Let's Ban Hydrogen

Hey everybody, welcome to Free Game Friday. For this week’s edition, I’ve taken some inspiration from the awesome movie UP and have chosen “Higher!”. Higher! is an addictive little browser based game that has a pretty basic goal- to get your house higher.

To play Higher!, you click on balloons you see while dodging balloon bursting bombs. You have more options than just hitting your left or right arrow key, however. You can drag bombs into each other, which will cause them to explode and give you plenty of coins as a bonus. These coins can be used to purchase all sorts of upgrades for yourself, like defense for your balloons or more “up power”. As the amount of balloons you attach to your house grows, the surprise meter fills up more and more. When it completes, you get (surprise!) a surprise.

It’s pretty easy to pick up how to play this game, and once you do, there’s plenty to draw you back into playing for just a few more minutes. If I had to name one drawback, I’d have to mention the game’s music. It isn’t offensive by any means, but I thought it got a bit irritating after playing it for a while. Other than that though, there’s not much not to enjoy about Higher!. If you want to play it, click here.

Before anything else, I want to go ahead and apologize for not being so good about these posts the last two weeks. I’ve had two extremely hectic and stressful Fridays in a row, and I haven’t really had the time to play and compose a post. Since I feel like I could’ve easily managed this just about any of day of the week, I’m going to try to just write these earlier in the week and then schedule them to post on Friday. If I run into a situation where I don’t manage to get my post up on time, I’ll go ahead and backdate the post.

Now that that’s settled, I’d like to tell you a little bit about Self Destruct. Self Destruct is a neat little shoot em up game that lets you play for 10 minutes before you self destruct. You have to make it through as many waves of attacks and rack up as many points as possible before that time comes- if you can manage to stay alive until then.

Even if shoot em ups are not your forte (I am terrible at them), this is a pretty addictive game. Because each game is so quick it’s easy to say “oh, just one more try” over and over again. For those of you who are skilled at the genre, there’s an online leaderboard that you can try to get on. The music and sound are fun and really add to the experience, and while things are pretty simple, the game’s art looks nice.

If you’d like to download Self Destruct, go here.

Dragon Age: Origins is a new Bioware RPG set in an exciting fantasy world with a bunch of elves and dwarves and dragons and stuff. I’m not sure why, now that they’re making a game not based on D&D, they didn’t decide to go with something creative. They could maybe have even made a race that’s like elves and is just called something else.

The plot is excellent. You play as an unlikely hero who is charged with defeating an ancient evil horde of creatures, who derpy derr. It’s full of insane twists. At one point, I discovered a character I thought was a good guy was actually evil, and ugly, to boot. Then, later, a character I believed to be my ally turned out to be a villain. As I continued onward, I discovered a twisted, unpredictable tale was unfolding in which the forces of good and evil derpy derp derr derr derpy derp dum. Also, everyone talks in an English accent, except I met a couple of Frenchies, too. Unfortunately they did not refer to my mother as a hamster at any point.

My character is a young lady elf with short red hair, and she’s very cute if I may say so myself. She never says anything, which feels silly after playing Mass Effect, but she does have hair roughly the same color as Crono, which helps it feel a bit more normal. She’s a mage, although as soon as I level up I’ll be able to take the Arcane Warrior subclass, which will be awesome. I plan to shoot a large fireball at some Evil Men, which will explode and, in addition to knocking them down, light them on fire, which, from what I am told, Hurts. By the time they get up I will have begun to hit them really hard with a sword. A magic sword, by the way, engraved as it is with mystic runes of Hurting. In this game you can get a mentally retarded dwarf to use runes you find to enchant your weapons. Everything I said in the sentence preceding this one is literally true.

I have to give the developers kudos for resisting the likely tremendous urge to fill every name with “ae” and “wyn.” There is, however, a point in this game where a man says something like, “Dragons are no joke.”

This man is right. I woke up the dragon he referred to and it killed me. I had to start over from my last save. It definitely wasn’t a joke.

Overall, I rate this game “Decent For Helping you Hold Out For Mass Effect 2” Out of 10.

It’s just about Halloween, which obviously means that this week’s free game will need to feature zombies! There are quite a few good zombie games out there, and it took some thought, but I ultimately decided that my first Halloween edition of Free Game Friday should feature Deanimator.

Deanimator is a really neat flash shooting game inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The gameplay in this one is pretty basic; you click to shoot down zombies and reload your gun. If you don’t slay the zombies before they get close enough to grab you, they’ll kill you in an entertainingly gruesome way. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock the ability to use a shot gun, which takes less shots to kill a zombie but longer to reload. You can use the shift key to cycle back and forth between the two weapons. I personally prefer using both weapons to using just one, but your mileage may very.

In spite of this game’s simplicity, it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of dread you get when you’re not sure if you’ll manage to reload in time to get the shots off in time, and it’s really satisfying when you pull off a miraculous comeback. The game’s graphics are fairly plain, but I think they look great. I especially enjoy some of the death effects. This one’s browser based, and it’s easy to give a quick playthrough, so I suggest that any fan of killing zombies check this one out.

If you’d like to play Deanimator, click here.

Yes, this is a real, official Barbie toy from Mattel. Yes, “Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken” is his actual name. You can order him here at Entertainment Earth. Have you ever seen a toy more utterly PIMP than this?!

Cool sophistication in breezy Palm Beach! Sporting a dashing jacquard-patterned jacket with a light pink polo shirt and crisp white pants, Ken doll is ready for Palm Beach social season, sunning by the pool and a stroll with his little companion. Fashion designed exclusively for the Silkstone Barbie doll body. Includes Ken doll, jacket, pink polo shirt, white shoes, dog with leash, swim trunks and accessories, doll stand and certificate of authenticity. For the adult collector. Order yours today!

Daddy, I finally know what I want to be when I grow up!!!

And I’m back. It’s funny, for the first two thirds or so of 2009, I thought it was a really dry year for music, but it turns out that all the best stuff is just coming out in the last quarter or so. Particularly of note in this entry are Jemina Pearl’s first solo album and the new Tegan and Sara, which I’ve decided to make the recipient of my brand new “TK’s First Choice” award.

Don’t forget that you can stream the entirety of all these albums once by following the Lala link under their title!

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For this week’s edition of Free Game Friday, I’ve chosen the adorable puzzle game Red Remover. I think most of you will be happy to know that it’s a browser based game, so nothing to download.

The concept of Red Remover is pretty simple: Green blocks are good. Red blocks are bad. In each of the game’s levels, you must figure out a way to take out all the red blocks on your screen without damaging the surprisingly cute green ones. The way that gravity in the game is implemented is consistent, so solving each level is skill-based rather than luck based, making it a lot less frustrating than similar games I’ve played. Red Remover also has a level editor, so you can create your own puzzles for your buds (or fellow shriners).

The only real complaint I have about the game is that a lot of the levels are just way too easy. It gets a bit harder as it progresses, but I would’ve enjoyed it more if they’d made it more challenging, especially since you aren’t penalized for retries and walkthroughs are available. Nonetheless, it’s still a great way to pass the time.

To play Red Remover, click here.

Let’s fuck! I’ll fuck anything that moves!

Here’s a quick post just to bring something to your attention that I find extremely awesome. Mashed in Plastic is a remix/mash up album. Now wait. Don’t close this page just yet. If you’re anything like me the minute you hear the word “mashup” you think of some Youtube punk slamming two shitty 50-cent tracks together and calling it his own. No, “Mashed in Plastic” is a superb mashup album putting together random music with music from the movies of David Lynch. Check out the video below. If it doesn’t appeal to you after this move along.

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I had been hoping for more responses, but seeing as we’re just starting out, it’s probably going to take a while to attract a bit more attention. In any case, it’s time I went ahead and got this posted. I want to thank the two people that did respond – arthurgolden and Ndi. I appreciate your taking the time to write in and give me some material to post here. So, let’s have a look…

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