An interesting little game I came across the other day is Ma Ku The rain cloud. In this game you play the part of a cloud whose purpose is to water all your plants and make them grow before the timer runs out. You must also protect your plants from the nasty insects that try to nibble and eat your plants. The flying insects are especially troublesome because they can eat full-grown plants while the ground insects can only eat plant buds. In order to protect your plants, you use lightening to kill the bugs crawling around your plants.

If you fail to grow all your plants when the timer runs out, you lose. Because the flying insects can eat full-grown plants, I suggest you target them first and then water as many plants as you can to make them grow so the ground bugs can’t get to them. Its a fairly simple game that really depends some on quickness and reflexes. The theme of the game is pretty cute but the music, while fitting, got really annoying after a while(I guess I just don’t like that kind of music). Overall its an entertaining game made for the younger audience.

Taking Halloween off today to get some partying and fun in, see you guys tomorrow!

I wish I were the moon is a love-story type short game with five possible endings. The game involves a boy, a girl, the moon, and a seagull. There is no “right” or “wrong” ending to this game, but there are five endings. You can move stuff around by clicking and then dragging it to another location. It takes a while to understand how to play this game and what the point is but its a very good five-minute game. To get the endings, hit the “Click me, I am a walkthrough” link below.

Click me, I am a walkthrough

Other games worth a look:

The Heist — Pull bank jobs, upgrade your van and equipment and pull more jobs.

Command 2 — Play the part of a commando in the Asian theatre.

Its been a few days since I’ve released Shoot and Catch and although I haven’t promoted it much, it is solidly getting about 10,000 non-skipped plays per day on Mochi-Ads. The game is getting more popular than I would have thought and may end up being my most popular game, despite not having the highest ratings. I can attribute this to the addicting game-play and the awesome graphics I had RushVision do for me.

The game itself is a decent multi-tasking game where you must shoot falling missiles on one side of the screen while catching fruits on the other side of the screen. Some people have complained its too hard and others have found that to beat the top scores, you need to have a friend play alongside you so each person controls one side. While this was not my original intention, many people have found the game enjoyable this way. However, if you are playing single by yourself, I do have a few tips for you. Being the maker of this game, I am well aware of how the dynamics and the power-ups work. One large imbalance between the sides is that the catching fruits side has a life power-up that gains you three lives while the shooting side does not have a life power-up, meaning that you can’t gain life back when lost. For this reason, I suggest concentrating on the shooting side more as you can’t regain lost life. Even though you start out with 50 lives on the shooting side as opposed to 20 on the catching side, its easier to lose from the shooting side. On the shooting side, you need to make sure to hit both the big shoot powerup and the multi-shot powerup when they come down each time. It will hurt if you don’t have big shots but you will absolutely lose the game if you run out of multi-shots.

On the catching fruits side, the main thing is to keep moving the bucket and keep an eye out for powerups. Pay attention to the big basket powerup and the life powerup especially. There is a flying powerup but if you are playing the game by yourself, you probably won’t have time to control the up and down motion of the basket. If you focus most your concentration on the shooting part of the game, you will last longer than if you divided equal concentration onto both parts. You should be able to get about 25,000 points this way.

Happy shooting and catch.

Other games to play:

Bucket Ball — Launch the correctly colored ball into the correctly colored Bucket

Maverick — propel yourself with your dual-pistols across the levels.

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.

Hi all, this is the first post of the flash games blog. This blog will be showcasing the latest and greatest games from all over the web. Since this blog is affiliated with Flashninjaclan.com and java-gaming.com, it will mainly use links from those two sites and will also have author links to their respective sites. This blog will mainly be covering hit games but will also delve into game design and development some and even provide some source code every once in a while. I’ll also be posting developments on my latest games and whats going on in my life also. So be sure to come by and check it out, we should be updating most every day.