Get an April hi score

The way the hi score tables work on Flash By Night is that they are reset every month. Some games also have all-time hi scores.

So here we are on April 1, and the hi score tables have been reset. If you want to try to get your name on the high score list, this would be a good time, since the barrier would still be low.

The games are here:  www.flashbynight.com

Enjoy.

Parents be warned: Video games may encourage your kids to read!

Unfortunately, there are still a lot of parents out there who think gaming is a completely unhealthy activity. I always argue strongly against this position and recently, after playing Skyrim and Mass Effect 3, it struck me that games can encourage teens to read.


1) In Skyrim, there are quite a few quests that involve collecting books and you can pick up books everywhere. These books can be opened and read, and have stories and lore about Skyrim. Each one would be about three or four pages of an actual book, but there are hundreds of them in the game. Just to recap, the game presents finding and reading books as a fun activity.

Reading a book in Skyrim

In Mass Effect 3, you explore a vast and rich universe as Commander Shepard of the Normandy. Again, as you explore, the lore and background story are revealed as updates to the 'codex'. A careful reading of the codex brings you more deeply into the game

Mass Effect Codex

Many other games have a background story revealed through in-game books, journals or a codex.




2) Game Fiction


After enjoying a game, many gamers aren't ready to give up on the experience and can't wait two years for the sequel to come out. A game like Mass Effect spawns books written about characters in the Mass Effect universe. Most of these books are very suitable for teens.

And then there's fan fiction... fiction written about Mass Effect or other games, by fans. Some of it is amateur and some of it can be pretty good.




So there you go, that's how gaming can help to encourage a reading habit. I'm a gamer and I usually read about two books a month.


And remember, as well as encouraging teens to read, games can also encourage them to write - they may want to try their hand at fan fiction. And games can stimulate teens to try their hand at art - just look at all the game-based fan art on DeviantArt.com for example.


So I hope you can agree with me that encouraging reading is just one of the ways that gaming can be healthy for young (or old) minds.

Staxx - a challenging word game

Here is a brand new game on Flash By Night.

It is called 'Staxx' and the aim of the game is to form words of 3 or more letters. You can click on the letters to slide them around and in each level, you are given a time target and a target of how many words to find.

Play it here: www.flashbynight.com/staxx

It's Not Toronto

Before starting a new game, I went back and made some changes to the game 'It's Not Toronto'

I've always thought that this was an excellent game, but the controls were too jerky, so I went back and made the controls smoother, as well as some other minor changes.

Hopefully, this will make the game more enjoyable. You can play it here: www.flashbynight.com/toronto

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Game Release: Clowd

Introducing a new game from FlashByNight.com…

In Clowd, you control a fluffy little cloud that can change colors as he drifts through the various levels.

Use the arrow keys to navigate

Press SPACE to change color:

If you hit an enemy of the same color, you destroy it:

There are four different level types:

You have two minutes to get through each level and the levels get progressively more difficult as you go.

The URL is:  www.flashbynight.com/clowd

Developer’s notes:

I’ve been obsessed for a while with games that use colors in various ways, so I decided to experiment with this little game. The original concept was to have smaller color blocks orbiting Clowd, which you could rotate by pressing the spacebar. However, the gameplay seemed too difficult and I decided to make the character change color instead (even though a cloud is usually white). I made the motion controls a bit ‘loose’ – hold down an arrow key and when you let go, the character will still move a bit further. This seemed natural to the game and also for the difficulty level I wanted to achieve.

The first few levels should be really easy, but fun, as you get to pop all the enemies in your path. After about level 10 or twelve, it’ll start to get quite challenging and you would have to be really good to get far beyond level 20.

An Emo Game

I'd like to share a little 'emo' adventure game that someone sent me.

"Q - Compressing the Heart" is the story of a little guy in the underworld who has had his heart stolen and yearns to get it back. This is a point-and-click adventure game with super slick graphics. The game mechanic is that you can remove your soul from your body to get to hard-to-reach places. It's great fun.

The game loses points for being surrounded by zillions of annoying ads, but if you can ignore those, you'll have fun with it.

The URL is:

http://www.bigdino.com/game/352/Q-Compressing-the-Heart

Here's a sneak peek:

Making Monkeys

Here's a fun little game that I found called Making Monkeys. It's a simple little platform puzzler, but it's well made and it's great fun:

http://www.smileygamer.com/play/11158/making-monkeys.html