Top Six Games of Google Gadgets
Well, we couldn't resist. You have to do a post on your favorite games every now and again. It's the only way we can play and still say we're working. So here's our favorite iGoogle home page gadgets from the games category. We're not just picking them willy-nilly; we're playing them first and thoroughly testing their features, in our tireless quest to single out the truly best ones. "Diligence" is our middle name.
We've seen many off-road truck and motorbike games before, but this one is the smoothest-playing yet. It's just challenging enough to keep you trying, but not so challenging that you give up. It's also broken up into levels, with a chance to restart each one and a variety of scenery, and never the same obstacle twice. Somebody really put work into this, which we feel sets it apart from other stunt driving games.
This one has to deserve some kind of award for originality. You get to manage a restaurant business - that includes planting soy for cattle feed, raising cattle, managing the beef plant and deciding whether to use hormones or industrial waste in the feed, hiring and firing the staff of the restaurant itself, and even managing the corporate level where you can launch advertising campaigns and bribe the health department. Now for the surprise: the interface for all of this is so simple, you'll pick it up in minutes. We were at it for hours.
No kidding! A smart, smooth-playing chess client. Great features, with sound effects to alert you to moments of drama, squares that light up to show where you can move a piece, and it was well-behaved in all screen modes. It connects to a server, so you play other people from wherever. This is the first chess client we've seen in Flash, and it's probably the best. Oh, and our deepest apologies to whomever we were playing (see screenshot) when we moved queen-takes-pawn at f7 for a tidy checkmate right after we snapped this shot. Don't take it personally, mate; we were only researching our article.
This is our pick for a good, honest card game. It's pretty bare on features, with no sound, and not much animation beyond the card flops. So we'll have to also call this our pick for the game to get if you have a slow computer, since this game runs light.
You'll recognize this classic from Popcap games, which normally only puts games out in Java. This appears to be the only Popcap game in iGoogle gadgets, so we're going to give it a huzzah here on the off-chance that they'll be motivated to release the rest of their catalog for iGoogle gadgets. Alchemy would be nice? Anyway, Bejeweled runs fine, with good audio and video quality and different modes of play.
Hey, it's a real TV game show! No matter where you are in the world, there's a version of Deal or No Deal playing on TV sometime. This game is fun and addicting, with smooth sounds and animation. And it lets you test your home theory without being all embarrassed on national TV. Though we never saw what's so hard about this game; we play the same way every time. Pick case #1, open the cases in order from 2 to 26, and take the fourth offer and run, unless the third offer is especially juicy. You could train a parrot to play this game.
Wrap-Up:
That's our pick for the big six games in iGoogle gadgets. Just a note: what disqualified a lot of games from our list:
- Tetris/Blockout clones. We're sick of them.
- Games that were too complicated in either concept or execution. Learn to pitch an idea in one breath, developers!
- Mario knock-offs. Nothing is Mario Brothers but Real Nintendo Mario Brothers. These were all just unrelated games that happened to have some of the same sprites and sounds.
- Games that were bogus. Demanding that we sign up or visit another site is bogus. The FOX game "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader" wasn't even a gadget; it was just a link to the FOX site, and you have to play the game there. Get a dictionary, FOX!
- Games that were broken. This was something like one-third of them! Either we had bad luck today, or there's some shoddy quality control out there. Games should be fully visible all at once in the gadget window or at least the iGoogle page in full-screen mode. How can we play what we can't see?
Filed Under: The Internetz
