This week on Link Dump Friday, some kids with some serious firepower, a farm where love and profits are just a click away, a whole lot of sky-bound bullets and bosses, and a prime example of why you should never get between a pony and her cake.
Frantic Sky - Survive as long as you can against waves of enemies and increasingly badder bosses in Crionuke Games' arcade shooter, nabbing coins to spend on upgrades for your initially paltry plane. Be warned... not only does the game make the dangerous mistake of not using Danger Zone as a soundtrack, but once you die, you'll have to start all over from the beginning! (Though you'll keep your upgrades, mercifully.)
Idle Farmer - Junjo delivers a simple sim game that almost plays itself as you hover over your initially itty-bitty farmland to grow and sell crops that can be spent on upgrades. Part clicktoy, part ultra-ultra-ultra-lite Harvest Moon, it's super cute, but don't expect much depth even when you get a wife, since her entire function is just to help you farm... which I suppose is fair since you literally spend every waking moment in the fields anyway!
Tiny Defender - Normally I'd tell you to pick on someone your own size, but the pint-size powerhouses in Smallfarm's defense shooter don't need any protection! Unlock new heroes and upgrades as you hold the line against metal giants and more, and even rescue fellow tiny citizens to enable them to help you in your battles, but stay on your toes since enemies can attack you as well as the wall you're defending.
Celestia's Cake Golf Adventure in Space - futzi01 has done a few My Little Pony games already, but this one might be the weirdest if you aren't up on your pony fan jokes. When Princess Celestia's beloved cake winds up in pieces in orbit, she takes up a rather unusual golf club to use the gravitational pull of the planets to collect it all in this familiar but silly physics game.
No cake is worth that kind of trouble... :P
Leaving aside its terrible contemporaneous context and fairly accurate historical context (at least the game didn't ship kids as free labor),
Idle Farmer is deeper than it looks. There are a lot of mechanics that aren't explained in words, yet are perfectly intuitive. Higher levels force some strategizing because of these. So it does take a while, but it didn't peter out like CivClicker. Buy the
merchant
early and you're on your way.
The math is pretty. Makes for smooth leveling. The Flash is a little clunky but otherwise a solid find.
idle farmer would be much better if it had some more depth to it. more intricacies about which resources are better at various times, more motivation to step in to micromange things on occasion. Also, having all of the skills decay so much makes them really unsatisfying to level. a .1% increase is really not meaningful.
It tries to encourage interaction through things like "once every 5 minutes, you can click on one of the women to improve your relationship. Do this a zillion times and you get a wife". This only provides a token interaction, rather than something meaningful.
Update