Heaneyland!

How about a cat on stilts trying to cross a river by only stepping on turtles, except the turtles sometimes explode, and a little boy keeps throwing Frisbees at the cat? Does it need more?

Remember the cat-on-a-stick game? Turns out there are a bazillion other games (okay, ten) by the same people, featuring many cats or parts of cats in situations one would generally not expect to find cats or cat parts. Such as:

Cat in a bouncing trolley

Cat dangling from a balloon

Decapitated cat head held by robot arms

Cat in a slingshot

Cat with a firehose, attempting to save life of other cat who is tied to several sticks of dynamite

Cat scuba diving

Cat on a seesaw which is, in turn, balanced on a fish

And more. I can't get the last game to work (although I don't know if its the game's fault or if I need a newer version of Shockwave or what), but it seems to feature a cat swinging on a rope.

The game with the cat dangling from the balloon is interesting; in each level you try to get your balloon to a goal area. Getting there with your cat alive earns you a 2000 point "cat safety bonus"; otherwise you receive the terse message, "cat died".

The most conceptually appealing game for me featured giant blocks tumbling across the screen, which kitty tries to avoid while picking up gems. Since kitty is stuck in a two-dimensional world, though, it cannot simply go around the giant blocks -- it must place itself, Buster Keaton-like, in a spot where the block will fall around it. The blocks are not perfectly rectangular, you see. I'm not especially good at this, but it's very cool.

These are weird, weird games. Of the rest, I enjoyed the bouncing trolley game (which I made it to the end of), but I can't really recommend the rest. They're certainly interesting to play once, for science, but that's about it. And the game with the cat tied to sticks of dynamite is just kind of sad and disturbing. Japan is a strange place.

Posted by Francis at 03:21 AM