This walkthrough is for the game Gravity Ninja.

1. Guru of Time — Move the level around you to reach the magical teleporter

2. Leave Cthulhu Alone — Help the God defend himself by turning humans into monsters

3. Minecraft tower Defense — Defend your path to your house

This walkthrough is for the game Treasure of Big Totem 15.

Games for today:

1. Fortress Magus — Fly an air-fortress and shoot down enemies

2. Totems Awakening — Throw rocks at the sleeping totems to wake them

This walkthrough is for the game Cut and Kill.

Games for today:

1. Exterminator — Kill Those pesky bugs

2. Murloc RPG 2 EP 1 — Cool Murloc adventure game

In a recent thread at talkarcades, several arcade webmasters Raged against in-game ads. While I think they went overboard on hating on ads, they do bring up some points.

First of all, in-game ads, unlike Microtransactions, I believe are generally a good thing. As long as there isn’t any network branding and they are not too obtrusive, they should be accepted and even embraced as they keep the costs of games down. However, that should only go as far as static ads, not video ads with sound or ads where you have to wait 30 seconds to play the game. The maximum wait time should be 6-7 seconds. Network branding needs to go. The network is already making a lot of money on the ads, there is no reason why they should have branding in the ads. Mochi used to be good until they started adding all the extra stuff. Now they are just an advertising front that hinders distribution. Most of all, they don’t listen at all to publisher demands so there really isn’t any reason for publishers to work with them at this point. The other networks like CPMstar, ad4game, bannerflux, etc are somewhat better as the ads are not so intrusive and some even have systems for sponsor splitting.

CPMstar did a bad move some time ago by trying to stealth add editorials without telling anyone. However, they were caught and they actually listened to publishers and sponsors and now sponsors(as well as devs) can turn off both editorials and video ads and allow only the square statics. Many sponsors have done so. The eCPM is still pretty good and I believe it will help the spread of games with CPMstar ads.

The other stuff discussed in the thread such as white label games and pay per play would probably never work out as the majority of arcade webmasters just would not sign up for it. You’d need 300-400 people to sign up and play nice for it to work and that just would never happen. The amount of work required to make that many site-locks would be enormous and for small sites, paying even $15 a game is just too much. You aren’t going to make a site popular by adding only 5 games a month. Site-locks and white label games are only worth it if you have a significant amount of traffic.

Like it or not, the arcade industry is stuck with the current sponsorship model. However, ad companies need to realize that publisher do have the power to make them fail or succeed by accepting or not accepting their ads. If an in-game ad company uses just static 300×250 ads in-game, many publisher will latch on to them. If they do intrusive ads, publishers will turn away quickly.

Games for today:

1. Fly Hard 2 — A vertical shooter set in space. Destroy the enemy spaceships.

2. Solar Max — Fun strategy game where you command your fleet and planets to take over the enemy.

This walkthrough is for the game Brains will Roll.

Games for today:

1. Imperium4 — Build structures and recruit armies to defeat the enemy

2. Multitask 2 — Do many things at once

So for game makers, there one point that I’ve written about before but it seems many game developers, and sometimes even myself, miss out on. We like to make our games difficult and challenging because we think that way players will keep on coming back to them in order to beat them.

However, this is not usually the case. If a game is really challenging, a lot of the players will just give up. People like instant gratification more than ever now and if something is too hard, they will more likely give up rather than try again. Take for instance a game I sponsored in the past — Lightwing. It is an excellent plane shooter game and graphically on par with the Raiden X series, but it had one major flaw — people consider it way too hard. I tried to get the developer to implement mouse controls but he wouldn’t do it because he designed it to be that way. The game ended up doing OK but I think it was denied a chance at going super-viral because many people just got frustrated at the difficulty. As one player put it “I simply do not like games that are all about dying”. Now, the game is possible to beat but it is highly challenging. I believe if mouse controls had been implemented or the game made easier, people would have rated the game a lot higher.

Another testament to the popularity of easy games are sites like arcadeprehacks, which basically take all the challenge out of a game and let players win instantly. Now, you might think that no one would want to play such a game, but in reality, those sites are madly popular. Once again, people prefer instant gratification rather than having to work for something. So next time when designing a game, do not make it too challenging or hard or have difficulty levels were people can choose to make the game easy if they want.

Games for today:

1. Roadkill Revenge — Launch cars to cause destruction