You know, this site might focus on casual gameplay, but sometimes I worry that doesn't come across in the articles enough. They're so rigid... so formulaic... so downright stuffy! So from now on, Link Dump Friday is now Hawaiian Link Dump Friday. You are all expected to wear brightly coloured floral shirts and attend the pig roast in Jay's office after the torch lighting ceremony. (Jay, I'm roasting a pig in your office; I think i forgot to mention this, but you might have already noticed the fire pit and palm fronds.) That is all.
Go Go Sunshine - Despite the fact that the sun is hovering a scant few feet above their heads, the people in this puzzle platformer are positively shrilled and not, in fact, shrieking in agony while their skin boils and sloughs off their bones. Hop from raincloud to raincloud, dispelling the gloom and letting a little sunshine in, without letting the sun plummet into the ocean below. It may be simple, but darned if I don't love these little MS-Paint-ish graphics.
Fancy Pants Adventures Sneak Peek - One of my favourite things in the world is seeing a developer turn something that they were doing for fun into something that's also fun and profitable for them. (Fun fact; developers gots to eat too.) Brad Borne is now getting a bite of that tasty pie, as his popular action-adventure platform series, Fancy Pants, is coming to Playstation Network and XBOX Live Arcade this spring! Give this short preview a play to find out what sort of fancy pants shenanigans are in store for you. Don't own either console? Don't despair; World 3 will be coming to PC eventually.
Famous Objects from Classic Movies - If you like hangman and being a movie snob/film buff, then this simple puzzle game might be for you. Using only a simple stylised object for a clue, figure out the movie title it's supposed to represent. Although it says "classic", you'd be mistaken to think it only uses movies from yesteryear your Grandfather likes to wax on about; films as recent as The King's Speech make an appearance. I guess I'll have to, you know, watch more than approximately two movies a year if I ever hope to be any good at this game.
Flaming Zombooka 2 Level Pack - Turbonuke brings you forty more levels of zombie splattering action in this physics shooter with some familiar faces, a lot of explosions, and even more flailing limbs. If I know you, and I think I do, you've always wanted to be able to say you pulled off a sweet headshot with a bazooka, so here's your chance to fulfill that childhood fantasy. If you don't go for the headshot, you'll probably need a few tries to complete each level as the zombies bounce around the scenery. This never would have happened if you hadn't wasted all our acid rounds on that miniboss battle!
The Maester's Path - If you are a fan of a certain series of books by a certain guy then you are probably very excited for this coming April. To tide you over, you might want to check out this atmospheric advergame, which is about being a maester, and links that aren't at all like what I pictured they would be but whatever that is totally okay. There's only a little content available right now, with more planned for the coming weeks leading up to the series premiere, and you will need to register an account to play, but presumably if you've stuck with Mr Martin through pounds and pounds of books and delays and chapters where nothing at all happens you aren't going to let a little thing like registration stop you.
I tried the movie objects one. It's fun, but I think I need to see more movies :S
About a hundred extremely lucky people got a promo for the HBO Game of Thrones series. It featured a scroll with the answers to that Maester's Path puzzle as well as samples of the different scents, all in a wooden chest. So jealous.
That movie game was a lot of fun. It's interesting how you can see one simple object you might find anywhere, like a quarter, and immediately associate it with a movie. I'm sure there's something to be said there about good movies and strong symbolism, but I'm too tired to say it.
I'd really enjoy the movie object game more if it shuffled through a list of them without repeating. It just isn't fun to be getting the same ones again and again and not be given anything new.
The movie one seems to have two kinds of movies in store: evident ones and obscure movies I've never even heard of :D Managed to solve many of those by cgance, due to the hangman-style gameplay though - ones where the object didn't help at all because I didn't know the movie.
bio
The movie game is cool, but I feel a warning is in order for those who don't care for more risque stuff: I ran into a clue for
A Clockwork Orange
and....well, there's no roundabout way of putting this, so I'll just be blunt: It's a picture of male genitalia, pure and simple.
sgtdroopy,
dunno, I went thru the game of 102 puzzles, all different movies, never repeated...
bio
@Onyxmouse,
it's not a picture of male genitalia, it's a picture of a SCULPTURE of male genitalia. Or better yet it's a picture of a shadow of a prop resembling a sculpture of male genitalia. I don't know at which level of abstraction that stuff becomes ok, but sculptures=kosher. Usually.
I thought for sure Fancy Pants was dead.
Well, Sneak Peek is very good. I hope World 3 comes on PC soon.
Just a comment re The Maester's Path - I don't mind registering, and like many other people I tend to click the "I've read the terms and conditions" box without looking at terms and conditions, but this time I did look at those terms. One of the first conditions was as follows:
"[This website] is intended solely and exclusively for residents of the United States of America and its territories and possessions ("U.S.") who are at least 18 years of age or older. In order to use and access the features and services provided by this website you must be 18 years of age or older (or whatever the applicable age of majority (legal adulthood) is where you are located), and a resident of the U.S. If you are not an adult, or if you do not reside in the U.S., please stop and discontinue your use of this website."
So it's possible that at some point it will detect my IP and throw me out of the site or something. (I honestly can't understand why they should have that kind of rule. Anybody more enlightened than I, who might shed some light?)
Noooo, Fancy Pants for Console!? They should reconsider because I'm mad that they rubbed this in our faces.
There's a couple of ones in the movie quiz that might be slightly offensive to some, not just a clockwork orange. That said, it's not exactly kid material anyway, so that shouldn't be an issue...61 out of 102! go me.
FPA = AWESOME!
You have a challenge level where you need to beat a high score and there is a level where you swim underwater! That needs to be expanded.
And apparently there is a sequence of squiggles that you get more points if you collect them in a certain order or something. A very interesting concept.
Pity we can't rate the Link Dump games...Fancy Pants Adventures (sneak peek) deserves 1337/5!!
Wow, really impressed with the movie objects game. Finally, a browser movie trivia game for actual film nerds! It weighs a bit heavily towards the eighties and nineties, but covers the spectrum from the thirties to last year, with a solid selection of foreign classics. And it works very nicely as a game: the increasingly vague images combine beautifully with the hangman mechanic (I'll start off with no clue, then get a few letters and then the lightbulb will go off - very satisfying). I was especially geeked out with two clues in particular(spoilery hints):
If the phrase "Odessa Steps" or the name "Jean Seberg" means anything to you...
...anyway, they say they are adding movies and taking suggestions; I'm already making a long list!
(I got an 86, BTW)
New alot of the movies, although I didn't remember them all, but wish they had something from "Alien"
That movie one was fun - I got about 30 right with maybe three or four wrong, but I had to keep going, and I ended up 25 and 50. Some of them are pretty nasty (the one that had a statue of liberty almost tricked me) and some of them I was sad to admit I hadn't seen, but it was a fun trip while it lasted!
I only question their definition of "classic" for the movie choices, but it was still a pretty fun game. Some of those movies I didn't see but still knew the prop... and like BioLarzen, I could figure some titles simply from "wheel of fortune" or "hangman" style of play.
I have a question about one of the clues, though, can someone help?
About the picture of the ice cream soda...
How does that equal "There Will Be Blood?"
I don't remember ice creams in that movie for some reason... it's the oil wells that stick out for me... and that bowling alley.
What am I forgetting?
elle
Elle:
Re the "milkshake" in There Will Be Blood, I didn't remember that either; but there is a reference to that scene in Wikipedia's "Milkshake" entry, strangely enough, about 3/4 down the page.
Fun fact: this kind of sentence needs a colon, not a semicolon.
This kind of sentence can use a semicolon; it uses something that could be expressed in two separate sentences, but smashes it into one, because one sentence makes more sense for the concept being expressed.
Does anyone know where to put the snailshell like in other fancy pants games?
Yay, there will be a Fancy Pants World 3 after all! My wishes have been realized! Now if only the sneak peek would work...
Oooo! I almost missed the Song of Ice and Fire game when I looked at the list yesterday!! (haven't played it yet, will now)
So, if the HBO series stays true to the books, then we should get the first four seasons...and then be forced to wait six years for the next three seasons? :D
Linnea: if I had to guess why they'd have that kind of restriction, it's because this game is tied to some kind of contest in which the prize can only be delivered to a US resident. The warning is there for legal reasons, so a non-US citizen can't sue them for not delivering the prize, since they can just point to the terms and go "what were you even doing on that site in the first place, hmm?"
But they probably aren't going to care where your from unless that situation occurs.
Aww, the movie object deal didn't save my progress like I thought it would. Oh, well; better score for me!
@elle, @Four
There wasn't really a prominent milkshake as a literal prop or object in the film (though, there might have been in the restaurant, come to think of it), but in the bowling alley, Daniel Plainview uses a metaphor involving a milkshake and yells at Eli, "I drink your milkshake!" It was one of the most memorable and imitated scenes in the film (SNL did a sketch about it, for example.)
FPA doesn't load right for me. First time I got just a gray screen. Second time I think I'm getting the right audio, but the same gray screen.(Using Camino on OS X 10.6)
I think I'd like the movie game better if it were actually the objects from the films, and not just "here's a picture of an object that is associated with this movie". Also, it seems you have to click to start each round, but if you hit return, you skip it! Horrible UI decision.
@Kangra on FPA: yeah, me too. On both Firefox and Chrome. And it's made IE8 crash.
But there are plenty of other places out there in the wild world of the internet where the sneak peek is available, and seems to work.
The Newgrounds link to FPA doesn't work for me either (IE8 and Firefox on XP). However, you can also play it from the FPA website at http://www.fancypantsadventures.com/
Big fan of SoIaF, and Martin in general.
Not so big on ridiculous advergames you have to scour the web for insane details in order to play.
Just make some content everyone can enjoy and don't try to make a stupidly difficult scavenger hunt out of it. Marketing pukes who think of things like that need to have some sense beaten into them with something heavy and rusty. At least that would have some relationship to the story...
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