Insert Coin

Well, ultimately E3 proved to be pretty disappointing.  Sure, there were a few demos of some of the more anticipated games this year, but there were fewer surprises than expected.  Of course, it will be an even bigger disappointment if I don’t get my XBox 360 back in the next week so I have it in time to play pre-ordered copy of Soul Calibur IV.  Fortunately, I did come across a pair of Flash games today that got this week off to a more entertaining start.

The first was the physics based puzzler, Fantastic Contraption, which immediately put me in mind of The Incredible Machine, though I quickly realized the game is less about creating crazed Rube Goldberg-esque guantlets than it is about creating the eponymous contraptions.  In the 20 available levels you need to create some kind of device for each that is capable of pulling, carrying or launching a target object from the construction area to the goal area.  While you can use each of the 3 wheel types or either of the 2 resizable rod types as much as you like, you are limited by the dimensions of your construction area. You are able to connect rods to each other or to various points of the wheels to enable a variety of different effects. Even better, you can save your more impressive creations so that other people can test drive them. Most of my solutions ended up being pretty ramshackle, but the tank, at right, suggests the potential for creating some advanced vehicles. You can access and rate saved designs from within the game and I would strongly recommend you check out what people have come up with.

The second game I came across today was Bubble Tanks 2, an aquatic shooter. The game takes place in a series of bubbles where you steer your “tank” with the keyboard and shoot with the mouse. It’s a fairly standard Flash shooter, but the ability to upgrade your ship with the bubbles left behind by dead enemies and the fluid controls kept me playing longer than I intended. Making a solid shooter really is all about getting the right feel for the motion and keeping a steady progression of difficulty and Bubble Tanks 2 nails it on both counts.

But what I had really meant to do this evening is get through the last few levels of Psychonauts, which I was finally prompted to play when it was introduced in the Backlog segment of last week’s 1UP FM podcast. Since I finished sending off the first wave of resumes this afternoon, I figured I was due for a bit of a break. Unfortunately, I think I sent one of the resumes out with the wrong cover letter. I have to confess I’m not a fan of some of the job application websites out there that manage to automate the process just enough to lull you into clicking the wrong button at the wrong time. Of course, I have to finish this blog post before I can go do that, so …