awesome wonderful

Come on, who doesn’t love lego minifigs? Apparently not The Sun, who’s all up in arms over minifigs which to them look apparently like islamic terrorists. Doesn’t look like it’s hurt Brickarms though, who are now completely backordered on their minifigs, ostensibly because of all the press this has generated. They still have weapon packs for sale, which, quite frankly are even more awesome then the minifigs themselves. I mean come on, who wouldn’t want a lego sniper rifle? [via]

I know the guy who wrote this game, so I’m gonna plug it. :D

Eversion is this random little platformer made by Zaratustra (who has a bunch of other indie games to his name already) made for TIGSource’s Commonplace Book Competition. The concept behind Eversion is that to get past certain obstacles you have to press the ‘everse’ button at certain spots in the game causing the entire game to change with everything getting progressively darker, initially starting from a happy cheerful platformer to ending up eventually at oh-god-why-is-everything-trying-to-kill-me. The entire game transforms as you go, with enemies (and the scenery!) getting replaced with more dangerous versions, entire levels taking on gloomier feels, including the nice touch of the cheerful music from world 1 (gleefully ripped from Cocoron) just turning downright grim as you go through the game.

The first couple levels mostly ease you into the various ways the game expects you to solve puzzles and navigate obstacles with the eversion mechanic, with the game getting harder as it goes on (along with a near-pixel-perfect jump in world 4 that people have complained about). The last couple levels are great platforming action though and going through the game again to collect all the gems for the real ending (which is great, btw) gives it an extra bit of replayability.

The TIGForums post for the game is here, if you want to leave feedback for Zara.

Saw Fat Cat (flash game) over on MetaFilter (also, a writeup on jayisgames, which I haven’t read yet.).

It’s actually quite fun. Enthralling even. You play this Owl, who’s apparently been tasked to protect a Cat of questionable stature. Hold down the mouse button to shoot enemies down, while the difficulty comes in using Owl to rescue Cat from harm’s way (literally, dragging Cat out of the way or walking right into bullets to stop them, while Owl is impervious to damage, and Cat can only take three hits). Scrambling to feed Cat to power up Cat’s ‘burp’ attack is required to get through certain parts (or, just use it take out swarms of enemies at once! - Although, sometimes trying to get it to trigger in the heat of battle is kinda hard).

The interesting part is that most of the levels are broken down into individual segments which serve mostly as puzzles. Most of the puzzles are the twitchy-action kind, but, they are certainly puzzling/interesting enough to make the game worth playing. Some stages will take multiple tries, as the puzzles will need to be solved by trial-and-error occasionally. There are also epic boss fights that are strangely reminiscent of japanese bullet-hell shooters (Touhou, anyone?), where Cat invariably dies almost immediately, until at least you figure out where to stash him while Owl takes down the boss.

Anyway, it’s a good way to waste an afternoon (or a night, if you can’t go to sleep for some bizarre reason, and I can’t think of anything better to do right now anyway). (Lemme go hold down that mouse button some more – *pew*pew*pew* – Oh, the music and the sound effects are great too, especially, when Cat gets hit, and you hear that meow!-i-got-hit-meow! :)