Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The First 5 Games On Kongregate

Hey look! It's almost 2009! Kongregate's come a long, long way since it was first implemented. Better chat, better comments, better profiles, better.. functionality..

And better games. Kongregate is all about games. Without good games, it would be nothing. Since it is something, the games must be good. And they are. It wasn't like that when the site first started. So sit down, make yourself a sandwich, get some water, and enjoy this presentation of the first 5 games on Kongregate.



Where am I going?
I really can't see..
But I think I'll get there
Like a vision-less guppy..

This game is a Helicopter rip-off. It's a really bad helicopter rip-off. In Helicopter, you have to hold your mouse to move up and avoid obstacles and crashing into the ground/ceiling. This game is like that. This would be pretty easy and cool, but the controls don't make any sense in this one. It says you can also move your guppy by moving your mouse left to right, but it sometimes doesn't work. In fact, none of the controls work. You float up until you left-click and then you crash down, sometimes the mouse moves the guppy, sometimes not. This game might have good graphics, but it crashes at actually playing the game.

4. Balloon Go Pop!

Different color balloons show up. A color will show up on the screen and you have to shoot the matching color balloon. The 9th game to get uploaded on Kongregate was Fancy Pants Adventures. Why couldn't it have been in the first 5 so I wouldn't have to play this garbage? This game sucks. Boring graphics, boring gameplay, boring everything.. Next!

3. Food Chain

Surprisingly, this doesn't suck. It's a dog-cat-mouse game where you start off small and eat anything smaller to grow, to either other things. Sound familiar? That's right, it's Spore! It could also be Microbe Kombat, but it's missing a lot of features. Such as abilities and annoying viruses. It's still good. The first game of it's kind on Kongregate, so I have to give it major points with that. I love these types of games, but this is level-based. I wish it had an infinite mode. That would be pretty nice. It gets boring fast, which is it's main problem.



Mini-minions are invading! Are you a bad enough dude to protect the king? What you have to do in this game is hold rocks for resources, then build tower to protect your king. It should be fun, but the game ruins it by including slower and slower mining times as you mine, no replay value, and very repetitve gameplay. The game is confusing, and it took me several tries to figure out how the game works (mostly the archers). There's not even a tutorial mode. Oh, and you can bring the game to a deadlock by building towers around the edge of the universe, but there's no point. The knights will just get angry and spam your chat.

"LEAVE MY WALLS ALONE!"

The game is way too hard when you have no archers, and once you do, it's way too easy. The camera is HORRIBLE, since you have to click on a turning button instead of guiding with arrow keys. Too many things that can be improved in this one. This is richpixel's second game. Since this is also the second game on Kongregate, richpixel's first game was the first game on Kongregate. Speaking of which..



On October 10, 2006, this game was launched. Hooray! The first game on Kongregate! It's a Q-Bert rip-off, though. It's still fun. Uses about the same graphics as Micro Seige but not that broken. You have 100 steps of energy. Can you reach the top of the summit? I sure hope so, because you have to climb your way through walls to steep (as shown above) dodge a boulder, and try to get the energy bar so you can continue your journey! This uses the annoying style of walking where instead of walking straight up, you go north-east when you walk up, south-east when you walk right, and so forth. You'll learn to live with it though. This game is pretty fun and challenging at the same time. I can't decide which is better, Crazy Climber or Food Chain. Ah well, it's always nice to see a piece of history. Oh no.. here comes the nostalgia..

The time has come, the walrus said
To talk of many things..
Of shoes and ships and ceiling wax,
Of cabbages and kings..
Any why the sea is boiling hot,
And whether pigs have wings..


Tuesday, December 30, 2008

My Silent Saboteur

People often ask a question: Is Kongregate better then ArmorGames? It's a tough choice. Kongregate users often point out that it's obvious that Kongregate is better because it has cards, a card game, badges, a chat, and more. Kongregate is cleary better then ArmorGames for playing games. There lies the problem. Kongregate would be better then ArmorGames IF it had any games. Good games, at least.

The highest game on Kongregate is currently Sonny. Look at who uploaded it. It wasn't Kongregate, it was ArmorGames. Look at ArmorGames' account and all the wonderful games the uploaded. Kongregate uploaded the Shoot! (booooriiiiing) and Kongai (snore). ArmorGames sponsors tons of good games. Kongregate has sponsored, maybe about 2 or 3 good games, and then tons of bad games like Project Green and Saboteur.

The creator of Saboteur is NinjaCow, the guy who is a ninja and a cow combined together. He's also insane about killing DrNeroCF, the creator of Fancy Pants Adventures. NinjaCow does everything DrNeroCF does worse. He also tries to do his own games* sometimes, but they suck too. Like this game. In Saboteur, you walk around trying to crack the guard's necks (or not) and avoid cameras until you get to your target. After that, you have to get back out. It would be boring like this, so NinjaCow decided to add "features" to the game. The problem is, the features are annoying.

This game isn't 3D or anything, so it's set in bird's eye view mode. NinjaCow decided to add a circle that restricts your view to make it seem like a spy game. The problem is, it's annoying, it's pointless, and it's just stupid. Thanks for showing us your abilities to block the game screen, NinjaCow, but I really don't care. He also made our character suck. That meter on the bottom-right of the screen is the sound we're making. That's right, our characters make sound when they walk. This might have been cool, but NinjaCow didn't implement a sneak button, so we HAVE to walk fast and make sound. The character can drag a dead guard body so it won't be noticed by a guard. The problem is, he has butterfingers, and can't hold on to a dead body of a guard he just killed without it falling.

Whoever owns the area hired guards that are SuperMen, but they suck. It SAID in the job description that they can see through walls (which they can, thanks to NinjaCow's lazy programming) but it failed to mention they're blind. The entire point of dragging a dead guard body away is to make sure a guard doesn't see it. The problem is, they WON'T NOTICE THE BODY. That's right. The screenshot does not lie.

Is that a dead body? Nah.. I'm probably imagining it.

The guards are also blind in a different way. They have something I like to call "NST:18I" which means Near Sightedness to 18 Inches. In other words, their vision is .0000142045455 of normal human vision, which is 1,267,200 inches (20 miles). Having such a terrible vision must make life hard for them.

Where'd you go, Snake? I can't see you. Snake? SNAAAAAAAAKE!

The missions don't make up for the horrible physics. They're all dumb stuff like "Assasinate Mr.Black" or "Steal stuff but don't kill anybody". The game is boring, frustrating, and annoying. I didn't have the patience to get past level 3. Forget this game. NinjaCow must hate DrNeroCF because his games are infinitely better then his games.

Fail Factor 4: It's not fun, the game is broken, and it's annoying.

Phobia: Probably Scotomaphobia - Fear of blindness

*That have been done better a million times before

Monday, December 29, 2008

Project Ice Rink

A game concept that SHOULD be overused but isn't is real ice. Many games try ice that sucks. Real ice isn't moving a LITTLE faster over time, and you skid for an inch before stopping. Real ice is "holy crap I'm still moving 20 miles per hour" and "Whoah, this spinning is making me kinda sick" stuff. Where does ice belong, however? In an ice rink game of course! It's my honor to present, Project Ice Rink!

Wait a minute, that's not it. The game is called Project Green, and it's not about ice rinks at all. It's just another stupid game where you move and try to open doors to finally reach the exit switch to get to the exit. While missiles and lasers are shooting at you. None of these games make sense. They're also incredibly easy. However, Project Green is not easy. Why? Well, that's where the ice comes in.


There is nearly NO green in Project Green. There is, however, a whole lot of gray. Oh, and red. Mostly gray though. Project Green is a misnomer. The game should be called "Project Spin Out Of Control Until You Bump Into A Wall Which You Somehow Bounce Off Of". Why? The reason is that this game appears a friction of 0.0000001. Do you want to stop? Sorry, you'll have to waste 8 seconds randomly sliding and bouncing on the screen, hoping you don't get your ass fried by the lasers or bump a mine until you finally move only a LITTLE. That's right, you never stop moving, even after 20 years you'll still be sliding just a little bit. Call me crazy, but I think this isn't fun. And sure, 8 seconds doesn't seem THAT long, but it happens EVERY TIME YOU MOVE. The entire game is ruined thanks to these stupid physics. The game gives you a level editor, but that sucks too.

The level editor is unfriendly, unhelpful, and confusing. It doesn't tell you anything, which means if you haven't played the game you're forced to guess what everything does. It also doesn't seem to have a very important part of the game: THE PLAYER. Turns out the player comes with the exit square. I guess the author doesn't believe in freedom. The game has a "delete" option, but doesn't let you delete anything. Or does it? To delete something, you have to highlight it. I got that part, but it turns out you have to press "Delete" to delete it. The actual delete button on the keyboard. Now, I know why the author chose it and it isn't a problem! Except for one little fact: DELETE IS USELESS AND A HORRIBLE BUTTON TO USE ON A KEYBOARD. Nobody uses delete because it's much easier to use backspace. That's why EVERY single game uses it. Except this one of course, because Project Green is nonsense. I thing green is actually G.R.E.E.N, an acronym for "Giant Ridiculous Exciting (just kidding, it's boring.) Eggplant Nonsense. Why is eggplant in there? I don't know, and neither does the author because this game is INSANE. Fun Fact: Kongregate actually sponsored this garbage.

Fail Factor 2: It's actually pretty fun until you get up to level 51 or so.

The phobia here was hard to find, but I think it's Tropophobia, the fear of moving (which you'll do a lot of in this game whether you want to or not)

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Top 5 Ways To Annoy People Playing Your Game

The long awaited sequel to "Top 5 Ways To Make Nobody Want To Play Your Game" is here! Now, suppose you STILL manage to get some people playing your game. They are obviously rude, not respecting your wishes for nobody to play your game. What should you do? Annoy them while they ARE playing your game!

5. Use uncropped pictures for the graphics in your game.

Flash has brushes, pencils, and lines for a reason. Drawing art in Flash is always a good thing unless you're going to be a slob. Look at games such as The Last Stand 2 and Dolphin Olympics. Pretty nice, right? Imagine those replaced with real graphics. Okay, so that would be even cooler! If they did it right. However, if you're going to not crop it and leave ugly white borders around it, it looks horrible. Let me show you what I mean by an example from a game that's gone now:

"Hey look! It's Obamaa... er.."

Now tell me, does this game look professional? Would it annoy the hell out of you if you played it? I think so! Could there be a reason this game was removed from Kongregate? Hm..

4. Don't add a mute button if you add music to your game.

Teens and other people listen to music all the time. They usually start hearing the same songs over and over again. Don't you think you'll get tired of listening to something if you hear it too many times? I know I would. Most people use loops in Flash that they either made or got off of FlashKit.com. These loops are short, lasting for no more then a minute at MOST. Eventually, people will just say "You know what? I want to shut this stupid music off." They look for the mute button, but alas! There is none! There's only one way out..

"Shut the hell up, you stupid game!"

Muting their speakers means they can't use iTunes. If they choose to deal with the music, they have to listen to it ALONG with their song. It sounds horrible it's best to turn off iTunes if they want to continue playing. Turning off iTunes so they can listen to YOUR stupid song won't make them happy, it'll make them angry. You won't like them when they're angry..


3. Put red text on a blue backround, or the opposite.

Blue is a nice color. It represents respect, sadness, and a whole lot of other things. On Kongregate, however, blue represents annoyance, pain, and blindness. Blue and red are two colors that can cause seizures if flashing in rapid succession. Flashing or not, putting red on a blue backround or blue on a red backround can still hurt you. It's just painful to look at. If you make that blue or red any brighter or darker, they lose their effect. The only painful shades are the normal ones, #0000FF and #FF0000. You probably don't want an example, but I'll show you anyway.

My eyes are bleeding! GRAAAAARGHH!!!

This is the exact type of eye-burning pain I'm talking about. Blue + Red = Blindess. Next!

2. Use flashing colors in the game that are likely to give people seizures.

These days, dance clubs are highly blown out of proportion in terms of colors and lights. They just have different lights changing every 5 seconds, and some dancing. Many people now, especially the ones at Kongregate developing flash games, think that dance clubs and parties are places where every known color in the universe flashes ungodly fast. The problem is, these flashing lights can cause epiliptic seizures. Yet developers still insist on flashing colors at 30 frames per second just to try to keep the beat of a "dance party" and/or to annoy people. So, annoying people by flashing thousands of colors is a pretty good way to make people hate your game. It's also a good way to give people seizures. An example would be "The Groovy Dance Party Game Featuring The Groovy Button"

"Sparta? This.. is.. epilipsy!!!!"

1. Don't beta test your game, only to find out it's badly broken.

The most important part of a game is kind of obvious. It's not graphics, it's not controls, it's just if the game simply works. When the game is broken, then the entire game is ruined. That's why after a game is finished, people let it sit for a week then play it, looking for any bugs or glitches. That's kind of the ENTIRE POINT of beta testing. However, some people obviously DON'T beta test their game, because they're too arrogant and they think everything is perfect. It's not. When a game has a couple of bugs or glitches that are hidden and/or hard to execute, that's okay. However, when the part of the game that THE ENTIRE GAME REVOLVES AROUND is broken, then you're just stupid and lazy. A great example of this is "Dress Up Margaret". In "Top 5 Ways To Make Nobody Want To Play Your Game", I talked about how dress up games suck all you do is drag ugly clothing to some ugly girl/guy. The entire game revolves around dragging the ugly clothing. If you read this entire paragraph, you would have guessed by now that in "Dress Up Margaret", YOU CAN'T DRAG THE STUPID CLOTHES. Thus rendering the entire game stupid, broken, and extremely annoying.

MOVE THESE STUPID, UGLY CLOTHES! ARGH!!! *smash*

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Top 5 Ways To Make Nobody Want To Play Your Game

First appearances mean EVERYTHING when you're in the world of Flash Development. If people don't think your game is worth playing at a first glance, they're not going to play it. Are you tired of people playing your games? Just follow these rules and you too can have a game nobody wants to play.

5. My first (insert genre of game here)

Look up the words "my first" and you'll see a page full of "my first" games. Notice how their ratings are all close to two. My first game usually suck. There's two reasons for that. One reason is that if somebody insists on telling people that it's their first game, then they want pity because they know their game sucks. The second reason is that they want to tell people their game sucks so they could excuse their various bugs and glitches.

"Give me a break, guys. It's my first sidewalk!"

4. Create an excessively long title for your game and make half of it not even describe your game and can easily be erased and the message of your title will still be the same.

Again, it leads back to maturity, but this time, it also goes into creativity. If you can't make your title short enough to not be TOTALLY HARASSING, then you're not creative. If you're not creative, your game isn't creative. If your game isn't creative, it probably suck. If you don't need half of the title, then why put it there? It makes people who are thinking about playing your game question your maturity. Either you're too dumb to realize you don't need half the title, or you think everybody at Kongregate is an idiot if that extra half is something that's totally obvious, like the "that's why it's lame" part of the following picture



3. Make the icon for your game a bad .gif, a picture, or something that doesn't represent the game.

Kongregate has icons on games for the purpose of showing exactly what their game is about, or bragging about the graphics. Icons are important things, they're photographic proof of your game rocking. If icons can do that, they can also show photographic proof of your game sucking. You COULD be honest and show a real picture of your game, or you can be annoying and show something that has NOTHING to do with the game. Even more annoying is when you use a picture you found on the internet. What does that say about your game?

What does a picture of money have to do with "click the dot"?

Kongregate allows you to upload a .gif for your avatar AND icon. It usually sucks, because Kongregate has a problem with .gif pictures and strange black stuff shows up on it. Well, it used to. Even without the strange black stuff, .gif pictures shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing, because they usually suck. However, think about DTD's icon. Now, think of it animated. Wouldn't that be awesome? How about Last Stand 2? Dolphin Olympics? Yup, it would be awesome. However, imagine it done wrong. Imagine DTD having that zoom in/out problem most .gif pictures have. Imagine Dolphin Olympics having a choppy .gif picture. It would all suck.

2. Spell your title wrong, in ALL CAPS, in l33t, or make it nonsense.

Developing skills are equal to maturity skills. Look at the highly rated games list. Do you see any games called SONNY or gmcrft or b100n5 t0w3r d3f3nc3 3? Nope! Why? Games with bad titles usually turn out to be bad games. For example, look at the last page of the action games list. How many games are spelled bad there? Half of them? More? Look at this list of several games, can you tell which ones are bad?


Hm.. I think I would rather play Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2 then play something completely stupid like "click da cow" or "O-MY-HEAD". Good games have names that make sense. Sure, it's not the last stand if it's a sequel, and there's no point of the + in Amorphous+, but at least it's not something that seems to come from a mind on LSD like "M3OW.. GRRRR!!" or "THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!" Really? The best game ever? That's totally NOT vague, except it doesn't even tell us what the game is about. Also, the "best game ever" (edit: sorry, that's "THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!!!") is only rated 1.64. Best game ever? More like "THE WORST GAME EVER!!!!"

Note: Don't play it. It's not a game, it's just a loading screen on crack. That is, IT DOESN'T LOAD. The bar just flashes all over the place.

1. Make your game a dress-up game that isn't quirky and/or with bad graphics.

Dress up games suck. What's the point of playing them if they're not quirky? Dress-up games are usually for people who want to get the Developer symbol next to their name and the points from developing a game. Dress-up games aren't really games, they're just a picture of some goth musician or some 5-year old girl for Christmas and stupid clothes that have some lazy startDrag(); code in it. Wow, it takes real talent to make a game as unique and fun as this. Oh wait, did I say unique and original? I meant overused and boring. Most dress-up games aren't quirky enough to be worth playing. Some examples are:

Wow! I can dress up a teenage guy and a "cute girl"! Fun! The bottom two games are the quirky ones. However, Santa Claus dress up has the worst graphics EVER.


This is exactly what I mean about lazy programming. Dress-up games NEED to have good graphics AND be quirky to be anywhere close to good. Dragon Ball Z Dress Up uses the "Make your icon a picture you found on the internet" way to make people cautious about playing it, but it's cool. It has 10 different characters, the graphics rock, and you can actually mix up the clothes. Hooray! It's the rare type of dress-up games! The ones that are actually good!

Who do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Super Saiyan BatMan!


Part of the #3 text was in #2, so I put it back in #3 and added a new paragraph under the picture in #2.

The Top 5 Overrated Games On Kongregate

If you have ever seen a movie with robots, nanobots, or aliens, you might have heard them say things like "Humans are extremely flawed things." I'm afraid I have to say they're right. The people at Kongregate apparently have short attention-spans. If the beginning of the game impresses them, then they'll rate it highly. This leads to games being overrated, such as the examples shown below.

5. Music Catch


In this game, you're a small circle that has to collect all sorts of shapes flying out from a line. There are 4 different colors of shapes you can collect
Blue and Green - Normal pieces that give points when you collect them.
Purple - Gives you Purple Power, which sucks in all Blue/Green and Yellow shapes (and possibly Purple, don't have time to check) and not the Red pieces. Also it seems like it makes more shapes fly out or makes the rate at which they fly out faster. Really awesome since it could score you some major points
Yellow - Increases your combo meter by 1. For example, x1 is turned into x2, x2 is turned into x3, x3 is turned into x4 and so on.
Red - Red is the color of evil, and it's extra evil in this game. The challenge is if you get even ONE red, you're probably not going to get as much points as you really can unless it's very early in the game. Reds are pretty devastating. They cut your multiplier in half.

Now on to the combos. You start out with a x1 combo, with your circle twice as big as a capital O (which seems like a lot, but it's still really small) and when you get yellow shapes, your combo meter increases by 1, and you grow a bit bigger. So you can go from that tiny x1 to gigantic lengths. Music goes on in the background, and it's beautiful.

So, it seems like fun. Why is it overrated? Because it's short. Also, getting a red at around x50 is the most annoying thing know to Earth. Whoops, you hit a red, now you're going to have to get 25 more yellows to make up for it. The beginning is boring, with all those little tiny shapes, and the entire game is boring if you don't have sound on your computer. It doesn't really deserve such a high rating. Next!

4. Sonny

Sonny is way too short. DTD should have been the highest rated game because it had tons of variety. Think about it. So many modes in DTD, and so many ways to explore them. Sonny, however, does not. You play for an hour, spend another hour or two trying to beat the Stage 4 bosses, then you're done. What next? Nothing. No replay value in Sonny, and to make up for it you get team mates. Wait, no. You get a team mate, and then when you finish the game you get 4 more team mates, but you can only use 3 on Stage. Veradux is the first one you get early in the game. He is the healer of this game. He sometimes attacks too, but his attacks suck, just like him. I can easily describe him using two words: Veradux sucks. It even rhymes, so you know it must be true. Oh, don't forget the infamous glitch where you can take an item and transfer it's bonuses to Sonny. It's like wearing (insert number of items you glitch here) items. Oh, and it's permanant too. The only way using this glitch can screw you over is if you don't have subduction and you need it (because you NEED subduction for one of the final bosses, the Doctor). You can easily re-spec and put everything into subduction, but if you re-spec while using this glitch, everything goes down. You can also get 8 levels, which is a helluva lot easier, but more annoying. Oh, and the glitch is incredibly easy to execture. Shown above is me using the glitch to Coup de Grace the end game boss (not the final bosses on stage 4, the final boss on stage 3). The plot is completely insane. You're trying to find out WHAT'S ON A STUPID TAPE RECORDER. The dialouge seems fitting, if this game was set in the 21st century. Every time I read "My name is Sonny." I think of some cheesy rap song. I'm done with this. Next!

3. Monsters' Den: Book of Dread



Booriiiing. I don't know how this game got over 4 stars, or even 3.5 for that matter. It's a monotonous dungeon crawler. Oh, and guess what? There's only like 4 different levels of the dungeon (Undead, Hunting Packs, Humans, and Greenskins) before the levels start over. Random dungeon placement (hey look! The exit is right next to me!), too many items (that makes over 200 items we've seen so far, and they all suck!), and lack of healing pots (looks like we're screwed unless we find an altar!) make this game suck really bad. Next!

2. The Several Journeys of Reemus: Chapter 2



It's a point and click adventure game with 3 endings, a great art style, and fun puzzles. It's still just a point and click adventure game. PaC games are never fun. Oh, and guess what? There's no replay value! Yet it's rated 4.20 on Kongregate. Why? It's only 30 minutes long and then you're not going to play it anymore. No extra challenge at the end. Sonny was waaay longer then this, waaaay more fun, and this game is waaay overrated. At least it's not rated higher then it's superior, like the last game on the list is Next!

1. Bloons Tower Defence 3

How.. who.. what.. why..

Okay, how did this get to the front page? This is the 3rd highest rated game on Kongregate, yet it sucks. A while ago, DTD 1.5 was the highest rated game on Kongregate, and everybody knew it was going to stay that was for a long time, and it did before Sonny ursurped it's throne. That wasn't good, but it wasn't horrible either. However, DTD has fallen off the front page. It's now the 4th highest rated game, just after this one. The problem is, Bloons Tower Defence 3 is a mediocre version of DTD. Let's see why.

Modes

DTD had easy, medium, hard, trickle, random, 10k, spawns, boxes, cross, the 100, speed, 15 towers, survivor, and 3k fixed.
BTD3 has easy, medium, and hard
Winner: DTD
Stages
DTD has one and only one stage.
BTD3 has 8 stages, not like you need more then one though.

Winner: BTD3

Challenge

DTD has tons of challenging modes. Anyone who has the impossible badge knows what I mean.
BTD3 is easy even on the hard more.

Winner: DTD

Playability Enhancers

DTD has a pause button, a wave skipper (send more then one wave at a time), a volume setter (set how loud the music is), and an end game button
BTD3 has a mute button, an end game button, and you can set which monsters to target.

Winner: DTD

Freedom

DTD lets you place your towers anywhere you want to unless it's blocking the creeps' path or on another tower, lets you experiment with it by using the modes, and lets you juggle by building a maze (again, placing your towers anywhere).
BTD3 has a set path the creeps HAVE to follow, and no experimental modes.
Winner: DTD

Graphics

DTD has a picture of a desktop with stuff on it as a backround, and has pretty nicely drawn towers.
BTD3 has harassing drawn backrounds, and drawn monkeys.
Winner: DTD

Order

DTD has small towers so you can place a lot of them on the desktop, and everything is explained so you know what everything is.
BTD3 has BIG MONKEY TOWERS so you can place a maximum of about 30-40 on screen, and there's a strange "secret" tower that nobody knows what it is.

Winner: DTD
Powerups

DTD's towers can be upgraded 5 times at most, increasing range, strength, or even both.
BTD3's towers can be upgraded twice for range and twice for strength/piercing/something else

Winner: DTD
Security/Hackability

DTD is hard to hack, and a couple people have done it.
BTD3 is incredibly easy to hack. I had to download Cheat Engine to test this, and guess what? It worked the first time I did it.

Winner: DTD

So, DTD is better then BTD3 in almost all ways, yet BTD3 is rated higher. What the hell? This is EXACTLY what overrated means. I'm done with this stupid game. List finished!

BONUS: GemCraft

Ah.. GemCraft. Another Tower Defence game. Putting this on the list was hard, since GemCraft had so many things that DTD didn't. Originally, this list was going to be the Top 6 overrated games, with Music Catch being 6th, Sonny being 5th, and this being 4th. At the end, I decided not to put it on the list, since it is more fun then DTD and very unique, and deserves to be rated highly. Think about it. Wizard levels, boostbable skills, bosses, hidden levels, saving.. ect.

Don't forget how different the battles were. On DTD, you only had preset towers and that was it. On here, you have empty towers, and you have gems that you can make for mana. You can increase your mana pool, buy higher ranked gems, or EVEN COMBINE GEMS TO MAKE HIGHER RATED GEMS. You got a bonus for making a "pure" gem by combination (both gems have to be the same color to make a pure gem). Not to mention building water trenches, throwing gems at monsters to attack them, not having lives but instead taking away mana if the monsters get past (and if you ran out of mana, you were dead), medals for achievements during each level, an AUTOSAVE, tons of save slots, great graphics..did DTD have all that? No! The only thing DTD had going for it was the different modes, but that's not enough to be better then GemCraft. That's why I say GemCraft > DTD

Friday, December 26, 2008

Blood On The Wall!


Added blood stains bloody skeleton as a backround image.
Changed several colors of blog.

Cheats in Flash


It's important to pick an attractive icon for your game so people would notice it. For example, I would have never noticed Cheats in Kongregate if it didn't have some hobo as the icon. So, I played it. And boy does it suck.

I so did not know that you can right click and press forward to go forward on a game, or press tab to find hidden buttons! Oh wait, yes I did. Everybody knows these cheats. Oh, and they're the only two cheats on there. Perfect. Then it shows you an example about how you can use the right click cheat to get the medium badge on Age of War, then some stupid "extra" question. You can either go back to the main menu or click "view the answer", which will lead to a page showing you that ugly hobo again. Oh, and the two cheats can be made useless in flash with 4 simple lines of code.
Above: All you need to stop those two cheats.

This game sucks to the highest degree. Outdated and easily broken cheats, no fun, ugly backround.. ect.


Fail Factor 5: YAAAAWN. I think the author was trying to test his button actionScript, then decided to upload the game here anyway.

The phobia to pick here was hard. It's either:

Scelerophobia - Fear of bad people (like the lazy creator of this game)
or
Hobophobia - Fear of hobos, beggars, undesirables, homeless people, bums.. ect.

Keep Kongregating Games!


Anyone remember Nonoba? It was a website that was similar to Kongregate. Tensions between Kongregate and Nonoba began, and eventually led to a spam war on both forums. People overreacted there. Nonoba had badges, but not even challenges or a CCG..

However, a new problem has arisen. Keep Smiling Games. Go to this website, and immediatly you'll see how much it looks like Kong. Why? BECAUSE IT IS. You want to see the similarities? arcaneCoder posted them in his post on page 3.

3 posts above that post, an eMail answer from the creator is shown. He admits he stole Kong's design until he could make his own design. It's never a good thing when you have to steal a design so you can rush the creation of the site.

Some of the games seem to be stolen too, but there's a dispute about that because of the statement "the games were gotten from MochiAds Publisher Fee and were free to take"

Oh, that's not all. I've saved the best for last. An actual response from the author of Keep Smiling Games. Apparently, he coded it from scratch and BASED it on Kong. Is that why everything is the same, Vanhal? Who are you fooling? Designs might not be copyrighted (again, there's a dispute) but stealing a design is still ALWAYS uncool and unpopular.

So, what should you do about this? First, post on the thread we have to express your opinions. Second, DON'T SPAM THEIR SITE. Spamming will get you banned from Kongregate AND Keep Smiling Games. Third, well.. deal with it. There's not much you can do which isn't a horrible idea. Just sit back and let everyone else deal with it.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Yu-Gi-Oh's story of zombification!



One of the old articles on Kongiophobia (the first!) was a story on Zombie Creator.

The first story was lost, but I've created a new story. Here it is (edited):

When the outbreak occurred, Yu-Gi-Oh was outside of one of the city of Hollywood's rescue stations. Just when he thought he might break through the crowds and get inside, an obnoxiously loud pickup truck came up behind him. It couldn't stop. It crashed through the crowds and killed at least 1/0 people. Yu-Gi-Oh was almost as unlucky, as he was pinned under the obnoxiously loud pickup truck. Then, as if in a dream, Achmed the Dead Terrorist came out of nowhere... but she wasn't herself, it was quite obvious that she had been turned into a Zombie. Blood ran down her helping bra, drenching it. Before Yu-Gi-Oh could react, not that he could do much, being pinned under the obnoxiously loud pickup truck, Achmed the Dead Terrorist sunk her teeth into his armpit. He had put up an Achmed the Dead Terrorist poster in his room when he was 14, and thought that at least it was her biting him... 'Better her than a fat old man' he thought. Clutching his most prized possession, the ripped tissue his wife gave him as a two week anniversary present, he slowly passed into Zombification. He was still stalking prey 3 years later... and did so until the army of Arizona decided to take matters into their own hands, and dropped several nuclear bombs onto the city of Hollywood. This is the story of Yu-Gi-Oh.