Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

Please Sir, Can I Have Some Gore?

Orphan Feast is a delightfully strange game, inspired by a combination of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Dickens' Oliver Twist -- with a little Dr. Seuss and Tim Burton thrown into the mix. In Orphan Feast you play Creeky Tom, a ghoulish rogue whose goal is to prowl the dark alleys and rundown streets of old London and capture the homeless street urchins you'll find everywhere there, gathering them in a sack, while avoiding a cast of crazy characters out to foil you in bizarre ways. The orphans -- if you make it back to your lair -- are…
December 23, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month
Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

Scuttlebuggery: Soccer for Scarabs

Scuttlebuggery is a stylishly steampunk online promotional game for the goth band Johnny Hollow, brought to you by the geniuses at My Pet Skeleton Productions (maker of "A Murder of Scarecrows" featured here awhile back). In this game you play a scuttlebug -- a round beetle who must figure out how to push bubbles of absinthe toward a drain, dodging beetles and fluttering moths along the way. It's like soccer for scarabs. And though it sounds like child's play, it is a Sisyphean challenge that will likely make you appreciate the vast labor of the insect world, scuttling all around…
September 27, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month
Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

Evolving Your Monster

"Monster Evolution" is a clever online game from Nob Studio, in which you terrorize a city eating humans -- and if you eat enough of them, you can "evolve" into creatures with special powers and take out the shooters and tanks that come after you. It's like Cloverfield meets John Carpenter's The Thing. Almost. Try "Monster Evolution" for yourself, and play God(zilla) for awhile: http://www.nobstudio.com/games.html?fid=&gid=18
June 10, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month
Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

Broken Picture Telephone

Remember Telephone -- the "pass it down" game of crazy miscommunication from your youth? Well you no longer have to get uncomfortably close to your neighbor to whisper into their ear. Broken Picture Telephone is an ingenious game of text and stick figure drawing that will have you laughing for hours. It involves responding to obscure messages by drawing what they say -- and vice versa -- until you get a very bizarre story reminiscent of David Lynch's surrealism. For example, my first test of the game gave me the sticky note above ("a smiling bowl of meatballs with feet…
April 10, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month
Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

The Haunt’s Horror Arcade

I should be working, but how can I when there are maniac clowns on the loose? The new "MySpace for Horror Fans Only" website, The Haunt, hosts a bounty of online "flash" games you can play online for free in their macabre Arcade section. I'm not too old to admit I thoroughly enjoyed the silly survivalist massacre known as Clown Killer 2.   After a ten minute session, I became the champion player of CK2 with a new high score...which will surely be defeated soon by some John Wayne Gacy wannabe who has more time on his or her plastic-gloved hands. I'm haunting the…
January 30, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month