101 Free Games Part 1: Ray Hound and Harmotion

The ever-loving 1up posted this article on The Best 101 Free Games. As such, I figured I should play the interesting looking ones. Duhh.

Ray Hound:

This is by the same genius who did Warning Forever, and it shows. It’s an addictive, mathematical shooter, where your teeny little spaceship gets to bounce, reflect, and redirect the baddies rays back at them. Pros are the masterful design, control, and art. Cons are no sound, no way to save your progress (yeah yeah, classic shooter, blah blah blah.), and potential repetitive stress injury from waving your mouse hand around. Recommended, but it’s very much not a long term thing.

Harmotion:

A stupidly simple twist on a shooter: You’re under attack by big fucking bubbles, and you have to shoot them and suck in the power-points to get to the next level. But three quick, genius twists make this a great game.

1: To suck things towards, you have to hold down the shoot button, so you can’t shoot.

2: Vacuuming up power-points also draws the big bubbles towards you. Hello tension-in-design.

3: Make it MULTIPLAYER. Wow. Suddenly an average, quirky little shooter becomes just a blast. Between avoiding bubbles, your opponent’s fire, absorbing power, and absorbing the one-shot powerups, you’ll never run out of things to do. Really, really, really well done.

Pros: Super graceful design, multiplayer is a blast, the four different ships play just differently enough, multiplayer is a blast. Cons: Kinda laggy. For a game that brags about “interactive music”, the music and sonic interactvity is just fucking awful. There’s also no easy, fast way to get back into an online game short of restarting and picking up the first “radar” power-up, which acts as a matchmaker. Why should it take me ages to get back to the best part of the game? With that said, this one is highly recommended, highly addictive, and *much* deeper than it looks.