Today’s game Pong Nop is one of those games where as a flash developer I have to go like “why didn’t I think of this”. It is a classic remake of the game Pong with a large new twist. Your paddle is two-sided and there are two balls, one one each side. The goal is to keep each ball on its own side. Its such a simple concept, yet one that is done so well.

There are no power-ups but the game does start slow and increases in difficulty as you go along. Amazingly, even without power-ups and other such additions, it was an amazingly good game that kept me playing for 15 to twenty minutes, which is more than I can say for most games that involve only bouncing a ball back and forth. This game scores both decent game-play points and creativity of idea points from me and is definitely one of the better and more creative remakes of a classic game that I have seen in a long time. The high scores make it fun to compete against other people. My best around 1800, but I’m not good at these kind of games.

Other games to play:

10 Gnomes 8 water Forge — find the 10 gnomes in a large water forge

Spaceship Escape — Escape the tunnel

One game that has confounded me in its popularity, especially on Mindjolt is Crazy Taxi. The game is pretty simple: there are three lanes you can switch to and you can jump over other cars. You must try to race to the end of each level before time runs out. The further the distance, the higher your score. Its a very run of the mill car game with nothing special and the game-play is not all that addictive. Yet, despite its mediocrity(it scored less than a 3.0 on Newgrounds), it has held the top spot on Mindjolt forever. This of course means a lot of views which results in a lot of brand awareness for its developer.

I’ve had games published on Mindjolt before and I haven’t even come close to reaching the top spot when my games hit 20,000 plays per day from Mindjolt. The top game on there must at least get 40,000 plays per day. If the game had Mochi-Ads, this would result in several hundred dollars of revenue per month. Usually new games on Mindjolt only stay popular for a few days before dropping back down into the unknown.

This game has not been nearly as popular on any other portal as Mindjolt and in most places has not received nearly as many views. So what makes it so popular on Mindjolt?

To answer this or even attempt to answer it, we have to look at what separates Mindjolt from other sites. Mindjolt depends on Facebook for most of its traffic and a major draw is the high-score API that many of their games has integrated. Since most of the traffic comes from Facebook rather than their actual website, most of the gamers are not likely to be hard-core gamers and are therefore just looking for a easy, no-too-intense, casual game to play. Being able to keep track of score and compete with their friends is a huge bonus. Thats where this game cashes in. It has no hard-to-master mechanics so the game is playable off the bat for anyone. The game also doesn’t take any time to get into as once you start the game, the game-play is pretty much the same no matter how long you play it. And most of all, it only takes a few minutes to finish a game. There is no maximum high-score I’m aware of as you can always just keep on going. Its a complete test of how fast you are at pushing the arrow keys and the space bar so someone can always beat you. Since it a fast game to play and high scores are easy to achieve, it would naturally draw a lot of people on Mindjolt. It also helps that it is one of the oldest games on Mindjolt so that first-game type of effect gives it an advantage too. Overall Mindjolt is a site where not-so-great games can become insanely popular. The key here is not fancy graphics or complex game-play but easy to play games that have high scores and that would draw people back again to beat other people’s high scores. Simple shooting and matching games tend to do well at the site. Mindjolt presents a great oppurtunity for developers and games that many of us can develop in a few hours can make us quite a lot of money by Mochi-Ads views here. I, myself, am making a lot of highscore, point-and-click type of games to see how they do on Mindjolt. Maybe one of them will hit big, like crazy taxi.

A recent series of games that have become very popular are the games of the 10 gnomes series(10 Gnomes 7 features at left). This game series is a series of find the objects hidden on the map. In this case, find the 10 small gnomes hidden in a given environment. There are 8 games in this series and I have no doubt that more will be made due to their success.

Even though these games are well-made and fairly fun to play, I still do not get the series’ runaway success. There isn’t too much differentiating them from most ’search the map and find objects” type games, yet they have done so much better than average. It could be because it was made into a 8-game series with each game being in a different environment. Since each game was pretty good, the popularity just spread from there. The style of the environment may have also contributed to the success of the series as a whole as most of the environments have a throwback feel of an old black and white photograph. I can’t explain why, but this kind of environment appeals to me a lot more than most.

There are some other things about the series too that make it a little better than most point and clicks. There are more click-able areas on the map where you can enlarge to find gnomes. There are also some hidden areas which you can find and some that you must find to find gnomes. I’ve heard from some people that they just like to explore the environment. I’ve also heard from some that the environments have more than 10 gnomes and the real challenge is to find them all. However, I still think that the major draw is that it is an ongoing series and if a player comes in at the 5th game, he’ll want to try the first four as well. Every game being suitable for casual play also boosts this game’s popularity a lot.

If there’s anything a flash developer can learn from 10 Gnomes is that when you’ve got a decent game, don’t change a winning formula, just change the background and tweak the game-play a little and you can keep producing many winning games based entirely around the first game.

In case your looking for a walk-through the episode 7, one can be found Here

The focus of today’s main article is on the flash Real-Time Strategy game Star Dominion. This is the first decent real-time strategy game that wasn’t mostly tower defense in flash I’ve ever played. There have been some attempts at real-time strategy in flash before but most of what I’ve seen ended being either slight deviations from tower defense or a jumbled mess.

This is where Star Dominion stands out: it is actually executed very well. The game itself plays like Starcraft with many of the Starcraft graphics and sounds(it also takes a few graphics from Red Alert II). If your used to Starcraft, know that the old nuke silo is now a power plant(which you’ll need to build structures and units) and the Terran command center is now a refinery. The Red Alert research tower is now the central command tower(at least for the co-empire).

Technically this game is very sound with no major bugs and very fluid game-play mechanics. The resource gathering worked smoothly, the construction of buildings was flawless, and the building and battles between structures and units was smooth. The mechanics for selecting units, targeting, and firing also all worked great(which is rare for flash RTS’s).

However, there are a few things I do have to complain about. The first is the scrolling. To scroll, move your mouse to the edge of the screen and leave it there to scroll to one side. Since it is in flash, the terrain can’t follow your mouse since you’d just scroll the mouse off the screen. This is kind of annoying but it can’t be helped. However, the arrows also don’t work for scrolling, which is a disappointment as that would help greatly in commanding large battles where you have to move several units quickly while scrolling. Also, flash needs to come up with some way to make the right mouse button usable. This is not the fault of the game, but a severe flaw in flash itself. Not being able to use the right mouse button for a flash game is plain annoying as there is no way to de-select units easily without selecting something else. The third thing is that the game doesn’t give any warning that pushing the ‘menu’ button exits out of your current game without warning, thus making you lose any progress on the campaign you were just on. But besides the scrolling and the right mouse button and the quick jump to menu without any warnings, everything else is very crisp.

The game is played out between the co-empire and the Arnorians(think of them of the Empire and the rebellion, complete with a princess called ‘Arina’.) It is suggested you play the co-empire campaign first as the story flows from there. At the start of the campaign, the co-empire has discovered some resources that it needs to seize and thus needs to destroy the Arnorians in order to do so. This campaign starts with the seizure of some territories and ends with the siege of the capital city of the Arnorians. The Arnorian campaign picks up from here as the princess needs to escape from the capital city that is now being held by the co-empire. The Arnorian campaign ends with a revolution of the co-empire.

Strategy-wise this game is a lot like most RTS games. You collect your resources and then slowly expand outward and kill enemy installations, take over more resources and spread your way across the map. Be aware that enemies will harass you and they do come in large groups as you progress throughout each level. You need to establish a good perimeter defense and have one or two build-bots to repair on the fly at all times. Be sure to build the tech center before you go invade anything as your main offensive weapons will be capital ships which you must research. I found the easiest way to beat most levels was just to secure the perimeter and research the technology to build capital ships. Then build some capital ships to take out the first enemy installation. After you take over the resources there, you can start building capital cruisers. Build a fleet of these ships and hardly anything can stand in your way. Always attack with overwhelming numbers and leave nothing to chance. The last missions are always hard but eventually with decent commanding and superior firepower, you can always pull off a victory.

In conclusion, if you are a strategy fan, you’ll want to check this game out. Its missions and campaigns will be good enough to keep you occupied throughout an afternoon.

Other games worth playing:

Rapid wars

Mercenaries 2(click on picture to play) is an action/sidescroller made by Armor games and published by EA as a promotion for their XBox game Mercenaries 2: World in flames. While its pretty good for a side-scroller, it has some major flaws. For one, this game looks just like another metal slug clone with some new sprites thrown in. The background does look better drawn than metal slug games but the game-play is the same.

Some people over at Newgrounds have unfairly compared it to the real Mercenaries 2 game and by that have deemed it unworthy. While that is not fair as this game is a flash game and the real Mercenaries 2 is a huge title from Electonic arts, I would have expected better than this from Armorgames and EA. They could have at least varied the game-play at little more and added more interaction with the environment. Most flash gamers(myself included) thought the game-play was repetitive and monotonous after a while and lost interest.

The other huge complaint I have about this game is the large amount of CPU resources you need to run the game. I have never had trouble with a flash game before(besides endgame TD’s where there are a million objects on the screen) but this game lagged on all but the lowest setting. The first time I tried to play it on my dual-core computer with 2GB ram, it took forever to just get past the menu and set the settings down to low. Even at low, it chugged along at times. Since flash gamers are generally casual gamers, I’d say they did a poor job in balancing show-off graphical display(which wasn’t that great) and game-play. On anything but a high-end computer, I would recommend you turn the settings down to low to get a playable frame-rate. The game is also pretty short which is to be expected since its basically a trailer for an EA title but they could have thrown a little more into it than they did.

In the final analysis, this game would have passed if it was an amateur metal-slug game but since it was developed and published by a combination of EA and Armorgames, it was a bit of a disappointment. The length of the game, lack of creativity, and the fact that this game only had the most basic side-scrolling elements are big letdowns of what could have been a great flash game. If you’ve never played a flash side-scroller, take some time to play this game. If you’ve played metal-slug series, skip it, unless you really want to play more of the same.

Since every other games blog has written about this game(click on picture at left to play), I figured I had to as well. This game is a maze-like escape game which reminds me a lot of the Shift game from Armor games and by no coincidence either. It is built quite like the shift series where you are stuck in a maze and have to find the exit. Like shift, you also have a special physics based power - in this case its the ability to rotate the level 90 degrees with the Z and X buttons. However, if your not careful, this may cause unwanted objects to fall on you.

When you rotate, the heavy object besides you is now on top of you and will crush you, the spikes that were to your left are now under you and you will meet an untimely death falling on to them. So while rotating the room is a great and needed ability to win, you need to be careful as to how to use it. I was a bit upset initially at this game because it didn’t have an easy instruction page link that told me how to rotate the room. I had to push a large number of buttons before I found the ones to control the game-play mechanism. The keys to move were easy enough to find as the arrow keys are usually the first ones that people try. However, lacking an instruction page that tells you how to rotate the room may make a few impatient people come to the conclusion that this game is impossible to beat as you cannot advance past the first level without rotating the room somehow.

Another thing is that unlike shift where each level had a defined door that you had to get to in order to beat the level, this one is kind of like one big level. In the second room, I didn’t see a way out and it took me a while to figure out that I had to jump into one of the boxes to go to the next real level. This lack of a constant goal on each level takes away from the game a bit, at least to me.

But, for these two nagging complaints, this was a great game. It wasn’t as good as Shift, but its still much better than most of the portal clones made. The mechanics of the game work very nicely and the Physics of the spin are fluid as objects act as they would in real life. There’s also enough run and jump mechanics in the game to make it a game of not completely rotating. The game also keeps track of your progress and how many rotations and moves it took you to get out of a certain room. This way you can compete with friends as to who found the easiest way out of a certain room with the least number of rotations.

Altogether the puzzle aspect and the game-play are excellent, the lack of instructions and a door for the end of each level is a little disappointing but should not keep you away from the game because you’ll be missing out a lot if you don’t play. Its good enough to keep you busy for a few hours.

Text hints and Never end walkthrough:

Hints and Walkthrough

I am looking for a video walk-through on youtube for this game, if you know of one, please email me at webmaster[at]flashninjaclan.com with the title “Neverend Walk-through” please.

Other games worth a look:

Escape the freaky deaky room

Billy Genocide

Recently a lot of arcade webmasters(include myself) have had complaints about Yougame.com, a site that buys “non-exclusive licenses” to the source code of games, then re-compiles the game with their own site logos and mochi-ads and submits this “new game” to newgrounds and many other places as well as a large e-mail distribution list. There’s only one problem — these aren’t new games at all, they are the SAME EXACT GAME that someone else has already published just with Yougame’s links. The thing that makes many developers and sponsors angry is that Yougame.com originally said they mainly needed the source code so they could implement their Facebook API, but then later decided that they would submit everywhere because it looked like a good way to promote the site. Unfortunately most developers don’t read the long contract that gives them the ability to basically do whatever they want with the source code. This, in the eyes of many people in the flash games industry, is an unethical business move — advertising one thing and then doing another. The reaction has been severe from some sites(my own site, funny-games, and some others), enough that the owners have decided to never publisher any Yougame branded games. Much of the industry is still unaware of what Yougame does but thanks to a few discussions at Mochiad forums, more and more of us are catching on. Yougame.com is not the only one that does this. Another site that does this is freeonlinegames.com, which has also earned the scorn of many webmasters(also to their credit freeonlinegames.com does produce many of its own games).

There have been more than a few cases where the developer of a game that already had a primary sponsor or an exclusive sponsor sold the source to Yougame.com thinking that it would only be used on Facebook, but later found out that Yougame had tried to spread their version of the game to as many sites as possible. I have had this problem with my exclusively sponsored game Elite Forces Defense, which Yougame bastardized and made into Elite Corps Defense . Notice that the two games are the exact same thing, except the Yougame version ripped out my logo and replaced it with his. Another example is Global Defense which Yougames took at made into Global Defense 2, which is the same thing except with Yougame’s logo and a ‘2′ attached to the end of the title. Since many of these games where exclusively sponsored, you can see why some developers and sponsors would be angry at Yougame for tricking developers into selling the source code under the pretense that they needed it for their Facebook application.

If you are a developer, know that you absolutely cannot sell your source code to Yougame.com or any other site if you already have a primary sponsor or exclusive sponsor for the game. Most of the time the agreement is that you can only sell site-locked licenses to other sites. However, if someone has the source code, they can just remove the lock.

If you are a sponsor, I highly encourage you to make a condition when sponsoring that the source code of the game cannot be sold either exclusively or non-exclusively to any other site. I usually do this now after the fiasco with Elite Forces defense and mention Yougame specifically as someone that they cannot sell to.

A final note to all webmasters, if Yougame submits a game that you find interesting, just search for the game on Newgrounds or Google and you will find the original game. I encourage you to add that version to your library to give due credit to the rightful sponsors and developers.

Hexiom connect is a cool puzzle game that is easy to pick up and play and has levels challenging enough for any hardcore puzzle gamer. This fact makes is a great game for a lunch break or a three hour gaming session(unless your one of those guys that can solve any puzzle in 3 minutes). The premises of the game is simple. There are a number of hexes on the board with connectors on some of their sides. There are always some hexes that are not occupied and that you can move other hexes on to. Your job is to connect all the same colored ends of all the hexes and don’t leave any hanging. Note that you cannot place a hex in an empty slot if the adjoining end color from another hex is different.

The game has a good difficulty curb also. The first few puzzles were pretty easy, I got through 4 or 5 of them, then I decided to tackle the last level, 40. I was blown away by the difficulty of level forty and after spending some time on it decided to give up because I had some work to do. I will come back to it and probably follow the video walk-through(below) to finish up the game.

Note how I said I only got through the first 4 or 5 levels and then was able to play level 40. Thats one of the best things about this game. You don’t have to solve the previous puzzle to move on to the next one. You can play any puzzle you want to test out the range of difficulties in the game. If you get bored with the easy puzzles, you don’t need to wade through 10 of them, you can jump right into the harder ones. I would suggest that you do play them in order as each puzzle presents its own challenges and if you jump ten or twenty levels, you might just think the game got too difficult all of a sudden.

Hexiom is one of the best puzzle games I’ve played in the past month or two and is worth a play whether you are looking for a game for that 10 minute break or looking for a flash game to take you through a long gaming session. Certainly give it a try.

Now the Video walk-through:

Other good plays:

Descent II — Guide a drop through 20 levels to the goal by rotating the levels.

Infection — Retro style arcade shooter in a circle.

The recent “new category” of flash games is multitasking games where you have to play two separate games by yourself to test how good you are at splitting your brain between two tasks. Aqua bots is the latest in this line of games. I’m not writing about this game because its super-awesome because frankly, while its not bad, it isn’t a great game. It is a well-polished game in terms of graphics, interface, and controls, but lacks some in game-play and fun.

In this game you control two submarines on the top and bottom of the screen. and you must keep both from being destroyed. Controls are the usual arrows for one half and A,S,D,F for the other half. Space fires for both submarines. You must be vary of the terrain as the border between the two halves does change and enemies are constantly appearing. You must be alert all the time and pay attention to both halves of the screen. They are approximately equal in difficulty.

What this game has in polish, however, it lacks in game-play. The game was fun for the first minute or so but soon the game-play got old and controlling two submarines that do the exact same thing just isn’t that fun. The game is also pretty slow-paced so its not as action-packed as I would like it to be. What this game could have done to make it better is to add more elements to the game, make the action faster(but not impossibly fast), and add a little more variety and style to the levels. In the final analysis of this game, I’d give it a 3 out of five stars and commend it on its well done graphics and interface but cannot give a thumbs up on game-play and replay value.

If you ever consider making a multi-tasking game yourself, you should always put the fun factor first over graphics and interface as I enjoyed a couple of multi-tasking games involving only dots and lines more than this game, even though graphically, this was far superior.

Tower Defense games are one of the most popular types of online flash games today. Headlining this genre are tower defense games with titles like Desktop Tower Defense taking the spotlight. However, most of this genre is filled with bad to mediocre games that have limited play value. That is not so with Ultimate Defense 2, which with a polished interface, well-done graphics, and several different play mechanisms easily stands out from the rest of the field. Graphically, this game alooks alot like Protector and indeed it has a lot of the same game-play mechanisms like unit level upgrades based on XP and spells.

This game may take some getting used to but its well worth the learning curve. One thing that new players should be aware of is unlike traditional tower defense games were the towers fire at anything within a certain AOE of them, towers in this game only fire in one direction so be sure to make your defenders face in the direction where they will be able to fire the most shots. You can rotate your defenders once and plan on doing this or you will not be able to beat the level. Most of the units can only shoot two squares when they are purchased so be vary that you may need two defenders to reach across an entire lane which is usually 3 squares wide. Since you are allowed to rotate your defenders once on each level, be sure to put strong defenders at the turn positions and make them face the weaker side first so when the enemies get past the weak side, you can rotate them to the strong side where they will be permanently. This takes a bit of skill and micromanaging to master, especially if you are managing several rotations at once. For an easier walkthrough look to the end of this article for a more in-depth walkthrough.

Also, unlike traditional Tower Defense games, you do not purchase upgrades for your defenders, rather they gain XP according to the number of enemies you kill. You can use this to your advantage as it is possible to place towers so that one tower gets most of the kills thus giving you once super-strong tower, which is very helpful in single-handedly killing enemies. You can also unlock new defenders by completing levels and gain extra goodies by digging for treasure.

Spells and items are also an important part of this game. Watch your mana because you’ll need to have some in critical moments to prevent creeps from getting away. Early on the poison spell is great to pick creeps off but be sure to cast it early on in the level as it is a damage by time spell and takes a while to kill an enemy. If your looking for an easy direct-kill spell, go for lightening instead. The lightening spell is unlocked shortly after the game begins.

This game is a breathe of fresh air in the genre of tower defense. It is the first TD where micro-management is an important part of the games and is required for success. This alone makes the game a little more involved than traditional TD’s as you can’t just sit there and watch after building your defenders. You always have to be active rotating your defenders and using your spells to slow the enemy down.

The one complaint I do have about this game is that it is a bit too hard in the beginning and the learning curve is steep as it doesn’t quite play like a traditional Tower Defense game. But besides this small complaint, Ultimate Defense 2 is a solid all-around game.

Okay, still can’t beat it? I’ll take you through the game. Its actually quite easy to beat. You are basically going to use 4 defender types to beat the game. Archers, Mages, Ninjas, and Dragons. You never have to build knights and warriors(and they suck with only 1 in attack range). In the first two levels, build mainly archers and build lots of them. Building as many archers as you can while throwing one or two mages in there will do the trick. Be sure to use the pivot spots so you can use rotation. Digging for treasure is key, dig up all the squares that are not bordering the path as you won’t need to use them. You will get treasures for spinning the slots and more important in the early going, you will get mana potions to cast spells. A few creeps may get past your archers but with the spells of poision and lightening you should be fine(actually I never had to use more than these two spells the entire game). Starting at level 3, you will need ninjas. Ninjas have a range of 3 so one can cover the entire lane, place them at the pivot point(s) so you can rotate them. Usually one Ninja accompanied by a few archers in the right positions and the use of a few spells will be able to get you through level 3. On level 4, you will probably need two ninjas, some mages, and archers. Try to dig as much as you can for Mana potions as this will allow you to save money you will need to get through the levels until you can get dragons. Do not build warriors/knights as you don’t need them, Ninjas are better. I found that usually 3 strategic placement of ninjas accompanied by 2-3 mages and several archers were all I needed to get me through to the point where I unlocked the dragon. Try to save as much money as possible. You should be having a little bit more money at the end of each level. Don’t build extra defenders if you don’t need them. By the time you unlock dragons, you should have about 2500 or so to start the level with. Dragons take up four squares so after you get them, scout out the map for places that you can place them on. For the first level or two after you get dragons, build 1 dragon immediately, 1 ninja, and 1 mage(you should have enough start money to do this by this point in the game). That should kill everything perhaps until the last wave(but with spells it should be able to kill the last wave as well). After a level or two, you will have more than enough start money to buy 2 dragons. Basically at this point you’ve won the game as 2 dragons and one ninja is enough to handle all enemy creeps until the end. Never stop digging! I dugg every square I didn’t need to place on and ended up with 10+ mana potions at the end.

So lets recap — Until you can get dragons, build mainly Ninjas and archers and save as much money as possible while digging for treasure and mana potions.

After dragons, build only dragons and Ninjas and keep digging. Save as much as you can. If you can start every level with more than $3800(which is easily doable), the game is pretty much beat.

Overall, this is one of the easier TD games I’ve played. Took me about an hour to figure out how to beat it.

Other games worth a look:

Jessica Alba Puzzle — Game is not great but she’s still hot

Color Ball 3 — Catch same colored balls as yourself.