After being burned out on games (other than Facebook) for a while, I’ve recently played quite a few.

Treasure Seekers 2
The kids from the original Treasure Seekers are adults now, but still having strange adventures. Tommy has vanished while on an expedition and it’s up to his sister Nelly to rescue him. I had grabbed this one back when I played the first one, and I see now #3 is out. The plot here in #2 is pretty darn thin; I rewatched the cut scenes at the beginning several times, but I still got lost — I don’t understand how we got from Nelly going to try and join Tommy to her deciding he was trapped in magical pictures. But trapped in magical pictures he was. The play itself was pretty standard stuff. Some relatively simple hidden object scenes combined with none-too-strenuous point and click adventure type puzzles. The game is also extremely short (4h of gameplay tops.) A very mediocre title from a mediocre franchise.

Enlightenus
A young writer is summoned to the home of her favorite novelist only to find herself transported to another world — a world from which the inspiration for all of his books came. This is yet another hidden object/puzzle game, but with an interesting twist — you’re given all of the objects and you have to find the place in the scene where they should go. This was actually very well done and there were only a few times when I couldn’t figure out where an item was supposed to be placed. I can’t say that the objects themselves made any more sense than those in typical hidden object games, but it was a refreshing change.

Dire Grove
The latest entry in the Mystery Case Files series, this one follows the most recent “Return to Ravenhearst”. Our intrepid Master Detective has finished with Ravenhearst and is on the road elsewhere when he runs into an empty car and what turns out to be a bunch of grad students who’ve embroiled themselves in a horror movie-esque scenario. As is the trend recently, the game play here is pretty short — there’s an achievement for finishing the game in under 6 hours, and if I hadn’t left it running a few times when I got distracted, I would have done that easily the very first time through. But aside from the shortness the game itself was very solid, just not quite as awesome as Return to Ravenhearst was.

Special Enquiry Detail
A new department has been formed at the police department. The detectives here will focus on high-profile and high stakes crimes. The first mystery they tackle is the murder of a wealthy businessman’s daughter. Was it the best friend? The ex-boyfriend? Perhaps just a random homeless person? The detectives will find out in this mostly hidden object game. The game itself was okay, not exactly break out awesome, though I could tell it was trying to create an atmosphere. Some kudos must be awarded for the effort put into the plot, but it would have been nice to see that made more game and less narrative — most scenes would be ‘talk to X’ and then ‘find all the objects’. Er. Ok, but wouldn’t it be nice if ‘talk to X’ actually gave me something to do other than click through some screens? I’ll be interested to see where this series goes if it gets another entry.

My Kingdom for the Princess
The Princess’s father is ill, but she has no way to get back to him! This cute little time management game didn’t have a lot of variety in its tasks, but it was engaging nevertheless. The game play is centered around clearing/creating a path along which the princess’s entourage can travel in her efforts to get back to her home kingdom. Each stage is timed, meaning that some thought must be given to the order in which tasks are completed. I found most stages to be cleared quite easily, but there were a handful that I had to replay to finish and one or two that were very tricky to get done at all. The game was about the right length for its amount of complexity; it ended while still feeling fresh and not repetatively dull.

Avenue Flo
Flo, the heroine of the Diner Dash series of games, is the main character in this point and click adventure game. I’m not a fan at all of games that are made in the Diner Dash mold; I find them stressful and unfun. This game is nothing like those Time Management games, being a pure game of graphical interactive fiction. Flo is tasked with rescuing her friend when a series of mishaps befalls the wedding said friend has been planning. The game itself breezed along quite well, and the puzzles/mini games were interesting without being frustrating to figure out. There was only one or two places where I had to go back to collect something I’d missed the first time through. The bulk of the game play was similar to the excellent Emerald City Confidential (though considerably less challenging), but with a half dozen or so minigames thrown in to keep things interesting. I really hope to see more games along these lines coming out.

Artist Colony
A generation ago, a pair of friends founded a lovely artistic retreat. Soon after, they were torn apart by a love triangle and the artist colony fell into disrepair. Now a new generation has arrived to fix it up again and perhaps to find out more about what happened in the past. The setting here is what sets the game apart from the other sim-adventure games that have come out in the past few years — the majority of those tend to be centered around tropical islands for some reason. Unfortunately, the game has some glaring weaknesses in the game mechanics which make it less fun than it could be. The main problem is that one is completely dependent about making money to advance the plot, and to make money one must sell artistic works that the colony residents have produced. But a person only appears to make offers on items every 2-3 minutes, and roughly 60% of the time the offer is ridiculous and must be rejected. So it’s very easy to get to a point in the game where one is simply letting the artists run around and amuse themselves while you wait and glance at the screen every little while to see how much money has been offered. This isn’t really very fun. In fact it’s quite dull. And there’s not really any good way around it; even accepting the ridiculous offers wouldn’t speed it up much.

Frontierville (Facebook)
From the people that brought you Farmville, now you can have a farm -and- an old west town. Honestly though, this game is much better than Farmville. Why? Because it’s gotten closer to the holy grail of a social Harvest Moon. You can build more buildings, you can acquire a family, you can deal with wild animals and so forth. There are expansions promised that will complicate the gameplay further and prevent stagnation. I have hopes for this one.

I seem to go in fits and spurts, reading a lot for a while, then getting absorbed by some kind of television, then getting suckered into games instead.

I came down from a reading kick when I finished blowing through Bujold’s Vorkosigan series back in January. It hasn’t been clear yet what my next spree will be, but I have been playing a few games since I last wrote about them.

Farmville (Facebook)
I haven’t actually played this very much. I added it because it seemed like everyone else was obsessed with it, so I reasoned it must be pretty good. Except… I don’t find it at all enthralling. You need to spam your friends constantly to make any progress, which I dislike. I don’t like the graphics. The interface is incredibly insanely slow. The UI is poorly designed. I can’t fathom why it’s so damn popular. There’s nothing about it that I like.

Country Story (Facebook)
Another one of the bajillion farm games on Facebook, this one had the benefit of not being an exact clone of Farmville. Instead it seemed to take more of its cue from Harvest Moon, easily the most awesome farm game of all time. They had cut out the RP portion of the game where you make friends with the villagers and woo yourself a wife, but the farming mechanics were very similar. The graphics were cute. And while the game itself was glitchy, goals were clear and there were multiple ways to play the game. Some recent misguided changes by the developers have made this less fun to play, which is a pity. (Shades of Packrat, which I still miss on occasion…)

Pirates: Rule the Caribbean (Facebook)
I include this because thus far it’s only Facebook game I have completely finished. I did every quest and mastered every feat. I did not upgrade all my weapons but that was pointless.

Treasure Madness (Facebook)
Basically, a collection of mini-games. Tetris, jewel drop, a marble shooter, match 3. But somehow, hiding all these games on a map where you may or may not trigger one by clicking and then having you collect ‘treasures’ after playing makes them more fun. Because frankly, I would never be interested in most of these mini games as mere games. In this game, I don’t hate them and sometimes find them fun.

Ace Attorney Investigations (DS)
The long awaited Miles Edgeworth game arrived and it was great. I was concerned that the lack of courtroom action would make this too easy or different from the other games, but it was fine. Plenty of returning characters to make everyone happy. And my congratulations to the team for continuing their efforts on keeping the Ace Attorney timeline in order. I wasn’t able to spot any continuity errors at all in this game, and it slotted in very nicely with the already established dates (chronologically, the third game wraps up in February, this game takes place entirely during March of the same year, and the earliest date mentioned in game four is April. What, no one else is crazy enough to have drafted a timeline while playing? I’m not obsessive on this point at all. Really. Though on my next run through I plan to add in the days and annotate by case…)

Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands (DS)
I didn’t get all that far into this game before I stopped to play the new Miles one. So far it’s all right, but I still have a fondness for the first Harvest Moon (at least the first one released in the US). The gameplay here has some tacked on bits which are sort of confusing (crop growth is not at all straightforward) and my farmer gets tired far too quickly. The latter should be able to be remedied in time, but it’s still aggravating.

Vorkosigan GURPS
I haven’t played this yet, but I thought it deserved a mention. The GURPS Vorkosigan guidebook is finally out, after years of delay. It’s worth purchasing even by those who aren’t into tabletop RPGs, because even more than the Vorkosigan companion, this is the Vorkosiverse equivalent to the DLG. Except mostly unridiculous! I’m given to understand LMB approved all of the character pictures drawn inside, too.

Campion (Margery Allingham)
I got three more of Margery Allingham’s Campion books last month; I’ve been semi keeping up with the reissues of these from Felony and Mayhem press. I heard of Campion mainly because of the tv version, which starred Peter Davison (aka Doctor #5). The books are good enough; I don’t like them as well as Christie, but they’re easily as good or better than Marsh, though the characterization is not as good as Sayers. Campion has a propensity, like Marsh’s Alleyn, to randomly fall in love with women involved with the cases, which is annoying, especially as he has a Bertie Wooster-ish quality to him in the first place. Also interesting is the fact that unlike, say, Poirot and Holmes, he is sometimes mistaken in his conclusions even all the way to the end of the story.

Mrs. Bradley (Gladys Mitchell)
A few years ago, Mystery showed several of these on PBS. Diana Rigg starred as Mrs. Bradley, a middle aged, multiply-divorced woman of means who is a well known expert on psychology and crime. (Peter Davison was also in several of the episodes as well. He’s been busy.) They caught my attention because unlike a Miss Marple type, Mrs. Bradley has professional qualifications and a reputation that extends beyond her village. But I never quite got around to trying to find out if these were based on a series of books until just recently. Interestingly, for a series with dozens of books in, it seems fairly hard to get hold of some of the early titles and I have to wonder why she is not more well known than she is. A local library had a handful of titles from later in the series and the style was readable, if a bit different than what I’m used to. Mrs. Bradley is nearly as energetic as some of her younger counterparts and seems to be constantly driving around the countryside interviewing suspects and even spent some time crawling about on a roof and shimmying down a drianpipe.

The Baby-Sitter’s Club
I followed this series for quite a long time, pretty much until I went off the college and got behind in buying the books and couldn’t keep up (this is when I lost track of the Star Trek novels, too). It ended a while ago, but every once in a while I’ll get the urge to a) reread it and/or b) complete the set. Anyhow, a couple of years ago Scholastic had the idea to reissue four of the books (#1, #3, #4 and #7) as graphic novels. I bought the first one and was surprised (and a little depressed) at how much of the story I remembered. The graphic novel itself was quite well done — the art was clean, the character designs to my taste, and I think the artist did a nice job trying to capture the essence of the girls while trying to draw them in a way that wouldn’t become dated in about a month. Because the one thing the graphic novels dropped entirely was the effusive descriptions of 80s ‘cool’ clothes that permeated so much of the originals. First, because descriptions of that nature are not necessary when you have pictures, but second because while Anne Shirley going on about puffed sleeves may be historical now, I imagine it was a turn-off for girls in the 20s and 30s. And somehow I just don’t see the BSC enduring quite long enough for an armful of jelly bracelets to feel historical.

Picma
I really am not a fan of picross, but somehow the description of this game on jayisgames lured me in. I played the first three levels with little difficulty and was actually enjoying it. It appealed to the same part of my brain that got horribly addicted to sudoku for several weeks and which still occasionally wants to do some. But when I got to the 20×20 sized grids, I found the flaw in the game: the playing area is too small. While picma does provide a little tool which you can use to slide the grid around and see the edges, it’s incredibly annoying to try and fill it out without being able to see all of the numbers around the board. There needs to be an option to play full screen or an option to zoom out. I managed to do one puzzle shifting the grid around, but after that I was forced to give up.

Copycat
Another game I discovered through jayisgames, this one provides a pattern of colors on one side of the screen which you have to duplicate on the other. This is done by arranging shapes and then dumping paint over the rest of the canvas — you have to figure out in which order to apply the colors and where to place the stencils so you end up with the proper result. I hadn’t really ever seen any game like this before, and I was fascinated. It was very interesting, with the only annoyance being the possibility that you would accidentally hit the ‘winning’ percentage of replication before you were actually done with your efforts. This could easily be fixed by requiring people to submit their result for judgement rather than automatically judging it after every action.

I’m looking at my reading list from this year and I read a completely pathetic TWO books in July. TWO.

This doesn’t count the 30 times I read Princess Baby or the 25 times I read Wocket in my Pocket, but there is no excuse. Well, actually, there is an excuse, and that excuse is the Nintendo DS. I started replaying Phoenix Wright, and consequently all of my spare time was absorbed by that. I finally (re)finished the fourth game in the series around the beginning of August.

I’ve been reading more in August, though still not nearly as much as usual. However, just two more books (1.1 books, really, based on how much I’ve read already of both) and then I am going to start my Vorkosigan reread, September’s tripletake book be damned. I just need to finish those books before Professor Layton 2 arrives from amazon, or I am sure to be sidetracked once again.

After spending a couple of months going crazy on DS ports of old RPGs, I switched to downloaded tv shows, and currently I am in the middle of a casual game frenzy. I’ve been blowing through them at a pretty rapid clip, since I have hours every night to kill where I must be prepared to stop what I’m doing at a moment’s notice. In other words, school work = out, work work = out, reading = out. DS was ok because closing it will pause the game, but some of the games did still require a certain amount of concentration.

In no particular order, my quick thoughts on some of the games I’ve played:

Azada and Azada: Ancient Magic
The first Azada was somewhat similar to one of my most favorite DS games, Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Its weaknesses were a couple of puzzle types that were lame (the math puzzle springs to mind) and too much repetition of certain types (the math puzzle springs to mind). But it was a good collection of quick little brain-teaser kind of puzzles with a few very very simple ‘room escape’ sort of puzzles thrown in. The second Azada unfortunately was much weaker than the first in gameplay, as it decided to frame all of the puzzles within the context of a room/scene, giving the item location puzzles precedence over all else. We’ll see if they correct this misstep in the next iteration. I will say that the story of the second Azada was more interesting.

Dream Chronicles 1-3
This was an interesting set of games, of the point and click item collection/puzzle type. The first game suffered from an overly helpful puzzle engine, which would make the next item you were supposed to click sparkle after only a few seconds of non-movement. There was also an internal sub-game where you were to collect small jewels hidden in each scene, but there was no counter to tell you you’d gotten them all and no way to return to scenes after you’d left them. An odd omission. The second improved upon the first by dialling back the unwanted assistance and improving the quality of the puzzles. The third improved still more, but an over-reliance on Simon type memory puzzles threatened to derail its progress.

Samantha Swift 1 & 2
These two games were more classic hidden object type games with a few puzzles thrown in so they could call it an adventure game instead. The premise behind the games was somewhat interesting, and it was the backstory’s similary to Vesper Holly that led me to grab them in the first place. Unfortunately the game play was very weak. The scenes were often filled with multiple items which might conceivably fulfill the object you were supposed to be looking for. To combat this, the authors decided to include a ’scanner’ which would show you a silhouette of your target object if you clicked on its name. But then if you moved your cursor around randomly on the screen, the silhouette would turn red when you were near the object. It was thus possible to locate absolutely everything with no actual effort. Lame. The ‘puzzles’ included were not usually very complex or interesting; a few weeks after playing through the games, I can only bring to mind one or two.

Madama Fate and Ravenhearst 2
I had played the original Ravenhearst game way back when it first came out — back when hidden object games were a pretty new genre and both J and I were excited to download any random new one which appeared. Madama Fate didn’t push the genre envelope at all and by the time I was done, I was pretty bored. Ravenhearst 2 on the other hand really set a gold standard by which other games can be judged. The hidden object portions of the game didn’t overwhelm the rest of the gameplay and the scenes weren’t so crowded as to require a nose to the computer screen, squinting. The additional puzzles were varied, interesting and balanced out the rest of the game.

Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox
Mortimer Beckett is another hidden object/puzzle game series, and I tried this one to see if it was worth getting the rest. It was not. This game decided that it was too easy to find whole items, so it would be better to find little bits of items. I really didn’t enjoy it, because it was hard to figure out what the fragments might look like.

Chocolatier 1-3
I really hate games like Diner Dash, which require you to devote all of your attention to the game and keep clicking constantly. From the description of these games, it sounded like they weren’t that sort of game, but I wasn’t 100% positive until I downloaded them and started playing. In fact they were a quite enjoyable series. I’ve seen them described as time management games, but I think it’s more resource management than time. The object of each game is to collect recipes for various chocolate items, acquire factories in which to make the chocolates, and then sell the chocolates. Along the way you will be able to fulfill a bunch of special orders which will advance the plot until you ‘win’. What makes the games a bit more interesting is that they are set in the past — the first one begins in the 1880s, the second in the 1920s, the third just after WW2.

Flux Family Secrets
Another hidden object/adventure game, this one has a plot a bit similar to Mortimer Beckett and also like Beckett involves locating pieces of items rather than whole ones. This one is not as annoying, however, because the pieces are shown so you know what you’re looking for. I found the interface a bit irritating — the list of items is split into two parts, and you can’t have both parts on the screen at the same time, so you have to keep switching back and forth. Plus, it auto switches at various points in the game depending on what you’ve just found; an aggravating distraction with it moving at the bottom of the screen. Their definition of ‘puzzle’ is also pretty loose: placing an item for which you’ve located all the parts counts as completing a ‘puzzle’. It was also strange that they kept coming back to almost the same locations. Since they changed the backgrounds they could pretty easily have chosen slightly more relevant people rather than stretching to make one person fit three or four categories. This game also has a zoom function available in every scene. I believe this is the first entry of an intended series, so we’ll see if a sequel arrives with improvements.

Nick Chase: A Detective Story
The hard-boiled detective novel in game form. I liked the atmosphere, with the comic book style scene sets and the low music. But the game was pretty short and the ‘case’ was thin. I’d like to see more plot and more to do next time, but the idea held promise.

Emerald City Confidential
You’re a detective in Emerald City, which isn’t quite the Emerald City you’re used to from the movie or the books. But the game designers are clearly quite familiar with the books and I personally found their darker version of Oz a lot more interesting than the one presented in Wicked. This is a very solid point and click adventure with strong writing and nice graphics. I only got really stuck at one spot, a result of having done what I was supposed to do, but having had my character standing in the wrong spot to do it. The puzzles were challenging without being illogical of obscure. The ending left a little bit of an opening for a sequel, which I would definitely play.

Cate West 1 & 2
The Cate West games both have pretty okay plots and all right graphics (though I do not understand why Cate always has her eyes closed. From the screencaps I totally thought she was supposed to be blind until I actually played the game.) What they suffer from most is repetition and lots of it. In both games there are more than a dozen ‘chapters’, each of which is made up of three or four games. Pretty much the same three or four games every single time. It gets very dull very fast. Because of this I found the second game much worse than the first, because one of the games I liked (find the criminal based on clues) was removed in favor of Still More Object Hunting Fun. The second game also had some writing problems — the reactions of some of the characters did not make sense based on what was happening. If they make a Cate West 3 I’ll probably play it anyway, but I seriously hope they make some improvements.

Finally, after 7 years and 3 tries, I have finished Final Fantasy 8.

I have this incredibly stupid habit of getting 2/3rds (or further!) in video games and then… stopping. I don’t know why. Or well, I do know why: I get invested in the characters and I feel that I’m coming to the end, so something in me forces me to stop playing so the story won’t be over. I do this with books, too, where I’ll wander away from a series before the final book or halfway through the final chapter. Video games I have done this with: Kingdom Hearts, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 6, Final Fantasy 9, Star Ocean, Harvest Moon, Angelic Layer, Okage, Adventure of Link (yes, it started that early!!)… I’m sure I could think of more if I gave it more time. Some of these I’ve gone back and replayed and finished, but others I haven’t. Wasted, wasted time.

In any case, Final Fantasy 8, you are done. The end. Kaput.

(But I must recommend, if you ever do have to play this game, it multiplies the amusement factor a hundred-fold to give Squall and Rinoa better names. Myself, I called them Fuckwit and Dumbass. [And, of course, the dog -- Mickey.] And so I am able to leave everyone with this final quote:

Edea: You’re the only Fuckwit allowed to be here!

Ha.)

For almost as long as the internet has been around, geeks and other enthusiasts have been using it to share and make archives of “copyrighted” material. I put the word copyright in quotes there because a lot of the time the material so copyrighted is out of print or otherwise unavailable for the general public to use because of technology changes or other issues.

Recently, the Librarian of Congress announced several classes of material that would be exempt from DMCA under fair use policies for the next 3 years (at which point the exemption has to be renewed). Included was this:

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

So did all those archives of game roms just get protection from prosecution for copyright infringement? It certainly became harder to do so, in any case. I also wonder how Nintendo’s efforts to collect various obsolete and OOP game makers to make such things downloadable for Wii will affect what classes of items are affected by this. You certainly can’t buy a Commodore 64 any longer, but does the Wii’s existence make those games not a part of this group? As it reads, I’m thinking it doesn’t save them.

From the makers of Katamari Damacy, we now have Katamari Damacy 2 in Flash.

As Michelle wrote recently, last fall they released a computer game based on the Agatha Christie book “And Then There Were None”. (Originally known as Ten Little Niggers, then Ten Little Indians, and apparently we have now decided Indians are too offensive as well, because in this game everything became Sailors. Let’s just hope the Navy doesn’t pitch a fit.)

Since my Agatha Christie addiction knows few bounds, I naturally had to have it, and after a bit of an adventure wherein we discovered my laptop was too crappy to run the game, we eventually found a compromise position between not playing it and buying a new laptop: we bought a better monitor for upstairs and I played it on the desktop.

So, my opinion:

Graphics
For all they required me to have a better graphics card than I had in my laptop, they weren’t really very good. We’re talking Playstation circa 1996 — pretty much comparable to the cut scenes from FF7, with solid hair and immobile outfits. They also skimped on the creativity: every character wore the exact same clothes the entire game. This didn’t make any sense at all to me and can only be explained as a conscious decision to cut corners on the part of the programmers. 3/10.

Game Play
The first half of the game, which encompassed time-wise the first 4 “chapters”, were quite good. NPCs rarely interact meaningfully without The Hero coming along to talk to them, so that part didn’t really bother me overmuch. My main problem with point and click adventure games is and has always been feeling herded along a linear route and getting ’stuck’ because of some random thing I haven’t yet done. Anyhow, for the first half of the game, this didn’t happen. Everything continued to progress, but I never consciously needed to do anything to push the plot forward. The puzzles were interesting but not impossible, and the new character was incorporated into the story in a fairly realistic manner. Unfortunately, the second half of the game did not live up to the first. As the number of suspects grew fewer, the number of puzzles decreased. There was an obvious attempt by the writer to shore up the puzzle aspect of the second half by forcing upon us several ridiculous attempts to escape from the island, but all they really did was annoy: it was an insult to our intelligence to think they would work, and it made The Hero out to be a fool.

It was at this point that I began to get ’stuck’ as well: I would wander around and around until I found the one single person to talk to or one particular door to look at that would get the plot moving again. While there is a need for some linearity in a game, and to require that certain tasks have been completed before things progress, I do find it to be a flaw when they don’t naturally flow from what’s going on. And frankly, they didn’t. They were just random. There weren’t even helpful hint cards as we’d had in the first half of things. So my score for the gameplay is 5/10 (but 8/10 for the first half).

The Plot
One of the big claims of this game was that even if you’d read the book (or seen the play) the ending was not the same. The problem with this was that they did follow the plot of the book otherwise nearly to the letter. (A few minor additions as I mentioned to up the number of puzzles to solve.) A more extensive rewrite would probably have served them better, because it would have given them more scope for the imagination — and prevented me, as someone very familiar with the book’s plot, from predicting nearly everything that was about to happen. I think it would have been hard, but not impossible, to take the same plot framework: 10 people trapped on an island with 1 out to kill the others, and make an entirely different story from it. Just mixing up the order of the deaths would have been a good start. The whole attempting to escape plot should be deep-sixed in favor of more extensive investigation. I don’t know if I’d want to go so far as to have to ask the questions myself, but perhaps having more than one chance per scene to speak to the NPCs would be nice. 5/10.

Overall
Overall it wasn’t a horrible game, but it wasn’t great either. I think, though, that this genre of game is still undergoing some growing pains. Without the endless random battles of an RPG to fill in the spaces between plot points, the adventure writers are stuck trying to make puzzles that are hard but not quite frustrating to solve. It’s quite a difficult task. Hopefully if they try making some more Christie (or other writer based) games, they’ll have improved some of the weak points from this one.

I’d recommend this game if you’re a serious Christie fan, but otherwise, you may be just as happy with one of the Nancy Drew mysteries that cost half as much.

This list of 2005’s top 20 Flash games has quite a few spiffy games on it, many of which are sequels to games I already played and didn’t realize there was a sequel for.