Tag: PLATFORMER

When someone tells me about a "platformer", my first thought is that it's probably a simple game that mainly revolves around running and jumping around, with a minimal plot. [Play a Zelda game! -Ed] Elephant Quest is one platformer that managed to prove me completely wrong. Yes, you do run and jump around, and you also shoot at stuff. But the game has much, much more going for it. ...

Let me start of by saying there's nothing NSFW about Balls in Space; I mean, not that playing any Flash game is very "safe for work", but Balls in Space isn't NSFW in that way, if you know what I mean (hint hint, nudge nudge, say no more!). Now that we've got that out of the way, let me tell you about the game: You're a ball. On your own, you can run and jump, and that's about it. But as with ...

So you're an alien, tooling around in free space in your little spaceship... when suddenly, disaster strikes! Your craft is hit by a meteor, and you're forced to crash-land on an unfamiliar, dark planet. That's where Insidia starts off. Now that you're on the planet, you have to navigate its complex maze of rooms and corridors in search of repair kits for your craft. Once you find all ten ...

Spikes Tend to Kill You has got to be one of the nicest games I've played in a while. It's an old-school platformer, and it is very well made. You're just a cube, and the graphics are retro. But the game is very fast and very responsive. Each level takes exactly one screen, and as you may have gathered from the name, touching spikes is not a good idea. Other than avoiding spikes, you will ...

So, you're a zombie. And you're hungry, and you're all pixelated. You're going to stay pixelated and retro-looking, at least on this game. But you don't have to stay hungry: In Zombie Bites, you run around the level, finding humans. As soon as you touch a human and press SPACE, you attack. Your energy bar fills up a bit, but not so much. You must keep running and jumping in search of more humans ...

Every once in a while, I like to write about a game that doesn't have a complicated set of controls. To be honest, most time wasters don't tend to be very complicated, perhaps except for those that require using both the mouse and the keyboard at the same time. But there's a category of time wasters that manage to hit the simplest UI possible, and still remain playable: The "one-button" games. ...

As a platformer, Lint is fairly thin on the graphics. The protagonist is a tiny ball that rolls around and the whole thing works as one huge level, which you traverse screen-by-screen. There is often more than one way to cross a given screen. Navigation is great; it's very fast and fluid. You can jump high, double jump (i.e., jump again when you're already airborne for an added boost), and scale ...

The nicest thing about The Deeplight Expedition is the speed. For me, a large part of what makes a platformer fun is how the character reacts – does it run fast, does it jump high? And in The Deeplight Expedition, both are true; the protagonist is extremely responsive and zips all over the screen as you control it. Other than the fun dynamics, it's a fairly stock platformer. You don't have ...

Look at the screenshot. Do you see how, on the top part, there's a landmine to my right? I'm not very close to it, though, so I can still pick up a bit of speed and jump over it. Now look at the bottom of the screenshot and see the reflection. I'm actually right on top of a landmine there and if I move even a couple of pixels over to the right, I'm done for. This is the basic premise of Visible ...

You've gotta love those retro games! Color Theory is an 8-bit style platformer, wherein your blocky character jumps all over the screen and hits colored "tokens." Each level is composed of platforms in a number of colors. As soon as you hit a colored token, all of the matching platforms become transparent. So, if a blue wall is blocking your way, just find a blue token, hit it, and the blue wall ...

The Illusionist's Dream is a simple platformer; you play as a magician who needs to get through each level by transforming into any number of animals that you encounter along the way. Each animal can do different things; the butterfly can obviously fly, but if it encounters a frog, the frog eats it, and you have to start over again. There's also a fox that runs fast and leaps far, but it eats any ...

Some time wasters are easy to define – "It's a platformer." Sometimes, though, I come across a game that is so original, it takes a whole paragraph to explain what is so cool about it. Hello Worlds is just such a game. Yes, it's a platformer, but it's a game that happens at the same time on several different levels. The screen is split into two or more parts, and when you move, you move in ...

Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C. You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- ...

If you like retro-style gaming, you're going to love Don't Look Back, which is a modern platformer in a retro style by Terry Cavanagh. The game manages to create fantastic ambiance with the use of only about 4 colors, and very simple music. The graphics are old-school, which is to say extremely pixelated. The control scheme is also very simple; you can move left and right and jump, and if ...

I think this one might rank as the easiest Time-Waster I've ever reviewed -- even I managed to finish it in just five minutes! Where is 2010? is a quaint little platformer game. You jump around, flip switches and... that's about it really. Eventually you find '2010' and the game finishes. This one's more about the ride -- the artistic vision -- than the actual gameplay. You only need to know ...