Kongregate posts

For a day that's only a few days away from THE BIG DAY, we certainly had a ton of news to report. Hopefully tomorrow things will actually slow down a tick:

• As promised, the first episode of the Back To The Future game series is now available for download at Telltale Game's web site.
• Steam has a number of updates today for games like Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Blood Bowl Legendary Edition and Alternitiva,
• Steam also has a new Super Meat Boy update that adds the World of Goo ball to the game.
• Steam has a Worms Reloaded update that adds some community made content such as five single player maps, three multiplayer maps and more.
• The web browser based game site Kongregate is sponsoring a $25,000 Unity 3D game design contest.
• You can now check out how far Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam players have to go before unlocking the expansion's fifth map.

Game retailer GameStop has said it wants to expand its digital game offerings and today the company did exactly that. Today GameStop announced that it had acquired the web-based game portal Kongregate. The site is home to over 30,000 web based games and 10 million users. Indie developers can gain revenue via micro-transactions and via ads. Financial terms of today's deal were not disclosed.

Kongregate's co-founder Jim Greer has posted up a funny FAQ on today's GameStop acquisition along with a video of Greer on the same topic (stay until the end of the video, by the way). Greer states that all employees of Kongregate will stay in their offices in California and that the site will continue to offer free games for its users. There are plans to give Kongregate users a way to link to GameStop's new PowerUp rewards program.

Shooting zombies in Left 4 Dead 2 is bound to be as much fun, if not more so, than the original. But how do you feel about playing a kind of-sort of version of the game on a casual game site? That's what the Flash game site Kongregate wants you to do from now until November 20 as part of a promotion for Valve's co-op shooter sequel.

The site's Infected Fury Month will turn some of the site's players into zombies while others are turned into human survivors. Naturally the zombie players want to inflect others (your profile and avatar page gets all bloody and gory when this happens) while the survivors try to find more of their kind (represented by a silver shield on your profile page). Of course we like our zombie games straight up with a shotgun, thank you very much.

The Battalion series of flash strategy games is going strong with its newest release, Battalion: Arena. For those that have not played a Battalion game, they are much like the Advance Wars series of strategy titles, only through your browser. The first one was released around this time last year, and now it's time for the new one, There's a huge addition to this new one through online multiplayer and a maps database, so it's certainly more robust than its predecessor.

Battalion: Arena is a multiplayer focused game, and it definitely shows. There's no campaign, with skirmishes against AI being the only thing you are able to do in single-player. Multiplayer, however, is incredibly robust. There are item drops, a persistent ranking system, and player-created maps, on top of the traditional strategic gameplay you can expect from such a game. It's a massive time sink and will no doubt cause addiction in all you strategy fans out there.

Physics games are everywhere, and yet we never seem to get tired of them. It's partially due to the fact that most Flash-based physics engines are free, and partially because everybody loves physics! Max Damage is one such physics game. Incorporating simple, cartoony graphics with an interesting premise, it's an addicting and clever take on the genre and easily worth a good playthrough.

Max Damage is all about destroying the household objects. You do this by launching different types of balls out of your cannon at various strengths. These balls include normal cannon balls, bouncy basketballs, or even fireballs. Each type is best suited for certain tasks, and as the levels get tougher, you'll have to manage just which ball is best for which job. It's excellent, but we can't help feeling that there should have been some sort of level editor.

There has to be something ingrained in the human psyche that says "burn things." That is the only explanation for how Pyro II can be so fun. An obvious sequel, Pyro II does not expand greatly in gameplay, but rather in accessiblity. Through finely-tuned physics gameplay that revolves around the mechanic of setting things on fire, it is an absolute blast for any player, casual or hardcore.

Pyro II has you lighting torches through the use of fireballs. This could mean hitting the torch directly with your fireball, or hitting a burnable wooden crate which then sets the torch alight by itself. Every level can be completed with one toss, and doing so unlocks new content to play through. There is also a robust level editor that allows you to share levels through a built-in community browser. It's all the rage with physics-based flash games for a reason, after all.

Some people are great at multitasking. Others, not so much. Whether this means doing lots of things at once, or multiple things in a short period of time, is up to you. However, Multitask is a game that challenges you to do everything at once, and because of this, is exceedingly hard. We're talking impossible hard. If you get a score of above 150, we are amazed.

Multitask has you doing four tasks, all at the same time: keeping a ball on a platform, avoiding spikes in a vertical line, gathering squares, and avoiding lines. Each task is performed with different keys. For example, collecting squares is done with WASD, while the platform balancing is done with left and right. It's an interesting concept that is well executed, thanks in part to easy controls and distinctive shapes. It's just HARD.

Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. But for some reason, strangely addicting! This is the concept of GOBTRON, a game which has you using your bodily fluids to repel nasty attackers that want to wipe you from the face of the planet. It's definitely not a game for those that can't take cartoonish fascination with things like boogers, belching, farts, and spit.

GOBTRON plays much like any castle defense game. You can use different abilities to defend yourself from hordes of enemies. In the case of the GOBTRON, you can grab enemies with snot, shoot them with your boogers, block their attacks with a bubble, burp so loud they die, and fart everyone into oblivion. It has a whimsical immaturity and incredible addictiveness that somehow add to its charm.

In case you missed it, we'd like to reiterate that we really like Typomagia. It's strangely addicting to mix strategy and typing skills like that. Semantic Wars pulls a similar card, but instead of being about typing, it's about something far harder: hangman. You may think that hangman and strategy games could never go together, but they make excellent team in Semantic Wars.

Semantic Wars is played like most Flash strategy games: train troops, which then proceed along a linear path to attack the enemy base. The catch is that all your money is acquired through the correct guessing of words. For every letter you guess right in a word, you get $7, and for every you guess wrong, you lost $3. It quickly becomes a game of guessing the phrase as fast as you can to train more and more troops. There's only three troop types, each of which can level up, and only one level, but the vast amount of words available to guess adds greatly to the replayability.

Everyone wonders about just how cool it would be to knock a golf ball around planets in outer space. If they deny it, well, they are just rejecting their true feelings. Don't worry, they'll come around eventually. Gravitee 2 is an excellent take on this concept, and a vast improvement over the original. Combining gravity, stellar objects, and the fine art of golfing has never been so much fun!

The basis of Gravitee 2 is very simple: Knock a ball in a direction and let the gravity of various stellar objects, such as planets and suns, do the rest. The difficult part comes in the form of the challenges, which include things such as scoring, collecting items, passing through hoops, and your average, everyday golf course (make it into the hole). There's lots of awards and specials to unlock through continual play, which makes it a great coffee break sort of game.