like that needs to save 1MB to keep my game data? The whole game is probably smaller than 1MB. Something is wrong there.
I played a game very similar (and I think exactly the same) on my Palm V about 7 years ago. It is awesome.
koro - have you taken a look at the number of levels the game has? Answer: 2,800+
While I cannot vouch for the efficiency with which the game author is storing the data, it isn't difficult to compute the maximum number of bytes per level allowed for the default 100K...
2,800 levels
100K = 102400 bytes
That leaves just 36 bytes to store each level's data. That's a very, very tiny amount.
In conclusion, there's nothing wrong here.
Alternately, if you right-click on ANY Flash game and choose "Settings" from the pop-up menu, you can change the default to a more reasonable size, thereby circumventing these dialogs. If you have a HD capable of storing several GBs of data, 1MB per Flash game is a relatively minuscule amount and most games won't come near to requiring that much anyways.
There was this game called "Uz" I got with my old gateway computer that's quite similar to this, only it had a bit more of a puzzle aspect to it (but I've only played through the first levels of Flashxd, they've been pretty intuitive) anyone else heard of Uz?
"manages to breathe a little life into the familiar puzzle theme with a new mechanic:"
I don't think remaking the classic game of Vexed is breathing new life into anything. Still fun, but hardly novel.
There is an older flash version that has a lot more levels at http://oos.moxiecode.com/examples/vexed/index.html
Alex - correction: There is an older flash version that has far fewer levels (at Klaus Kroon's OutOfSociety website.)
;)
Forget Vexed, doesn't this remind anyone of Brix? Now we're talking SUPER old-school :P
Ahh, yes, you are correct, it does have more levels. I didn't realize that you could scroll up or down with the mouse to get more packs. Very cool.
Nice graphics. But it does remind me of Blox Forever
Indeed very similar, Karin. ^_^
Coulda sworn someone wanted to keep track of their progress; this is easily accomplished by clicking the menu button at the bottom during play. If you're still seeing names of ice cream flavors, you're still in the Children's section (59 levels total); once you start seeing city names you'll be in the Classic II section, which is a fair amount more difficult.
Also, the person who mentioned Vexed failed to consider the fact that this is a remake designed by the same team (I read the name of the authors under the level pack descriptions, which says Vexed dev team :P).
Seems like the game has been taken down because the author exceeded his bandwidth limit...
Actually, this game is ultimately a clone of Puzznic, a 1989 game by Tatio. I first played it in an arcade, but it was ported a large number of other systems of its day.
Oh no, the site is down (exceeded bandwidth as far as I can tell, by the way there's no such thing as "too much bandwidth" :P).
Can I get a mirror?
I'll have a mirror up within an hour or two. Here's the URL, and until it's live you will likely get a page load error, so please be patient...
http://flashxed.fizzlebot.com
has anyone had trouble with the beam not letting go when you try to move another block? What causes that and how do i stop it. It runs up the number of moves
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