4 - Dolphin Olympics 2
It’s the classic Quadruple Nice Entry Double Reversal Wraparound move. Textbook.
With a name as camp as a bowl full of clown fish, you’d be forgiven for skipping right past this entry, but you’d be wrong. So wrong, it may be the one thing you regret when laying on your death bed. Possibly.
Dolphin Olympics 2 is an aquatic based Tony Hawks style points fest. An extreme sport that only a turbo powered space Dolphin could achieve. The idea is to gain height through perfect jumps, entering the water at a correct angle to keep your speed up, dipping in and out of the waves, tail sliding across the water’s surface before powering up into the atmosphere, tail surfing across the stars.
It’s a beautifully animated affair, a bright and cheery game that highlights the carefree attitude of Flash gaming. It has some brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide references, a wonderfully difficult to achieve collection of badges to grab (Thanks again to Kongregate) and a cheesy menu screen that’ll make you feel like a 12 year old girl again. Or a particularly effeminate boy. Whatever floats your Dolphin.
3 - Grow Cube
It may look confusing, but that’s because it is.
Grow Cube is truly different. Where most puzzle games see fit to throw you a match-3 or block puzzle style game, Grow Cube just... Well... Changes everything.
The idea of the game is difficult to explain when you haven’t played it before. You have a big brown cube in the centre of the game, surrounding this are a number of buttons, each one depicting an object to drop into, onto or around the Cube. A simple click on one of these buttons will make the item appear, and an animation will occur.
And that, in a nutshell is it. But that’s not it. You got it wrong. Start again. The idea here is to make everything grow, level up, evolve, until you reach the final evolution and your Cube becomes a living world. By following the animations each turn, and working out where each item fits into another, you have to click on the buttons in the correct order. It’s simple to play, hypnotic in it’s execution and beautiful to watch. Go play it.
