The more you play ‘em, The more you love ‘em: online browser adventure games. These are not games to play at lunch, rather you sit down to play them and waste your evening, when there’s nothing on TV. Amazing what great games are available. Click on the links to play.

Harry Quantum: Episode 1

Get your own Inspector Gadget, the creator of this game must have thought. Well he did. And the first person you meet in the game is B.A. Baracus. What, a look alike? Shut up you fool! Harry Quantum is one of those adventure games which – they say, is different than other adventure games. I got stuck at one point, where you need to use an inventory item on an object, while I already lost it in another scene to another object. So this is one of those adventures which you can lose. The creators put a lot of humor in to the game, which makes this game very nice to play.

Create a crop circle, to attract an alien ship

Find all hidden TV-signals within 30 steps, minesweeper but now different

The Fog Fall 3

Very atmospheric adventure game. The art and sound effect really give an intriguing and mysterious feeling while you play. I didn’t have a clue what the objective is, which is a big positive point. The game is about finding out, what the game is about. This game has an autosave function, so that you can return at a later moment. Very cool feature!

In a mysterious house, just browsing..

Somewhere under the ground, you find a broken bicycle

The controls can be somewhat unnatural at times. However the story, the graphics and the way objects are hidden in the scenes make me really appreciate this game.

Morning Star

You crashed your spaceship onto the planet and you friend has been speared in the cockpit. Great game, with great graphics. The objective, as far as I’ve played, is to repair the ship, rescue the speared captain, and get the spaceship back in the air. I think. This addicting game has a save game feature, which is really useful.

Entered the engine room with an electric doll

The suit sealed the speared captain’s wounds

Cargo blocking your way

Keywords: nice try, okay and brilliant. What makes a good game? Well, a good game is one which people like to play twice. How do you get there? Well, you need to give the player that special feeling.

Nuclei
Nuclei is a nice try for a game. Quite simple, however takes too long to load. The object of the game is to protect your own ball in the middle of the screen, from incoming balls. You do this by rotating some forcefield around, on which the enemy balls will bounce. Well, that’s about it. After playing a few minutes, you have been there and done that.

That blue thing in the middle needs to be protected from the green things

Spaceball
Spaceball is an okay arkanoid clone. I have never seen anything like this. The object of the game is to play away all the colored bricks in the level. However, you do not control a platform to bounce the ball, no, you control the ball itself. An okay game to kill some time.

Green bricks when the ball-color is green

Coma
Coma is one of those diamonds you find on the internet. Absolutely brilliant. You play some black blob character and you start in some sort of haunted-house scene. When you leave the house, you enter into a cartoonist world, where the flowers wave as you pass them. I’m still not sure what the objective of the game is. But that’s also a positive point, you need to play it to discover the objective.

You walk past that haunty window, and birds fly-by

A game creator needs to play games, to be inspired for his own games. But you can also play games for fun if you like.

 
Traffic Control, Traffic Control 2
I remember when I was quite younger; about 1983, I had one of those books with the source code for games. After you entered the code line-by-line on your Commodore Vic-20, you could play the game. Of course we didn’t have storage at that time, too expensive, so typing-over was the standard painful ritual, before the fun. Some games were unplayable, because you needed “extended memory”, which we didn’t have.

One of the unplayable games from that book was called “Manhattan”. As I understood from the description and the source code, the game was a matrix of Manhattan blocks, and cars were supposed to cross the streets, while the player adjusted traffic-lights to avoid car crashes, traffic jams and so on. My curiosity for this unplayable game probably became some sort of youth-trauma, because still today, I would like to play “Manhattan”. And what do you know? Somebody made this game in Flash – Traffic Control and Traffic Control 2.

Help traffic through the city

Both games are a partial implementation of “Manhattan”. In “Manhattan” you had car-crashes; people could become impatient and ignore the traffic-lights. Without all those features, both “Traffic Control” games are already hard enough. The second version of the game, significantly demonstrates, what I call, challenge-by-accumulation. I mean that a game or level is made harder, by adding more-of-the-same. Traffic Control just adds more cars per minute when the game advances. The second version adds trucks, which need more space. The object of the game is to see how long you can stand.

I prefer new challenges over challenge-by-accumulation. Make a complete different level, with different cars, with different features. The trucks in the second version of the game is a nice idea, however it does not contribute much to the gameplay; it just sucks up your resources (space) and you have no control about it. These games lack suspense because you can’t beat the computer. That’s probably the reason why I wouldn’t play these games a second time.

Panda’s Bigger Adventure
One of the most amazing things these days is that people create quests in Flash. Quests need a lot of graphics and sound. And ofcourse, a quest needs a plot. To be honest, I’ve been playing Panda’s Bigger Adventure until I finished it. Most puzzles are not too hard, but still the game is entertaining, for those quest lovers.

What is Elvis doing in that strange device?

One small point of critique is that the game has gathered all sorts of ideas from famous media. There is “Radar”, based on the clerk character from the comedy serie “Mash”. You have “Private Ryan” from the movie “Saving Private Ryan” and ofcourse Leonardo Da Vinci from history.

 
I like it when people create their own ideas, not basing them on something which already exists. However, creating your own ideas in a game is very, very hard. There is very little opportunity for this. There are only few games which became a movie later, like Prince of Persia, Doom, Tomb Raider, while many movies became a game. So let’s not be too critical on this point.

Panda’s Bigger Adventure keeps you playing and leaves you with a satisfied feeling when you have finished it.

Tombscape

Tombscape is like a quest, which reminds me of Myst. The puzzles in the game are not self-explanatory. For each puzzle, first you need to discover the question, and then find the answer. It takes quite some time to download, but the graphics are really great.

A tunnel between two puzzles

I need a triangle key plus all gems to open that door

In my honest opinion, Tombscape is addicting. Not only because of the great graphics, very much also because of its great puzzles. It’s a long download, but it certainly is worth it.