awesome wonderful

When I first saw this I thought to myself, Dolphin Olympics 2. Two? This original game was popular enough for a sequel? And I gave the game a shot, and, hey, it’s not bad. It’s definitely a great little time waster, and an addictive one at that. You’re a dolphin and you can do all sorts of tricks in the water, and, as you keep chaining tricks (“Triple Reversal + Quadruple Schooled + Triple Nice Entry + Wraparound” anyone?) you keep getting more points. After you get the hang of it, it’s not too hard to get enough height to go soaring right into space. Wish there was a music or something to it though. [via]

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! :)