Let's pick some flowers!

Attention All Animal Lovers

The Movies puts you in charge of a major motion picture studio, and pretty much everything else that goes along with it. Hire actors, fire actors and send them to rehab. Assign directors to movies. Research new filmmaking technologies. Decide where on the lot to plant a tree. Determine whether there's more money to be made in comedies, romances or those things where second rate comedians dress up like fat women...I'm not sure into what genre those are supposed to fit.

Fizzball is Breakout with an eco-friendly, robot accepting, alien sympathizing theme. You are Professor Fizzwizzle, because, with a name like that, no one else wants to be. The Professor has built some sort of rail system across a series of islands, and he ends up using it in a very unique way when the island becomes deserted of human life, leaving the animals behind to fend for themselves. I was always under the impression that animals on islands generally saw humans as a bit of a nuisance, but these animals depend upon human life, so it's up to the good Professor to keep them fed. He does this with a bubble. And his train.

There's something pure about a video game in which your only weapon is your head. It's like the old days of Pac Man and Pitfall in which games were violent, sure, but in a pillow-fight sort of way. Pac Man ate the bad guys, after all, Pitfall Harry was mauled by alligators and killed by scorpions. What a charming way to go! BlockHeads Clash is along those lines. You're a guy armed with nothing more than the inability to suffer a concussion. This is good, as you won't just be using your head to hit enemies, but to hit the floor, boxes...anything standing in your way as you navigate a labyrinth of enemies and puzzles.

There's a bit of a story in Atlantis Sky Patrol, which places you neither in Atlantis nor in the sky, making the ironic title a double misnomer. How's that for fun! See, there are 100 doomsday devices scattered about the Earth (because when planning doomsday, the Atlantians understood the importance of redundancy). So, you move across a map of the Earth in a predetermined route to disable these devices.

Widening the scope of games in the "combine things so they blow up" category, Pirate Poppers gets some things right, and confounds the gamer with its minor quirks and strategy-killers. Each screen opens with a blank "pathway" that twists around the screen, ultimately ending at a barrel. From the far end comes a series of cannonballs of various colors. Able to scroll across the bottom of the screen, you are tasked with blasting a colored cannonball into the procession, in an effort to combine three or more like-colored cannonballs. When this happens, they explode.

I enjoyed Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects. It isn't about solving crimes, it's about finding things. It's like those old Where's Waldo? books, only you're looking for multiple items, not just a dorky looking guy in a red and white hat. The items can be hidden in impossible places, there's often more than one of each item, and the items aren't always what you're looking for.

Professor Fizzwizzle was busy working on another brilliant scientific experiment when his robotic assistants went haywire and threw him out of his own lab. In this side-scroller platform game, you have to make your way past a series of obstacles to get back into the lab and return the robots to normal.

SketchFighter 4000 Alpha's hook is, of course, the graphics. It doesn't look like any video game you've played before, it looks like a sketch; a home room doodle come to life inside your Trapper Keeper. The visuals are basically nothing more than crude line drawings on top of graph paper. The only texture you'll see here are the cross-hatches of the border walls. The only motion comes from that which can be destroyed. The only color comes from the weapons and such. SketchFighter remains true to its doodle inspirations right down to the explosions of enemies; after they're destroyed, eraser marks remain. It's actually quite funny.

To this day, Time Pilot is one of my favorite arcade games. Perhaps this is why I'm such a fan of Freeverse's Wingnuts. I absolutely love Wingnuts 2, which I continue to play with frequency. And now that the original Wingnuts: Temporal Navigator has been released for free to the Mac community, it looks like I'll be getting back into that.

This is a good game that's worth at least a demo download. Experienced gamers will probably find the $20 price tag a bit steep considering the game's simplicity and, therefore, short shelf life. But those who like their action in manageable doses, and especially those with child gamers in the house, should get more than their money's worth. And besides, what else are you going to spend $20 on? Pizza?