First of all I wish you had a pleasant Christmas.

And what about playing a nice Xmas-themed FlashGame during the holidays?

I found this one, Santa’s Tower (Red Beard Attack) very funny and fresh since it seems to be just released.

by GameZhero.com

You have to help Santa Claus to protect the presents from Red Beard and his gang.
Santa is on the top of his tower, the enemies come from the bottom, climbing the tower wall, or coming down from the sky.

Each enemy carries a symbol: while keeping the left mouse button pressed you have to trace the symbols in order to fight them. The control is interesting, it is called “gesture recognition system” (one of the first implementation was on Peter Molyneux’s “Black & White“) basically you have to employ your mouse-drawing skills for good playing since each failed sign costs you points!

You have to face several waves (nine if I’m not wrong): from bottom only, from the sky, both directions and back again like this but with harder symbols, growing difficulty in shapes and number, you’ll have to reproduce multiple signs to beat the bad guys. At the end of the last wave you’ll notice a bigger symbol box (in purple) coming from the bottom: it’s the final boss -the crucial phase of the game- the huge teddy bear with Red Beard on his shoulder.

Tips and Tricks:
Once you’ve learned how to draw the symbols without too many mistakes, try to concentrate on the Combos, tracing sings occurring more than once in the screen at the same time.

My best score: 76,335

About the score, well this is how much I managed to do honestly, yes because the game is affected by a huge bug: when the bug is running, even if it’s impossible to complete and reach the final boss, you could double up scores, potentially scoring incredible ones. Doing so I submitted the highest one, 1st place in the Top 100 board, using the nickname “Please FIX this BUG!” sending an e-mail about how to fix it. Let’s see.

The classic Sudoku is played over a 9×9 grid divided into smaller 3×3 grids called “regions”. As you can see some grid cells already show a number (or generically a value or symbol).
Other versions feature different grid size and different values to fill the grid cells but, to avoid complicated explanations of the rules let’s just focus on the classic Sudoku sized 9×9 with numbers 1 to 9.

The objective of Sudoku is to fill the whole grid with numbers respecting this main rule

you can only use the same number once in each row, each column and in each of the 3×3 regions.

The Heracleum Sudoku Game Interface

On the top you can read how many given cells are already displayed on the starting grid.

Left-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values (numbers or letters in larger grids) in a popup menu: this will confirm the chosen value in the cell.

Right-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values in a popup menu: each selected value (with a tick on the left) will then appear as a small temporary value of the current cell. This comes in handy if you want to remember that a cell could contain only some values. Beginners could make a large use of this function while experienced players would use it only in tricky situations, to solve a blocking situation.

On the right (or bottom if the game area is vertical-wise) you can find three buttons: Timer, Options and Solution.

Timer:

it usually displays the elapsed time since you started playing the game but it’s also a “Pause” button; click it to pause the game and the grid will disappear revealing the background.

Options:

clicking this button, the same right-clicking the empty background, will popup a small menu with definitely self-explaining commands:

• Rendering quality: decrease graphics precision and details if your computer is running the applet too slow;
• Hide Background: in case you find the background distracting;
• Allow Controls: activating the backspace key will work as if you’re deleting backwards usual text (clears the cell values) or use the Mouse Wheel to roll the values up/down.

Solution:

The correct numbers -in a transparent red colour- are overlapped on the game grid. Since the solution is semi-opaque you can easily tell if one of the number you placed is wrong, showing two different numbers one over the other.

All this buttons and sub-options can be toggled, activated and de-activated on every click.

by Nick

You control a waitress, the only one working at the Yum Burger, and you have to:

- greet clients;
- let them seat on an empty booth;
- take the order;
- go to the cooks’ platter and serve the order;
- at last clean the tables and collect the tips they leave.

Use the left click to perform all actions.

Don’t let the clients wait for too long or their smile will turn into a red face: to be sincere, I never had the opportunity to see the smiley face get orange and then red because the game is very easy; I just saw the red face a while ago while taking a screenshot from the game, taking my time to resize and save with GIMP2 while the game was running in the background.

Unfortunately the score is mostly affected by pure random, because if two or three tables in a row are asking for the same kind of food (let’s say the fries) you have to wait until the cook produce a new item of that kind. So skill is absolutely not the main requirement.

Tips and tricks:
When game gets faster you better find clients a seat following a sequential order not a random one, let’s say: 1st client on the upper left, 2nd on the upper right, 3rd on the middle left, middle right bottom left, bottom right and so on. This way you can immediately tell which client to serve next or is waiting for too long.
Other tip, keep an eye on the timer! When less than 30 seconds left keep well in mind that collecting the last tips is the main goal, simply ignore newcomers.

My best score: 1830

A Gothic style game, very well drawn as you can see, specially compared to all those over-coloured stick-style flash games. Despite the white background the atmosphere is dark indeed:

A Murder of Scarecrows

by The Skeleton Shop

Basically you have to drag and throw seeds, appearing on the tree, in order to hit and awaken the three scarecrows, this when they are molested by the crow. If they keep staying on them the energy of each scarecrow decreases: you can tell how much energy each have by the length of their roots. Once exausted a scarecrow dies but can be “resurrected” by hitting a bell that can appear some time later.

Tips:
do not end up with all three scarecrows’ energy too low at the same time, it’s a good way to reach a game over. If things go bad you should rather let one of them die, taking care of just the two it’s easier; then ring the bell to resurrect the “sacrificed” one.

It vaguely recalled me the Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas style.

You can add darker atmosphere by turning the music on (a popup opens).

Hello Sudoku lovers!

This post is here to receive feedback, suggestions, bugs (impossible! eheh)