Captain Forever

[COM: (Farbs) Help me. Help us all._________________________________]

Out in the emptiness of space sits the Nemesis, a ship that cannot be destroyed, and its pilot desperately needs your help. Every time it should be the Nemesis' turn to explode, space around it explodes instead, taking everything in the vicinity with it. The only way to stop this from happening is to keep the Nemesis from exploding, and the only way to do that is to destroy other ships and harvest their parts.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? That's the premise of Captain Forever, a Flash game with a simple goal: survive. How? Up to you. Log in and get moving, pilot.

Fantastic Contraption

Both those words are a stretch, to be honest.

The physics playgrounds return to haunt me, as does Flash, this time in Fantastic Contraption, a little toolbox to play around with on your lunch break. Your goal is clear. Can you get there?

Yeah, right. Like I've got the brains to get there. Come on then. Let's see how fast we fail.

Cursor*10

If you want something doing...

As Adobe Flash dies (or has it finally actually been killed off by now?), we get to experience another little gem of a game that I have never come across on my travels, Cursor*10, a small puzzle game where you've got to be a team player... with yourself.

How's that work, then?

Quadradius

3D Space Checkers on Crack

Does Chess need a bit of pep? Some abilities dropped onto the board to introduce new ways of playing, new strategies to master? If you think it does, you're not alone. There are untold numbers of Chess variants out there to spice things up. I up a couple of physical variants myself, and the 1001 list wants to take you back in time to the days of Flash and Quadradius.

Chrome and the Internet of 2020 have other ideas, however...

Desktop Tower Defense

"Not having enough fun?"

The tower defence genre is a simple one to describe. A wave of enemies will swarm in from a set direction, charging towards a given objective. You've got the resources to build a manage a bunch of turrets that will automatically track, fire, and hopefully kill the enemy before they reach their destination. The more enemies there are, the more towers you'll need to defend against them, or the better those towers will have to be.

You can already see the gameplay. Slow-moving but powerful towers, quick but weak-hitting towers, towers with magical abilities or towers that specifically target a certain enemy. Of course! Multiple enemy types. Slow-moving drones, zippy little pests, flyers and bosses.

There are so many possibilities, but one developer wondered why no tower defence game had really allowed players to create mazes that enemies were forced to navigate through. Most had shown players a route and tasked them with placing towers to the sides. Desktop Tower Defense didn't.

Line Rider

Wheeeeee?

Many games allow players to get creative using inbuilt tools. Maps. Characters. Even whole games, built within other games. But how many of us don't bother? No matter how easy the tools are to use, we know other people have more time, energy, skill, and desire to put us to shame. There is, perhaps, no better demonstration of this than Line Rider.

Samorost

Oh gnome!

This is the screenshot that accompanies the 1001 writeup for Samorost, a point and click game that follows a little space gnome on a mission to avert disaster for his home.

But you wouldn't know that from that screenshot. Your first reaction to it is probably similar to my own: what the heck am I looking at here?

GROW

Words. I have none.

After a string of games that I've been quite aware of, some of which I had played quite a bit, comes something so far out of the left-field that I have to wonder just what makes it a game in the first place.

I've played a fair few Flash games in my time. Most of which would be described as a flash in the pan, but there are some highlights from the now dead (severely crippled?) piece of software. Those of us from a specific age range probably has their favourites, even if it's something as simple as Curveball.

Curveball didn't make the 1001 list, though. GROW did. I've not come across GROW before. I'm not sure I'm best placed to describe it nowadays either.

Let's at least try to, eh?