You are a warrior. You’re about to have your lunch outside when a giant bird steals it. This is unacceptable. You require revenge. And you will get it with a sword, a grappling hook, and a seemingly unending field of Titans*.

Titan Launch Retaliation is a new game from Berzerk Studio on Adult Swim’s website. This takes the launch the [animal] games to a whole new level of absurdity. Instead of shooting a turtle out of a cannon or a frog in a rocket ship, you are jumping off the edge of a cliff and stabbing your way through the air. Every creature you kill gives you a boost of energy to jump further until you hit a more complicated boss. Those require multiple hits to kill. Your ultimate goal is to get back your lunch.

The controls are simple even if the game is difficult due to random generation of monsters. All you need is the mouse and the space bar to navigate the menus. In the game itself, you just need the space bar or the left mouse button. This launches you off the cliff, shoots your grappling hook into smaller enemies, and slays the larger beasts.

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Wonderputt is a unique online mini golf game from DampGnat at Newgrounds.com. If you’re thinking “How can a mini golf game be unique at this point?,” you have a right to your skepticism. For years, the only major change in most golf games worth trying was the style of course. You’d still drag back with the mouse to power up and aim the club and let go to hit. You’d deal with either an overhead 2D or angled 3D perspective. It felt like the same game over and over.

Wonderputt has a big novelty factor going for it that I haven’t seen before. The entire course is on the screen from the first hole. You just don’t know it yet. Every time you sink that last putt, the environment moves to create the next hole. One minute, your golfing in a pasture a group of cattle just ate through. The next minute, a cloud arrives to fill the screen with snow, transporting you to ski slopes. It’s refreshing enough to make this mini golf game a must play.

The game is clean and graphic. The controls are responsive and the music and sound enhance the experience. The cut-scenes to produce the next course are clever and often unexpected. Even the difficult ramps up in unexpected ways. It’s not that the course becomes progressively more challenging. It’s that the challenge is constantly shifting in ways that change your playing strategy. Even turning one hole into a near-mirror image of the previous hole is enough to keep the game interesting.

Vampire Vision from Center for Game Science is a fun and challenging spot the difference game. You are a vampire hunter. Your job is to use the clues given to you during a tarot reading to rid a village location of vampires. The cards might reveal that vampires will have red eyes or run in the dark. You then take a field-wide view to point out who the vampires are, stake them through the heart, and save the village.

The goal of the game is to be a sort of vision training exercise. You working on the ability to follow multiple objects at the same time and make quick distinctions between them. Hidden behind the novel vampire hunting/shifting attributes theme does wonders to make it fun.

There is no experience curve as you could randomly be placed in the hardest style of recognition for you after the initial training stage. Maybe you do great identifying which vampires are dressed different, but struggle to tell which vampires can move quickly at night. The game makes it challenging enough to feel like you should invest your time, but simple enough to progress that anyone could take a stab at the game.

For a fun time-waster with some good novel concepts, you should try playing Vampire Vision.

Today we have a restaurant simulator and a puzzle platformer to go through.

Papa’s Taco Mia is an online game where you win a taco restaurant in a taco eating contest. Without any additional staff, you have to take all the orders, grill all the meat, and assemble all of the taco orders. You have to keep the customers happy while they’re waiting and please an ever-expanding range of tastes.

The mouse controls the entire game. You click on a customer to take their order. Then you drag their ticket to the line on top of the screen. Then you switch windows to the grill, where you fire, cut, and flip the ordered meat for the taco. Then you pull the meat off the fire and assemble the taco on the assembly screen. You have sauces, vegetables, beans, and cheeses to contend with. You shake the mouse back and forth over the taco to spread the desired topping in the correct order. They all fall at different rates which are hard to gauge after the first stage. You then wrap the taco, attach the order slip, and see how much you get paid.

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Corporation Inc is a real time strategy game about building a business from the ground up. Literally. You own a soon to be mega-corporation and make all the decisions. You build the offices, hire the staff, provide elevators and restrooms, and motivate your workers to earn more money per click of their mouse finger.

Though the game play never evolves beyond drag and drop, there is a refreshing sense of achievement when you complete even the most mundane objective on the game’s task bar. These range from learning to move on the screen to building an elaborate hook system to deliver employees to their respective offices.

There are so many options in construction and hiring that the game can probably never be played the same way twice. Do you hire all office workers and little management, or do you hire a lot of management to force a smaller group of office workers to earn more money individually for the company? Do you research all kinds of developments at once, or level up just the hiring system to promote workers faster? And what about mood-boosting decor? Is it enough to earn a free cat every “x” employees hired or should you start spending money on plants, water coolers, and vending machines?

Corporation Inc is easy enough to be played right away by anyone but expansive enough in its nebulous goal of growing a company to be played for a long time. Just do yourself a favor and sign up for an Armor Games account. There is nothing more frustrating than going back to your game and seeing your 100 floor mega corporation has turned into an empty screen with the “learn to control the game” objective highlighted on the bottom screen.

I almost feel like I’m in a gaming rut. I’ve been digging through sites to find new games and consistently have been drawn to strategy/defense games. I can’t help it if the indie game developers are doing interesting things with this style of games.

Rebuild combines two of my loves: zombies and defense games. You have managed to stave off a zombie invasion in four blocks of a large city. You have a farm, a police station, and two sets of houses. Your mission is to rebuild civilization one building at a time. You scout out abandoned houses, malls, stores, and other structures for food and survivors. You kill off the zombie population then reclaim the building for your new society. Your primary objective is to survive. To beat the game, you must bring government into the new society. You have the option beyond that of both eliminating the source of the zombies and eradicating the zombie population.

You make choices with each action that change how your society will grow. Do you build a laboratory to better defend yourself against the zombies or a bar to boost morale and lower crime and desertion? Do keep population low and food supplies high at the expense of saving survivors? Do you waste your leaders trying to recruit outside survivors or do you hoard them to maintain order in the town? And how many soldiers will you assign to protect the city at the expense of not being able to expand quickly?

Try it. It’s addictive. You can log a few hours into this game without even trying. And that’s on the normal difficultly rating. It goes up to hard, harder, and even nightmare.

It’s a rare day that I find a real time strategy game that interests me. Even just basing a game in history isn’t enough to draw me in. But an RTS about the Opium War/British Imperialist period in China? Sign me up.

High Tea places you as a British entrepreneur, buying opium from Thailand to sell to port cities in China. You use this money to buy tea to ship back to Great Britain. Failure to sell enough opium will result in the collapse of the British economy. The Brits were so addicted to tea, they were buying it by the case-load with silver, the base of British currency. Opium gives them their only chance to obtain tea from the otherwise uninterested Chinese traders without destroying the entire empire.

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The ClickPLAY series is a fun, sometimes frustrating, set of puzzle games. They aren’t regular puzzle games, though. Your objective is to find the continue button in each level. You manipulate objects to make the PLAY button (like a VCR, ([>)) appear. This is rarely as easy as it seems.

ClickPLAY 3 boosts a whole new series of puzzles with even more bizarre conventions. The series has tipped its hat toward the popular WarioWare games on the Nintendo consoles with this edition. One puzzle sees you feed a monster a box of cereal and a quart of milk for him to poop out the PLAY button. Another sees you picking the petals off of a flower until only the PLAY button remains.

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In this edition of Play It, I recommend a randomly-generated sidescrolling platformer, an action-puzzler-strategy type game, and an experimental puzzle art game.

Paranormal Shark Activity (mercifully) has nothing to do with a similarly titled film. You control a young man trying to go for a swim. Unfortunately for him, a giant mutant blood-thirsty shark tears through the dock and chases him. You use the arrow keys and space to jump from floating platform to floating platform. To slow the shark, you must collect bombs using special jump platforms scattered throughout the game. There are obstacles: you get stuck on grass platforms and gymnastics-tinged vault platforms send you the opposite direction you’re trying to go.

This is an endurance sidescrolling platformer, where the goal is the highest score you can get. Your primary objective is to stay alive, but if you can hit five platforms in a row, you set off a bonus rainfall of gumdrop-colored orbs falling from the sky. You get points for narrowly avoiding the shark’s advances and sending him off the screen, as well. It’s an addictive time killer that I feel compelled to play whenever I think about it.

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I have to recommend two very different games today.

The first, One Chance, is an experimental adventure game. You play a scientist who developed a cure for cancer. Unfortunately, the cure goes belly-up as it is discovered that the engineered cells destroy all living cells, not just cancer. You have six days. That’s the entire directive. Every decision you make impacts how the story ends up. Will you abandon your family to try and save the world? Spend your last few days in the company of your family and forget about work? What would be important to you in your last days of Earth?

The game is presented in a simplistic, pixelated style. You move the character with the left and right arrow keys and interact with pop-up text with the space bar. The music is appropriately simple and moody for the conceit of the game. The colors are muted and the characters are flat enough to make you put your own emotions in the story.

So what is the conceit of the game that leads to this recommendation? You can only play it once. There is no restart button. After your six days are gone, the game is over. If you try to go back to the site, you will see the final still of your character in his environment, frozen forever in time. Sure, there are ways to get around the ending if you want to explore other life paths, but that defeats the purpose. One Chance is a hyper-realistic life simulator placing the player in extraordinary circumstances and forcing him to make decisions in a game like he would in real life. It’s just such a well-executed concept that only takes a few minutes to play. It’s art, really.

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I like rhythm games. The genesis is surely an obsession with Mario Paint's music creation function where I would spend hours writing original songs with dog barks and car horns until my family sent me to my room to get the noise out of their heads. It grew to its peak in the late 90s when I began playing Dance Dance Revolution like it was my job at home and in the arcades. The interest hasn't faded away, even if the time available for Samba de Amigo and Amplitude has.

Record Tripping, a new game from Bell Brothers available at Newgrounds, is a different kind of rhythm game. It is not about the creation of music or playing in rhythm. Instead, the game plays tribute to the lyricism of Alice in Wonderland, combining spoken word with record scratches. You manipulate your scroll wheel like a turntable and your left click as an effect button to control movement in time. Scrolling down moves the recording backwards; up, forward. The goal changes in each of five levels, from navigating a ball through a maze to getting bunny rabbits on a train. There is a time limit and other factors of physics involved to make the game more challenging.

Though it does not take longer than five minutes to play, the clever controls and storybook-styled illustrations make Record Trippinga game with a good amount of replayability. The time based leader board doesn't hurt, either. You can also tweet your score. This may not seem like a big feature but it still amazes me that more online games aren't trying to use this feature as a publicity tool.

If you need a quick break from your work, Record Tripping is a fun diversion through Wonderland.

I feel like I was teethed with an NES controller. Some of my earliest and fondest memories of my family involved us all sitting around the living room TV and taking turns playing Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. While my brother moved on to extremely difficult games involving stealth and gun play, I stuck to puzzle games, platformers, and bizarre peripherals (I still love my intermittently working Samba de Amigo maracas for the Dreamcast (my favorite console)). That means I've played a lot of puzzle games. When kids at school would invite me to their video arcade birthday parties, I would be quite satisfied to deposit a few of my tokens into a Tetris machine and play until they'd have to drag me away for pizza and laser tag. When I got a GameBoy and (later) a GameGear, I had Disney platformers and every puzzle game I could get my hands on. 

So what does this have to do with another game on Newgrounds? A lot. Paradox Embrace is everything I love about puzzle/platformers. At this point, swapping out costumes for different abilities is nothing new. Neither is the necessity to swap abilities to traverse difficult terrain. The strength of Paradox Embrace is presenting a clean, stylish puzzle/platformer game with a challenging, but not unreasonable, difficulty level.

The story is minimal. You are confronted with a shadow monster who taunts you, claiming he took your treasure but since you don't know what to do with it anyway you haven't learned to miss it yet. You are then thrust into a fantasy platform maze where you can transform from your normal action hero form to a wizard and a scientist to start. You have to collect items, such as beakers for the scientist, to open new paths that only other characters can actually get to. It's almost like an elaborate version of a pen and paper logic puzzle that requires a lot of trial and error to get right. Then you move on to the next stage, and the next, and the next, until you complete the game. The gameplay is not repetitive, a common fault in online puzzle/platformers. There is enough variety in the action and well executed gradation of difficulty to keep you involved.

Best of all is how the game saves itself with each stage completed. I recommend giving it a try. Maybe play the first level or two. Then you'll find yourself coming back later for the third, then the fourth, then the fifth…

As I learned last night, I'm not the only one who has a love/hate relationship with the Adult Swim website. For example: it's the only place to see the third season of Moral Orel (since no DVD has been released), but they'll only put up a handful of out of sequence episodes at a time. I can watch all The Boondocks clips I want, but only one full episode a week. There are clips of all the shows, but the new video display page is awful. Adult Swim's website also has interesting game concepts, but very buggy execution.

5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself) Wedding Day is the newest game on Adult Swim and is easily one of the best outputs on the site. It is a sequel to the original 5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself), a welcome guilty pleasure with a darkly humorous streak to indulge work rage and despair in a safe environment. The goal, unsurprisingly, was to kill yourself in five minutes or face a horrible, boring meeting. The first sequel was a rehash with new locations and did nothing to address the bugs that plagued the original, like broken buttons and horrible lag on all but the fastest computers.

5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself) Wedding Day is a breath of fresh air for the series. The graphics are larger and cleaner. The violence is presented in funny cut scenes that greatly speed up the game. The screen doesn't jerk along for 15 seconds in real time to have an aerosol can catch fire in less than 2 seconds of game time. While the tools in the game are more limited than in the past, the execution is near flawless.

A welcome (but buggy) inclusion is multiplayer mode. You can play as a bride or groom (same-sex marriage is legal at Adult Swim), trying to off yourself before your betrothed. Once one player has used an interactive element, the other player cannot. It's a race against the clock and your opponent to escape the bondage of a poorly thought out marriage. Unfortunately, like all of their multiplayer games, there is unbelievable lag. Your opponent will not move for two minutes from the altar and then be declared the winner because the game can't handle both players at once. The game tends to freeze when your opponent quits and freeze if your opponent comes in contact with your player. The principle draw of the series is still single player until they resolve these online issues.

If there is a criticism to be levied, it is the limited arsenal of interactive elements. There are points in the game that clearly look like you are supposed to be able to interact with – the obese office worker from the original, a cleric at a desk, rotten children in the rectory – but cannot. Adult Swim has a bad habit of releasing a "sequel" to a game that is actual the original game redone with all the unfinished elements. Like Zombie Hooker Nightmare and Twirl & Hurl before it, 5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself) Wedding Day will probably have a 2 added to it in three weeks and be the same game, just less buggy and more option filled. I'd rather see a completed game on the site than play a shell of what it could be a few weeks early. This was almost certainly rushed through production because a trailer for the game was posted two months ago. If they held off, they probably could have released a more polished game.

5 Minutes to Kill (Yourself) Wedding Day is a welcome distraction game. The novelty may wear off quicker than normal because of the limited arsenal of destructive ends, but it does fine for a brief break from the doldrums of everyday life.

Newgrounds.com tends to get a lot of puzzle games with plots. You attempt to figure out what the appropriate course of action is in a given scenario to help your character move on to the next puzzle. The stories aren't usually all that engaging and the characters tend to be pretty annoying. If they aren't hellbent on destroying humanity, they're cloying cute.

Abuba the Alien is very cute. Abuba isn't annoying, either. The principal character tends to disappear into the scene, only essential to move on to the next scene with a simple "Abuba say thank you" in an adorable voice.

Abuba needs to get home, and it's your job to help him. The puzzles are pretty simple, though they are clever in how everything ties together. Some are a bit tricky towards the end, though nothing a little thought can't solve.

Give it a try. You won't regret it.