Usually I feature games in this column that are just plain fun. While there were plenty of entertaining titles in August, I'd like to focus on something a little different this time around. Namely, innovation. Browser games have to strike a balance between themes and premises that are familiar enough to hook players quickly and concepts that are new or somehow different enough to stand out from the crowd. Hundreds of new games get uploaded every month and though many of them aren't very good, the sheer volume makes up for the lack of stiff competition. In an attempt to grab attention, new ideas get tossed around a lot. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but most of the time they end up somewhere in the middle. Let's see what August had to offer in the new department.
Care of Foofa Studios, Unfairy Tales employs some of the most familiar tropes in gaming in the hope that the streamlined control scheme will distract from any boredom. Unfortunately, the experience just doesn't pan out. The game is a standard JRPG in the vein of Final Fantasy complete with a generic anime hero and a series of nonsensical companions, random encounters and dialog bubbles. Unfairy Tales requires only a mouse, but that conceit (while quasi-innovative) wears thin when hand cramps and impatience kick in. It's physically unpleasant to constantly hold down the left mouse button just to make a character walk and the battle system is slow and clunky. "A" for effort, but it's just not good enough elsewhere.
Browser game enthusiasts have come to accept that certain genres are just standard these days despite cliche. The 2-D army generator is one of those genres. Dress them up any way you want, it's still "my dudes vs. your dudes" in a frantic storm of micro-management. That's why Limex Games in partnership with Dictionary.com gets the second slot today. Semantic Wars is far from innovative in the army generator sense, but the modified version of Hangman that serves as the game's money system is subtly ingenious. Based on clues and the process of elimination, players have to type words to get money for more soldiers. Make too many mistakes and the castle starts to fall apart. Semantic Wars is fun and engaging, even if the novelty wears off quickly.
Developer Raitendo makes games that fall squarely in the "cute" category, as in, "That was cute. Let's move on." I mean this as a compliment, mostly. Replay value isn't the only measure of a game's success. In the case of You Only Live Once there is no replay anyway unless you want to constantly clear your cookies. Following a paper-thin plot that riffs on the rote "save the princess" premise, you guide a hapless hero through a platforming dungeon until he dies, for good. All that follows after the hero groans, "I don't feel so good" is a comically stoic run-down of the facts of death. The coroner shows up, the police arrest suspects and the news reports on it. Then, no matter how many times you reload, the grave is the same. Fun? Sure, for a laugh. You Only Live Once is definitely in the "art game" field.
I also can't talk about browser games in August without tipping my hat to Long Animals' extremely fun and not at all innovative racing games CycloManiacs. It's well-designed, challenging and funny.
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