Browser Games 5

It is time for another trio of browser games. This time around, I am going to mention three The Incredible Machine-like games. If you read through my old entries, you will see that I love TIM. I hope that someday a new version comes out. Until then, here are three web based games to tide us over. Oh as a fourth choice, I have previous mentioned WhizzBall.

BluePrint



The goal is to get the ball to the target. Each BluePrint level comes with a variety of items such as ramps, treadmills, nudges, and pipes. When properly placed, these items guide the ball to the target. When improperly placed, the ball goes flying off the wrong way. The physics model is realistic. One nice thing about BluePrint is the items have to placed in the grid, and thus no pixel level placement that some TIM games suffer from. One odd thing about BluePrint is that you only have a limited number of attempts at a given level before it resets. There are 28 levels which can be played in any order.

Impulse



This is a browser based demo/tutorial of a full game, a really good game. Again, the goal is to get the ball to the target. Sometimes, you have to activate the target by hitting a key object first. Each levels comes with some collection of exploding bombs, imploding bombs, bounce bombs, and teleporters for you to place. With each bomb, you also get to set its timer, how long after hitting start the bomb goes off. The timing on the bombs often has to be right down to the 1/50th of a second, but with Impulse's amazing replay feature this is not a burden. The demo comes with 20 levels. The full version comes with 100 levels.

Rubicon



Rubicon is a great game. What it might lack in graphics, it makes up for in tough puzzles. Also, users can and have submitted levels. This game is going to become a cult favorite. You have to move each numbered (in hex 0x0 to 0xf) create to its destination. To move those creates about, you have conveyer belts, pipes, dozer, ramps, winches. The best item though is the packer which takes two boxes, packs them together, and creates one new box whose label is the sum (mod 16) of the two inputs. As you might guess, people have already come up with some tough puzzles requiring this feature. There are only 12 prebuilt levels. Then you have to move onto the user made levels. These get tough. There are some devious people out there.