Posts Tagged ‘ flash ’

I’ve come across a great online puzzle game called 3D Logic. 3D Logic is played on three faces of a cube. Each of the three cube faces has a grid on it (of varying sizes depending on the level.) Some of the grid squares will have a colored outline, two of each color, and the goal is to fill the empty grid squares with the appropriate color to create a path between the two outlined squares of the same color. The first levels are easy, but it gets tricky pretty quickly. In the beginning, I could figure out all of the paths and then fill them in. Later, I had to fill the paths in one block at a time, alternating colors.

There are no instructions with the game, which was a little bit confusing at first. To fill in a square, you must first select one of the outlined squares. Then both squares with the same colored outline will be highlighted and you can fill in empty squares with that color.

I’ve been trying to figure out a puzzle game that I found recently called “portal“. The portal board is made up of 256 discs arranged in a 16X16 square. Each disc has an elbow shaped joint on it and if you click a disc, it rotates clockwise. If one of the end of the joint lines up with an end on an adjacent disc, that creates a connection and the adjacent disc will in turn rotate clockwise. This process continues until a disc rotates and no connections are made. The goal of each level is to get a certain number of connections using only three moves. The goal number for connections starts in the hundreds and goes up from there. So, to win, you have to chain your connections and make a move that continues making connections for as long as possible.

My frustration is that, unless you’re very good at planning, finding a good moves seems serendipitous. There are ways to insure better moves, but good moves gain hundreds of connections, and I’ve occaionally gotten over a thousand. It seems like I could never have known this before making the move. I’ve come up with strategies that seem to work a little bit, but in the end whether I advance or not seems to depend on luck. I’m curious to see if anyone can come up with a good strategy for the game.

Orbox and Orbox B present a familiar puzzle game with some interesting added twists. The basic rules of the game are simple: Pilot your little space craft to the gate. The only catch is that once you start moving in one direction, you can’t stop or change direction until you hit an obstacle. To make things more interesting, the game includes bombs that explode ten seconds after the first time you touch them, gates that close after you pass through them, and many other obstacles. The blog Passion for Puzzles notes that on some levels the horizontal and vertical axes will switch randomly. This must happen on higher levels as I didn’t notice this in the first ten or so levels that I completed.

I mentioned a little flash puzzle game called Hapland last week. Well, Hapland 3 has just come out. (And, in case you’re wondering, yes there is a Hapland 2)

I’ve encountered a couple flash puzzle games on the internet that I would put in the “do things in the right order to complete the puzzle” category. The two games are Hapland (through the Dumb: The Game site) and Warbears (through Yunikos Special Storage — warning: there’s a solution on this site). The games both involve an environment that you interact with in specific ways. For example, you might click a warbear and have him throw a grenade or you might click a stick figure in hapland and have him fire a cannon. The set of things that you can do is limitted and you probably need to do them all at some point, you just have to know when. Of course, trial and error can lead you through the game, but there are often clues to indicate what you should do next and that’s where the puzzle comes in. The games are fairly diverting and should only require 15-20 minutes of your time. They remind me in some ways of an old computer game I used to play called Gobliiins.

I always enjoy simple flash games, so I was pleased to find out about the game Rotation through the Random Good Stuff blog.

The playing area is a hexagon containing colored marbles with faces. When you click on a marble the six marbles surrounding it all rotate counter-clockwise. The goal is to match the smaller layout to the upper right. You have a limitted number of moves to solve each level and the levels become more difficult as you advance.

Anyone who likes mechanical games, like the Rubik’s Cube, should be interested. The main problem that I see with the game is that you can’t save your progress, so you may have to replay less exciting early levels to get to the puzzle you want to play.

I read over on N-Sider about a new puzzle game called Magnetica that will be released for Nintendo DS. It seems to be identical to a Japanese game called Puzzloop. I’ve never played Puzzloop but, from what I’ve read and the screenshots I’ve seen, it seems that there’s a flash game called “Bear and Cat” based on it which i have often played. (Note: Bear and Cat is not an English game, but it should be easy for puzzle solvers to figure out how to play. Also, I’d love it if anyone can tell why there’s a cat mentioned in the title.)

The game involves a line of colored spheres that travel in a fixed path, inching ever closer to your submarine. You destroy the spheres by shooting other colored spheres into the line. If you create a row of three or more of the same color the spheres explode. But if the line of spheres reaches your sub, you die. It’s fun, addictive, and worth a look.