Xbox 360 Jump In Shootout

A relative oldie, but still good. This Xbox 360 Jump In advertisement features a spectacular finger gun shootout in a train station.

Critters Does It Again

David Scott, a.k.a. Critters, is the author of Flash Element TD and Flash Circle TD has released another online Flash based Tower Defense game. This time it’s called Vector TD.

Vector TD

The latest Critters game revisits familiar territory. There’s a maze. There are creeps. There are various towers with upgrades. There’s an interest component. Only this time it’s a vector graphics look. If Disney wouldn’t sue, it could be called Tron TD.

High Points

Frankly, what’s good about Vector TD is what’s good about all the tower defense games. Building towers and trying to finish all the levels.

Additionally, there are several maps from which to choose, instead of just one.

Low Points

Vector TD suffers from being a rehash of Scott’s earlier works without adding much new. Nothing wrong with milking a cow that gives golden milk, especially if you’ve already agreed to milk the cow for a bit longer. On the other hand, it would be nice to see something new.

There also appear to be some bugs. The Auto checkbox can be set, but not unset. And, after completing 50 levels, it congratulates you for completing all 40 of 50 levels. Uh, what? Critters is good at fixing bugs, so that will probably clear up soon.

Conclusion

Minor bugs aside, Vector TD is an enjoyable game that isn’t too difficult to complete, at least on the easy levels. One expects a little more than the same old tower defense game, but as TD games go, this one is the most Tron-like, except there are no light cycles.

Screenshots

Another Boggle Contender

As an addendum to our Play Boggle Online overview of free online Boggle games, we can suggest that if you enjoy these word games, you also take a look at Boggled.org.

What’s Good

Boggled has an interesting feature that the others do not; it determines how common or uncommon a word is and gives you more points as you find rarer words. Nice touch.

The statistics for registered users are also interesting. Games played, total points, average score, average words, most words in a game, highest score, best word, longest word, etc. are all tracked.

The hall of fame shows the top 100 users ranked by total number of words found.

What’s Not So Good

Monetizing free online game sites is what keeps them free. On the other hand, Boggled needs to address some flashing and resizing issues caused by the integration of ads into their layout.

One other nit is that there are one too many clicks to get to a new game. When a game is over there should be a minimum of effort to play again. Incidentally, Weboggle does this very well.

Overall

Boggled.org has a few rough edges that can be cleaned up, but actually is not too bad. Recommended.

Screenshots

Game Tips, Walkthroughs, and Cheats

If you spend much time playing a videogame, you will likely start to wonder if there are tricks or strategies that you can use to improve your scores or progress. In games where missions or quests are involved, or even in elaborate puzzle games, you might looks for walkthroughs, which describe how other players got through the game. Or you might look for cheat codes, which might unlock superhuman strength or unlimited ammunition. Thankfully, there are plenty of websites, books, and other services to feed your cravings (can you believe 900-style phone services that charge per minute for game tips?).

Wii Game Cheats

Offering Nintendo Wii Game Walkthroughs, as well as various tips, cheats, and videos, WiiGameCheats.com is a fairly new website. It is owned by Adams Media, LLC.

The Good

WiiGameCheats has some Wii game cheats, guides, and walkthroughs. There are also a few miscellaneous videos, such as the robot scoring a perfect 300 in Wii Bowling and an old PS3 vs. Wii spoof.

The guides are for Trauma Center Second Opinion, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Zelda Twilight Princess.

There are 18 cheat articles spanning slightly fewer games.

The Bad

Unfortunately, though promising, WiiGameCheats seems light on content. It has the potential to get a good resource if more content is added. Also, though has a bloggy feel to it, but has no way for visitors to comment.

The site can be improved in a few ways. First, allowing readers to comment might result in more tips and cheats being left in the comments themselves. Second, adding more posts would improve the site, as would (third) adding more original or value-add content.

Overall

All in all, WiiGameCheats is a site worth keeping your eye on, but has some work to do before it’s a go-to site for Wii game information.

Brittlefish.com has been upgraded to WordPress 2.2 and the look has tweaked to a slightly-customized CutLine theme.

If you notice oddities around here, please let us know in a comment. Thanks!

Where on the web can you play a friendly game of Boggle online?

How To Play Boggle

The goal of Boggle is for the player to find words in a 4 x 4 grid of letters.

In the original Parker Brothers / Hasbro Boggle game, shown at right, the letter grid is created by shaking letter-faced dice into a grid. A sand timer is used to time the game. When time runs out, the player’s score is based on how many valid words they found, with longer words counting progressively more than shorter words.

Online Boggle Games

Boggle is a lot of fun as an actual, physical game, but how does it translate into the online world? Often the answer is “pretty well.” Done right, online Boggle is a great casual game that you can jump in and play for five minutes or on which you can spend hours.

Interactive Boggle

Interactive Boggle is a fine recreation of the standard board game.

The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Words are entered in a basic text area, one word per line, and unlike Weboggle and Babble there is no immediate feedback as to whether the word is valid or if it has already been entered. One unique feature to Interactive Boggle is that you are penalized for invalid words, so mitigates the lack of instant feedback on those at least.

After a game you can enter your name. If your name is in the recent top eight it appears for a few rounds, after which it drops off. High scores and names do not appear to be saved past these few rounds.

Weboggle

Weboggle is a fast game of boggle, on either a 4×4 or a 5×5 board, against dozens of other players. In the 4×4 variant the minimum word length is the normal three, but in a 5×5 game you need to find words of at least four letters.

If you enter an invalid word it is listed on the right in green, invalid or duplicate or too-short words are listed in red.

Scores are shown after each game, as are words only you got, words you missed, and words everyone missed. Clicking a name highlights the words that person got, which hovering over a words highlights the people who got that words.

Babble

Babble is clearly the smoothest and most impressive of the three, though here it is one game per day on a 5×5 grid with a four letter per word minimum. To play you must register, though you can do so for free. If you pony up $14.95 you get more features, some of which are available for two weeks when you first sign up.

The high score system includes three lists of players and their points. The first is “Cream o’ the Crop” which ranks players by their average per game score. The second list is the “Village Elders,” which ranks players by their cumulative point totals “since the dawn of Babble.” The third is “Who’s Hot,” which ranks players by average score over the last 30 days. Your points for all these lists are displayed.

A chat window to the right of the board ties together the friendly Babble community and keeps them sharing word clues and life stories.

Babble was created by the author of Iron Sudoku.

What’s The Best Online Boggle Game?

Strictly speaking, the best pure Boggle translation to the online world is probably Interactive Boggle. Unfortunately, Interactive Boggle also provides the least fun. Weboggle does a good job at keeping things fast and giving immediate feedback. It also provides two grid sizes, which offers some nice variety.

Babble, though, is the cream of the crop here. The interface is interesting and polished, the community is warm, and though the games last an entire day, each game is challenging enough to warrant the slow pace.

Little Big Planet Trailer

Here’s a nice co-op trailer for Little Big Planet, an amazing upcoming release (Q1 2008) for the Sony Playstation 3 from Media Molecule.

Looks like a lot of fun.

GDC Little Big Planet Demo

And the captivating demo from the Game Developers Conference.

Plastic Balls is a swell Flash-based breakout game from Plastic Martians, a.k.a. Matt Folkard. It’s of the circular breakout variety. Folkard is a free-lance Flash designer based in Manchester, England.

Game Play

If you know how to play Breakout, particularly circular Breakout — where your paddle is in the center and you bounce the ball outward to the bricks around the circumference (or vice versa) — you know how to play Plastic Balls.

Buried in the various bricks are lots of fruit (which you hit with your paddle for extra points), and several power ups which do things like reverse gravity or enlarge your paddle or similar things. There are also bombs in the bricks. These are good bombs, so don’t worry; hit them with your paddle and the ball becomes a bomb that blows up when it hits the next brick, destroying several bricks.

Graphics and Sound

It’s fairly simple but effective Flash graphics, with adequate sound effects and a nicely annoying humming noise in the background.

Bottom Line

Nothing new but still fun for a while.

Plastic Balls Screenshots

Numerous headlines report that, in an interview with eWeek’s Darryl K. Taft, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division president Robbie Bach called the Nintendo Wii no more than GameCube 1.5. And that he said even the original Xbox is better than Nintendo’s supposed next-generation console. So, some folks dug in and decided that yes, the Wii is underpowered and the Xbox can indeed pee just slightly further. Others decided that yes, Robbie Bach is just jealous of the Wii’s success and is really just an idiot.

So, much like the experts set out to prove that Wii whiz comes up short, we at Brittlefish set out to prove that Robbie Bach was just jealous and that Wii whiz is more colorful than Xbox, even Xbox 360, whiz. Sales figures were gathered, graphs were created, pH kits and a ColorVision Spyder were ordered, and we were off to the races.

On a lark, we went to eWeek to read what he said. You know, to see for ourselves just how mean and jealous that Robbie Bach really is.

Wait a second, must have the wrong link. No, they all point there. Let’s see… look at it in Print mode. Um, okay search: “1.5″. Nothing. Search: “gamecube”. Nothing. Dang it. Oh, okay, this is part three of the interview. Back to part one. Search, and… nope. Part two? Nada. Okay, alright, let’s actually read part three.

Wait A Second

First off, Robbie Bach did not say Nintendo’s Wii was nothing more than GameCube 1.5. He may have implied it but he didn’t say it. Second, he didn’t come off as jealous. Actually, he sounds appreciative of a competitor’s success.

What Robbie Bach Really Said

What Bach said was that Nintendo struck a chord with the market, that he was surprised by the Wii’s broad success. Sure, he points to the Wii’s lack of graphics horsepower and its limited feature set, and to Nintendo’s challenge to move outside the casual gamespace.

In fact, he had some interesting things to say about how he views Microsoft’s and Nintendo’s differing market challenges.

So the challenge for us is how do we drive to more casual users, and how do we bring more casual experiences to Xbox and Windows? And the challenge for them is figuring out, “Hey, how do I broaden beyond a casual demographic?” We’ll see how that plays out.
…
I think Nintendo and Microsoft are clearly in the driver’s seat on what’s happening in this generation. And they’re different driver’s seats. In a way, … our circle and Sony’s circle overlap I would say 90 percent. Nintendo’s circle and Microsoft’s overlap say 20, 25, 30 percent, something like that.

The fact is, the Wii arguably does have slightly less raw graphics processing power than the original Xbox, and the Wii does lack simple features like DVD playback. Bach’s point is that the Nintendo platform’s future growth is limited by its graphics and feature shortcomings. He points to its controller as the reason for the Wii’s current success, and wonders if that appeal will be lasting. These are good points.

Sony Market Problems

His criticism, if you want to call it that, was reserved for Sony and their lack of success with the Playstation 3. In fact, Back sounds almost compassionate towards Sony.

It’s interesting to note that a year ago if somebody had said, “Hey, we won’t be discussing Sony,” that’s an interesting statement, and I think something that frankly hasn’t been written about very much.
…
But Sony I think has some real challenges. They’ve got a pricing problem, they have a cost problem, they have a content problem, and they don’t have an online service. But I’m just talking about the psychology of me doing an interview with you as a reporter coming in and not uttering the word Sony without me bringing it up.

Reality Check

Frankly it is not surprising that Wii fans would be stung by the GameCube 1.5 non-comment, and that some would set out to count the horses under the hood. It is a shame that the interview was reported for what it was not. The “Wii is GameCube 1.5″ slam has been floating around the Internet for some time and the headlines just used Bach’s mention of the Wii’s underpowered graphics as proof.

Here’s a news flash for you: Robbie Bach works for Microsoft and should be expected to promote their products to the detrimate of other companies’ products. He didn’t even do that to Nintendo in the interview. He merely pointed out some facts about graphics and features and pointed to Microsoft’s challenge to do better in the casual arena.

On the other hand, everyone is missing the point of the Nintendo Wii. It may incorporate older graphics technology and lack some features, but Nintendo decided instead to innovate in the fun department. Compared to Xbox and Playstation 3, it is inexpensive fun, different fun, active fun. In the end, the only measure that matters is how much fun it provides and for how long.

Nintendo is running a contest where you can win one of six custom-painted Art of Wii consoles. The contest ends tonight, April 30th, 2007, and is limited to Canadian members of My Nintendo.

Even if you’re not a Canadian member of My Nintendo, it’s worth checking out the art. Nothing stopping you from painting your own Wii.