Effing Hail is a interesting game where you have to use the wind to keep hailstones in the air to grow them before launching them to destroy buildings. The game is well-made but suffers from one major flow — it is more than 600 in height, which means even on my 1200*800 resolution, its near impossible to get the entire game on the screen. This should be a note to all flash game developers — don’t make games more than 600 in height. This game is also very hard to master — which may be a good or bad thing.
You hold the left mouse down in order to blow wind and keep hail afloat so it can grow. The wind currents come out in vectors but its very hard to control. The best bet was to just go to an area with lots of hail and hope that some stay float and get launched up. Its much easier to control them when they come down. Controlling large hailstones is easier than controlling the small ones. The trick is to try to concentrate on the few large hailstones instead of many small ones for maximum damage. If you can get a significantly large stone, you can crush large towers in one shot. Slowly orchestrate the movement of the really large stones so you can ram them into the large towers. Generally if you want a stone to go to the right, move your mouse to the left of the hailstone and if you want to move it to the left, move your mouse to the right of it before turning on the wind.Try to get the hailstone to fall straight high above a building for maximum damage. This game is alot of fun but it takes a while to really start killing the buildings.
Super Mario Defense is a fun side-scrolling tower defense game where you have to choose from a variety of anti-mario towers to kill the Marios, Luigis, and Yoshis constantly invading your castle. You are given a choice of towers to choose from on each level and the game does in fact get increasingly harder at a very noticable rate. It takes a lot of strategy and planning to get through. Timing upgrades just right is extremely important in this game as there are three upgrades of range, damage, and fire rate for each tower to maximize the damge.
For the first three levels, you mainly have to depend on the springboard. But you just can’t build one and keep upgrading it. Sometimes its not worth upgrading the springboard past a certain level(like past damage = 15). At that time, just build a new springboard as that is more effective. If you do this on the first 3 levels, you should be able to beat them without much problem.
For level 4, I used a turtle shell launcher combined with a star dude to beat it. Upgrades are very important for this one. I just upgraded the turtle shell’s damage and range(1 level). Keeping the damage of the turtle shell high is very important. If it looks like your falling behind. Quickly build another turtle shell tower behind your current one and you should be fine.
For level 5, I used 2 star towers and a bullet bill. The hammer thrower is nice but very inaccurate in his throws, so I couldn’t rely on him very much. I upgraded the star tower’s range and the bullet bill’s damage. I tried to keep the bullet bill’s damage high enough so I could 1-shot invaders but this level was pretty tough.
The rest of the levels involve combining the different types of towers and require a lot of strategy to get past.
Penguinz is a really fun shooting game where you play the part of a penguin and have to shoot down eskimos, penguins, and other enemies on the way to fighting 15 different kinds of enemies and four bosses to claim penguin supremacy. Although this game was amazingly simple, it was also addicting and fun as well. You start off with just a normal pistol but quickly earn enough money to buy other weapons like shotguns, AK47′s, and other awesome weapons. Be sure to get the Grenade launcher upgrade for your AK47 as you will need some AOE attacks.
I would mainly just hold the mouse hold for auto-fire almost all the time as running out of ammo is generally not a concern because of all the ammo and power-ups the enemies drop. In the shop, spend as little money on ammo as possible(just make sure you have some). When you get to the bosses, the tactic of constantly jumping is usually a good plan. Just make sure you are a safe distance away from the boss and you should be fine. This game is pretty fun and funny in its own right and is worth a play.
So while in Beijing this summer for the Olympics, I was not able to access one of my favorite sites(newgrounds) and it annoyed me. While stuff like Google,Youtube and even CNN was unblocked, Newgrounds was for some reason, blocked.
Well, that has now changed. China has finally unblocked Newgrounds and it has taken on a temporary(at least I think its temporary) communist overtone with a red theme and many China-themed mockery games. Have fun while its on, it may be the last time freedom of speech like this will be seen on Newgrounds!
admin 
7, April
