Gamehead

After something of a slump in January, the browser game community came back with a variety of excellent titles last month. There were a lot of fun, innovative and exciting games released in February in a variety of different genres. Here are some of the best of them.

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When video games got so complex that it became unreasonable to ask players to just dive right into the main experience, designers started to put together quick, low-stakes introductory levels to school newcomers on the controls and basic mechanics of the game. Some tutorial levels are fun, but most end up being boring, frustrating or even entirely unnecessary. Many who picked up a copy of Driver for the Sony Playstation, for example, never got to play the actual game because of the unreasonably difficult and utterly mandatory tutorial garage. It's also rare to find a first-person shooter war game that doesn't start in an abridged bootcamp scenario. Good tutorials are hard to come by, but they can end up transcending their purely functional roles to become an essential part of a game.

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Those who deny the educational potential of video games have obviously never played Oregon Trail. Several generations of bored elementary schoolers learned to love that buffalo-hunting, wagon-axle-breaking and dysentery-suffering simulator because it represented a break from the doldrums of a normal history lesson, but they also came away with an impressively visceral understanding of the westward expansion of America. Oregon Trail teaches players that life in a wagon train was a struggle against disease, resource scarcity and the great unknown. Though it's just a video game and can't be expected to portray the experience with complete accuracy, it does a lot better job than one might expect. I doubt any modern schools have computers than can even run Oregon Trail (unless some cheeky admin installed DOSbox), but maybe there's a different game that can be used for history class. I would suggest Sid Meier's one-of-a-kind Civilization series.

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Mummies were introduced with the World Adventures expansion pack.  They live in Al Simhara (the Egyptian world), inhabiting underground tombs.  

Finding A Mummy

To find a mummy, look for a sarcophagus.  They sleep there - all the time, apparently!  (Mummies must be even lazier than I am.)  You can awaken the mummy by right-clicking on the sarcophagus and instructing your Sim to look inside.  Mummies may also spontaneously awaken if you start stealing treasure from their tomb.

Fighting The Mummy

Once the mummy awakens, it will pick a fight with your Sim.  If your Sim loses this fight, they will receive the mummy's curse.  
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A new year, a new set of browser games. 2009 was a pretty stunning year for the medium and I have high hopes for 2010. Now that art games are a significant part of the industry, a lot more creativity and style have started popping up in Internet-based titles. This has made the field considerably more crowded, but hopefully this competition will encourage innovation. It's still early in the year, so we'll have to wait to see if 2010 will be as strong a year for the browser game.

All told, January was something of a light month for browser games. I suppose the work-averse holiday season had something to do with that. Still, a few truly interesting offerings hit the usual channels. The thin stack of exemplary games means that several different genres get represented this month. There's a unique puzzle game, a simple and balanced shooter and a clever strategy title on the slab. Let's dive right in.

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Early in my college education I, like most students, was required to take a basic writing composition class. At first I scoffed at the idea that anyone who managed to make it into an accredited university would need any extra training to write standard five-paragraph essays and do proper citation. After all, we'd all presumably been doing those things since middle school, and college applications themselves require some basic essay-writing. Oh, but I was wrong. When our rather disengaged grad student instructor paired us off to edit and critique each other's work, it became shockingly apparent that half of the students in the class had absolutely no clue how to string sentences together meaningfully. I had the good fortune to work with a non-traditional (re: middle-aged) student who composed an essay comprised of little more than an imaginary argument between two abstract concepts, a corporation and its customers. As in a literal argument. On that day I didn't learn how to better compose an essay, but I did learn that the core of stupidity is simple misconception. Take the following Flash games. They're awful because the people who made them just don't seem to understand what a "game" is.

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In just a few short years, those of us born in the 1980's will be officially uncool. That doesn't bother me so much, as I was never particularly cool to begin with. What does bother me is that all those millennial kids currently enjoying the pop culture spotlight don't really appreciate the difference between the 80's as a span of time and the 80's as a concept. What has basically been reduced to a series of musical compilations, cheekily reductive movies and more bad hair styles than Lionel Richie can remember wearing was actually a very important period in global history. International superpowers fell, free speech in America achieved great victories and the foreboding groundwork for worldwide economic disasters was laid. So, when I say that Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was the best thing made by the 80's, I'm not talking about the time period. Rather, I'm referring to that nebulous collection of alluring pop culture absurdities all those millennial kids will one day know as "The 80's".

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Men Can Be Gamers Too!Fellow gamers, I have called you here today to discuss why there aren't more men among us.  As we all know, most gamers are female.  This is supported by statistics from both the most successful gaming companies in the world (such as PopCap) and the occasional break-out platform specific games like The Sims franchise.
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Serious Sam

Firstly, can I just say that the Xbox site had a very enthusiastic description of the game. 'Sweet, sweet achievements'? What exactly are we selling here, hmm, hmm?

Serious Sam

The game in question is Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, a fast-paced shoot-them-up sort of game. It is a remake of the classic game and now comes with jazzy new graphics. On a side note: is it just me or does the lead look a bit like a beefed up Kevin Bacon? The game also features multiplayer capabilities (up to 4) which is the highlight of action games today, isn't it? Grab it for 1200 MS points. Read more

Ever since the advent Internet-based gaming it has been possible to create a game in which business is not only not the chief concern, but isn't a concern at all. Most non-commercial games are labors of love by designers who make games because they enjoy it, others are trying to beef up their resumes for their dream jobs in the mainstream wing of the industry. A few aim for that ever-elusive achievement of the game as art. Central to art is the concept of social commentary. One of the strongest voices in socially conscious gaming today is Molleindustria, an Italian studio of online interactive agitators.

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