Much as I enjoy watching a morbidly obese man wearing nothing but clown shorts, a Batman mask, and purple balloons on his arms riding whatever deranged contraption I manage to come up with, I can't help but feel that my complete lack of skill at building an actually functional vehicle is hindering the potential fun to be had here. Dammit. :(
A fun idea here, but not so fun in its execution. The stress meter could be an entertaining and interesting mechanic, but it is implemented in a very unfortunate way in this case. There are instances where the game decides to spawn so few pills that it ends almost as soon as it begins regardless of any possible input from the player, and others when there are so many that you can stay more or less permanently overdosed. Combined with a frankly insane amount of lag for such a simple game, it makes for a frustrating experience at best, and yet another questionable choice for Badge of the Day. At least it doesn't demand much investment to get...
Honestly, this is just too grindy to be worth the investment of time demanded relative to the depth of its gameplay and overall content. You'll see more or less everything there is to see within a few minutes, and you'll do everything there is to do soon after, but getting the badge is a long, repetitive business. Granted, I'm not the sort of person the game's aimed at; I'm too slow and clumsy to be any good at running, jumping, quick time events, and the like. But the thing is, it's not even a matter of this one being *difficult* - it's just so repetitive that it quickly becomes very dull to mess with, and there's a strong luck-based element to boot. What eventually turned me off completely was being launched from one of the aforementioned QTEs directly into an enemy, thus ending what seemed to me to be a pretty long slog of a run at only 6000 score. There's a point when you realize there's better things to do with your time, man.
A brief and simple, but very cool RPG, well deserving of a badge! I enjoyed the system of exploration used by the game, with face-down cards representing unknown areas that are turned face-up and revealed by moving next to, as opposed to over them. This allows you to always make an informed decision about where you wish to go in the dungeon. I also found it refreshing that attacks do not miss, nor do they do more damage than normal at random. Outside of what is placed where on the map and the effects of certain types of tiles, the activation of which are entirely voluntary, the RNG exerts relatively little influence on the outcome of a given run, which some people such as myself may appreciate. My only real criticism of the game is that The Dark One is such an underwhelming opponent. He doesn't exactly inspire a lot of terror for a Dark Lord. But that just means he gets to hang out with Lord Voldemort in the Dark Lord Dunce Corner while Sauron laughs at them. 5/5!
Why on Earth does this *not* have badges? There's a lot of junk on this site that does, and some real gems that don't. It's never made sense to me. I love nonogram puzzles, and the Picma games provide some of the best I have seen.
You're right -- this was a bit overlooked. I'm going back through older games now to look for things that might be worth adding badges to, and I think I'm going to add this to my list if the API works well enough.
I come back to this one occasionally. It's a timeless game. Funny, sweet, strange, simple yet ingenious. You can't ask for a much better game on Kongregate.
I actually find the hard levels in these games very relaxing, if somewhat time consuming to do. There's a certain charming about the concept of a puzzle with a moving picture. They really aren't horrendously difficult, but they require patience and close inspection; I take breaks between every couple of puzzles or so. Some levels are, of course, better than others. When there's too much going on at once it becomes uncomfortable to even look at the mess, every little fragment having its own moving picture and all of them arranged without rhyme or reason, and I get a kind of sensory overload just staring at it. The best ones are those with at least some kind of logical starting point and without an *excessive* amount of visual noise, for lack of a better term. Not a bad way to get your puzzle fix, overall.
I enjoyed the first game in this series, and this one does not disappoint overall; however, the last real level, 19, nearly made me want to quit in frustration. It isn't hard to figure out a solution to it by examination, but actually getting it to work was a test of patience. It was very fiddly, requiring many restarts to get the motions just right, and the horizontally mobile trampoline can easily get stuck in a wall. A great game, but with a case of "That One Level" IMO...
I love the idea behind this and had a fun few minutes with the game. However, the fluid physics cause unnecessary complications beyond the player's control. Occasionally, a few little blocks will be squeezed out into the middle of nowhere at random and cause one to fail the level despite using the correct solution. The more different groups of colors there are, the more likely this is to occur. Otherwise, this is a nice series of puzzles!
I made a point of getting every last scrap of buried junk in the game before killing the wizard. Alas, the Treasure Reclamation badge is borked for me as well. Not a big deal, but it is a bit of a shame.
Further testing reveals that every great once in a while you can barely make the first jump, and I got about three "perfects" in a row before promptly dying again. Perhaps there is more promise to this technique than I had thought. Needs more testing...
"Interesting (?)" fun fact: it appears after some admittedly brief testing that if you begin the game holding down the spacebar and never let up, you will inevitably die after exactly four jumps. Apparently that first gap is just there to prevent you from leaving something on your keyboard to hold down the spacebar and letting the RNG play the game for you. This is unfortunate, because this medium badge indeed really, really sucks and depends quite a lot on RNG anyway. Le sigh.
Seriously, it's so random it's funny. I've only been at it for a few minutes for the medium badge, and I've seen tunnels literally as soon as I click to start, a near wall of X's that was almost impossible to avoid immediately after a tunnel, 3 jumps at about the same time making it appear as if the right side of the screen was shouting "JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!", and sometimes it's comparatively really boring and you never really get anywhere. Patience more than anything seems to be key...
A person called Foxy Ninja in the comments notes that city recapturing is drastically reduced when not using the fast forward button. This is absolutely true, and makes the difference between an unplayable game and a pretty decent one. Thank you, Foxy Ninja!
The game is won. It's not so bad once you know this bit of trivia. If you save up enough money to be able to make full upgrades after a company expansion, you can make progress reasonably quickly, and it actually becomes quite easy once you unlock the super-effective zombies. Maxed out berserkers and trojan horses used equally together works well enough before then. Good luck to everyone willing to go for these badges. Phew.
After almost a year, I've come back to try to at least get the easy badge here. It all starts so well. You sit and wait until you have some nice upgrades, you gather a fine little army, and you take a couple of countries. Yet again, however, the rate at which your cities are randomly and unavoidably yoinked away from you completely ruins the game for me. "Conquering" a country should at least mean something. You'd think if you've wiped out the entire population of Africa you could get some peace there, but nope. If anything, "conquering" Africa seemed to anger the population and kickstart the good old city-a-day loss. I can't even hold on to the poles consistently. It's hard to enjoy the game for what it is when taking cities or even entire countries does so little to actually secure your progress.
The game is a lot of fun, and does a number of things quite well. You could do worse on Kongregate. If you enjoy bullet hell, upgrades, an actual storyline, and a variety of weapons to choose from, this is worth playing.
Unfortunately, there are some questionable design decisions here. The uselessness of the shop is well documented in the comments; it deliberately keeps most things just out of affordable range, making gold useless. Crafting is the main source of equipment, but rather than choosing what sort of item you wish to create, the game throws a random selection of things on a spinning wheel minigame, and this can be frustrating. You spend two crystals hoping for a better weapon, but click a moment too soon and end up with a ship hull. Skills gained from levels are fairly lackluster as well, so you depend quite a lot on what the Wheel of Fortune gives you. It beats an endless grind for gold, at least Flawed but fun, as are many of Berzerk's games.
I love the concept, but I'm really turned off after finding that spending all of my money on a horse still does not allow me to outrun the goddamned ninjas. Fighting is a chore this early on, and it's not as if the little dorks seem to actually have any money on them or anything. Not here, at any rate. I came here to do business, not fight ninjas. Ninjas that run faster than horses.
Little dude will literally risk life and limb for that one hat. That's devotion, man. I like him.
I enjoyed this one. It's short and sweet and quite clever. 5/5. The last level and a couple of others required a certain level of physical precision that took me off guard in an otherwise very relaxed puzzle game, but even with my extremely poor level of dexterity it's not too frustrating. The only thing that's missing is a proper ending. I want to know where this dude is going in life from here on out, man! He's going places.
 "Dream Car Racing Evo"){kind=icon}
 "Death Dice Overdose"){kind=icon}
 "Flood Runner 4"){kind=icon}
 "Landor Quest 2"){kind=icon}
 "Picma"){kind=icon}
 "i saw her standing there"){kind=icon}
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 "String Theory 2"){kind=icon}
 "Coloruid"){kind=icon}
 "The Legend of the Golden Robot"){kind=icon}
 "Epic Coaster"){kind=icon}
 "Solipskier"){kind=icon}
 "Zombies, Inc."){kind=icon}
 "Sky Quest"){kind=icon}
 "Caravaneer"){kind=icon}
 "Pursuit of hat"){kind=icon}
You're right -- this was a bit overlooked. I'm going back through older games now to look for things that might be worth adding badges to, and I think I'm going to add this to my list if the API works well enough.