Something Something Soup Something

I actually held onto this one for a while, waiting for the right day to use it. I finally opened it up (you can play online here) and played. It's... odd.

It's a philosophical "game" where you categorize the things presented to you as either "soup" or "not soup." It varies the definitions of the liquid (some have ice, some are non-specific like "foamy liquid" and some are downright irresponsible like battery acid), the stuff in the liquid (meat, random household objects), the bowl (a coconut, a football helmet, a bowl), and the implement served alongside it (straw, fork, spoon, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing something like an axe?).

It's actually really interesting to see the results (your own and, on the website, those of others) to see how you define "soup." (Take note: it never says it actually has to be edible, it just says it has to be "soup" that can be served to the humans upstairs.)

Hallmark Fantasy Game

If you didn't already know about this, I'm going to change your life.

The Hallmark Channel has a fantasy game (like fantasy football) for their Christmas movies. Every week, you choose the ones you think will do the best that week (I guess in viewership?) and there are also trivia questions associated with it to give you bonus points.

Edit: I'm actually catching up on posts a week later right now, so as of 11/26, I'm beating Garrison but not by much. We'll see if I keep the lead!

Futoshiki

Futoshiki is one of the many games that's "kind of like Sudoku" in that you have to put numbers into a grid in a particular order to get it right.

In this one, you have > and < symbols to tell you that some of the numbers immediately next to each other are greater than or less than the other.

If you're curious, here's the solution for this one:

Mahjong Safari

This game, from Pogo, is less mahjong and more... mahjong-like matching game with a twist. But it was fun enough for me to play five or six levels before realizing it was pretty late and I should go to bed.

All the tiles have animals (except two pairs of Pogo logos, two pairs of stars, and two pairs that are each a half of an animal; when you match those to make the full animal, they show up in those blank spots on the left and when you get them all, there's a site-wide points bonus).

The trick is, you don't just match the pairs (there aren't layers, like in most mahjong solitaire games, so that would be too easy)... you have to be able to connect the pairs across blank space with a line that doesn't have to make more than two turns. For example, in the photo below, the line makes two turns.

Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself)

I think this one has been sitting at the back of my mind since I played Robot Unicorn Attack, because they were advertised on Adult Swim around the same time.

In this one, you have five minutes in an office setting to do enough damage to yourself to die. There are little things like staplers and scissors, bigger things like the microwave and copy machines, and you can talk to coworkers and use dialogue options to get them to do harm to you, too.

The controls were annoyingly bad when I played this time; I don't know if the blame lies with my laptop, the Wi-Fi connection, or the game, but it was pretty frustrating. I only managed to get 71% of the way to dead. (If you lose, you have to attend a staff meeting at the end.)

Tents

This is Tents, from Brain Bashers. The trees and numbers around the edges are what you're given at the beginning. There will be one tent associated with each tree. A tree's tent must share a side with it (not a corner). A tree can have more than one tent sharing sides with it, but only one tent will be that tree's tent. The numbers around the edges tell you how many tents will be in each row/column. You click on the blank (white) squares to change them between blank, grass (no tent), and tent.

It's kind of like a mix of minesweeper and the ABC Path game I played a while back, also from Brain Bashers.

The World's Easy-est Game

Note to self: Don't get drunk before playing a game for the day. You'll wind up finding a cop-out like this one.

It's from Addicting Games, it lives up to its name, and it's kind of like I Don't Even Know, or a very forgiving version of The Idiot Test.

I Don't Even Know

I realize that the title of this post makes it sound like I gave up on this challenge, but it's actually the name of the game I played today. It's a very silly flash game from Addicting Games made with drawings like the one you see above. Each level has its own logic, but they're definitely all very silly.

I got so wrapped up in it, I forgot to take photos during the game, but for example, there's a drawing of a clown surrounded by kids and holding balloons, and it says something like "defeat the clown!" and you're supposed to pop his balloons in order, and you move on to the next level.

I win!

It's VERY popular on Addicting Games, and I can see why. It's funny and quick and entertaining but also has a tiny bit of challenge to it to make it "hard" enough to keep my attention. Fun!

What's in the Box?

We may never know the answer to the name of this game: What's in the Box? Every level is a different puzzle with its own logic that you have to unlock to get to the next "lid" to the box. On the one in the picture above, the little shapes in the top right corner are the hint to what numbers you need to put in the dial (the number of sides on each shape).

In this one, you have to click one of the middle buttons to light up the top green light, then the other middle button to move it clockwise around the circle until it's in the last blank spot, then light it up again and move it again, etc. etc. until they're all lit up.

Empty Room Escape

Remember when I escaped the car? Now I've also escaped an empty room. (Which is technically not true, since the room has not only the theoretical me in it, but also a chair and some vaults and stuff.)

See? Chair.

Just like with escaping the car, I have to click around and find objects and solve clues to figure out how to get out of the room. In this one, you have to find four keys, and each one has a letter on it, and they spell "EXIT" (which is your clue that the four keys belong to the door, I guess).

I'm free!

Red Remover

This is a cute, fun puzzle game from Addicting Games. You have to remove all the red blocks from the screen, leave all the green blocks on the screen, and blue blocks are neutral: remove them or leave them, it doesn't matter. Some stages have different gravity logic.

And all the blocks are so HAPPY to be where they're supposed to be! Red blocks are grumpy until they start to fall, then they're as happy as the green ones are to be on-screen.

Yaaaay!

ABC Path

I discovered a site called Brain Bashers that has lots of different types of puzzles like sudoku, and this is one of them.

It gives you the "A" and you have to put in the rest of the letters. The sequential letters have to touch (so B has to share a side or corner with A and also with C, C has to share with both B and D, and so on) and there are letters around the edges telling you what row/column/diagonal they have to be in.

In the photo above, I actually have some of it wrong. You can see the finished puzzle below:

Farmville 2

I actually really liked the original Farmville. It killed a few minutes here and there; it was a nice little escape throughout the day. But then it started to rely too heavily on me needing to annoy my Facebook friends (the vast majority of whom did not play) in order for me to progress through the game, and it started to have too many elements (collect coins and stars and ovals and vertically-aligned ovals and whatever other BS we throw your way!) and I quit.

But I've been curious, on and off over the past several years, about what Farmville looks like now. I went to Zynga's website and found that I can't play Farmville without going through Facebook, which I'm not really willing to do right now, so I went with Farmville 2.

It took probably half an hour for me to actually get to the game, between allowing Flash to run and checking things like my adblock, and then finally just loading the darn thing. My DVD/Blu-Ray/etc. player was running Hulu and it froze up for a few minutes, which I don't think was a coincidence. I think this was a serious burden on our Wi-Fi. (To be fair, my phone was also simultaneously handling my fantasy hockey draft, so that probably didn't help.)

I planted some seeds, watered some crops, harvested some tomatoes, fed a chicken and a goat, turned tomatoes into feed, picked some lemons, sold some eggs and milk, turned down half a dozen prompts to invite friends to play, and finally got frustrated with the terrible load quality (jumpy graphics and that giant yellow arrow up there was leftover from the tutorial and never went away) so I quit.

Overall? I still kind of miss the original, but I have no desire to return to this game. Ever.

Bowman 2

Back to Addicting Games for, this time, a shooting game. I didn't even look for Bowman 1... Bowman 2 was just fine. (I don't think I missed any major plot points.)

It may look like I'm suffering some pretty damaging blood loss in the photo, but trust me... you should see the other guy.

Big City Adventure

I've never played one of these hidden object games, but they're actually pretty addictive! I get it.

There's only one free episode in this one, so I did that one: London.

It shows you an image like a page from I Spy, and you find the objects listed at the bottom. There are cheats that you can earn by doing well, which I leaned on pretty hard in the first one but after that I only used them twice (in something like 5 or 6 other images).

Word Whomp

Word Whomp (from Pogo) is a lot like a game Cassy and I used to play through Facebook... but I can't remember the name of it. Word... something. Word Twist, maybe? Except this one has gophers... and a chat window on the far right that nobody used.

I actually went looking for Psychobabble, which I've done several times in the past... decade? But it is long gone, and I found this instead.

The picture above was from my best round, where I actually figured out all the words. In all the other rounds I played, I missed a couple words.

Mah Jongg Candy

I love Mah Jongg solitaire! This is a cutesy version of it where all the symbols on the tiles are replaced by different images of types of candy.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think I first played Mah Jongg on a promotional website for some candy company. It clearly didn't work too well, since I don't remember the brand, but I distinctly remember playing games on that website daily for months, at least. I'm leaning toward Hershey, because I think I remember there being a game centered around Reese's? But I don't know. It might have been soda instead of candy? Anywho.

I found this version by using the search in Windows 10 (is it Cortana if you didn't use the voice feature?) which was weirdly disappointing, since it was searching online for browser-based games.

If you're interested in this specific version, it's the one from Wild Tangent. There are score multipliers (the first time you match a pair, it's x2, then they turn into x4, and when you match a pair of those, the last pair turns into x6). It's timed (5 minutes) and if you shuffle (which you can do as many times as you want) there's a 20 second penalty.

Robot Unicorn Attack

The song's already stuck in your head, isn't it?

If you don't remember this glorious artifact of early-to-mid 2000s Cartoon Network, allow me to explain:

The commercial for this free online game (yeah I'm not sure I get that part either) ran approximately once every commercial break on Cartoon Network for some period of time during my time at college. They licensed the song "Always" by Erasure, which is amazingly and in equal parts heartfelt, ridiculous, and catchy. (You know, the perfect storm of songs.) Allow me to put it two different ways for you... (1) the opening lines are "Open your eyes / I see / Your eyes are open" and (2) the chorus is "Always / I wanna be with you / And make believe with you / And live in harmony, harmony." It will also be stuck in my head for approximately the next three years.

The game itself is an infinite-run high-speed platform. You control a robot unicorn (of course you do) and all you can do is jump, double-jump, and dash. If you run into a wall/obstacle, you explode in a fiery blaze and start again. The song "Always" by Erasure plays on an infinite loop. It's really terrific.

Empathy Simulator

Ok, this one is silly and fun. Birk sent it to me today because he thought I would enjoy it, and I did, very much.

This is a joke game (but really well made for a joke game) that plays on the idea of how med students are taught how to express empathy with their patients.

The concept of the game is really simple: you use the arrow keys to move your "doctor" head around the room, and you need to get within range of your patient (or patients) and hit the space bar to empathize. (When you do, it uses a robot voice to say randomized phrases like "that must be difficult for you" and "how does that make you feel.")

Each room is a little bit harder. The second one is actually very difficult. It's a mom and a small child who runs around the room like a lunatic, and you have to empathize with both of them in ten seconds.

I finally gave up on the round with the patient who has a 7+ murmur... he has a giant heart animation that pulses every two seconds, and when it does, it throws you back in the opposite direction, so you have to time your approach and your empathy very carefully to make sure you don't go flying. (Also you need to get between him and the nearer wall so the return to him doesn't waste valuable seconds.)

Escape the Car

Do you remember these games? Flash games where you're basically pixel-hunting, but the game is the same premise as escape rooms... without having to be in the actual escape room.

You click on stuff until you find useful stuff, then you use the useful stuff to do things that help you escape the thing you're stuck in. In this case, it's a car that you're locked into. Don't think about it too hard.

You can zoom in on different areas to try to find things. For example, if I click under the steering wheel, there's a panel that you need a screwdriver to open. If you get the screwdriver, you can open it and fix some of the wires.

Hey look, I did it in under 13 minutes. Look at me go. I am free of the car with no premise.