The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

© Sean Cooper

Sean Cooper’s Boxhead series of zombie shooting Flash games have received a graphical upgrade, a new Defence game mode as well as new foes for the latest game in the series - Boxhead : The Zombie Wars. The name Boxhead probably stems from the distinctive blocky minifig looks of the player character and the zombies that infest each level. More about this series in my previous Boxhead : More Rooms article .

© Sean Cooper

The first thing you’ll notice if you played the earlier games, is that you no longer dodge between pearl-white monoliths in desolate deserts (above) while battling the zombie hordes as in Boxhead : More Rooms. Instead in Boxhead : The Zombie Wars, the zombies and their fiendish flame-spewing masters have overrun pleasingly lush (but soon to be despoiled) grasslands.

© Sean Cooper

Boxhead : The Zombie Wars also sports new lovely transparency effects as you can witness above, especially in the floating text that appears when you collect weapon crates and upgrades.

© Sean Cooper

The number of upgrades have actually dropped from 58 in Boxhead : More Rooms to 55 although the maximum multipler required to unlock all upgrades has increased from 125x to 500x(!). Upgrades range from the lowly 4x multipler required for a Pistol : Crack Shot upgrade to the 500x needed to unlock the final upgrade Airstrike : Nuke.

© Sean Cooper

There’s three new enemies apart from the generic zombies and their devilish overlords. You’ll quickly encounter groups of pesky red zombies who pursue you relentessly, shambling mummies and vampires who teleport right next to you whenever you stop for a break from the fighting. The blood-red demons have also now acquired fearsome flamethrower attacks that incinerate any friends or foe in its path.

Boxhead : The Zombie Wars relies even more on laying devious traps using barrels, barricades and whatnot than the previous games in order to get multiplers of over 50x after which goodies like turret guns and miniguns are unlocked for you to stand a better chance against the zombie host.

© Sean Cooper

For those who prefer a high bodycount, Defence is a new game mode (above) where you are given a few extra seconds of time after each level to emplace stationary stcutures such as turret guns, mortars and barricades to create killzones and fend off invasions by huge mobs of undead in numbers far greater than in the original Classic mode. You can easily reach multiplers of over 200x (and the associated goodies, of course) after completing just two or three levels but I find the action too frantic for me

Play Boxhead : The Zombie Wars.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Boxhead : More Rooms
The Last Stand & The Endless Zombie Rampage Games
Keith Thompson - Illustrator (Undead, Mecha, etc)
Operation Darkness Wallpapers
Soul of The Ultimate Nation Walllpapers

Reminiscent of both pen & paper RPGs and gamebooks, Monster’s Den allows you to create a party of four to journey into nine randomly generated levels of a dungeon to explore, kill and loot. Don’t even think of attempting to play this game during your lunch break or at work, since completing the entire game requires at least half a day. Trust me, I tried

Besides, dungeon crawl RPGs like these are inherently repetitive after an hour or so so make full use of the autosave slots and savour it slowly two or three levels at a time

© Biclops Games

Form a party of four adventurers from a total of five classes - Warrior, Cleric , Mage , Ranger and Rogue - and descend into the dungeon immediately : there’s no need for that time-consuming dice-rolling for stats and talking to NPCs for quests.

© Biclops Games

From the current highlighted room, simply click to move into adjacent rooms where treasure (treasure chests) or monsters (crossed swords) await.

© Biclops Games

The turn-based combat will be very familiar to players of Strategy First’s Disciples series but with far more tactical options. Levelling up in this game is done by moving to the exit for the next level and not by clearing the level of all enemies. Since fallen foes drop weapons and equipment, it’s highly likely that you’ll attempt to wipe out all enemies before proceeding to the next level.

© Biclops Games

When levelling up, your characters not only increase their stats but receive new class specific skills as well which translates to extra tactical options during combat. Several class-specific skills complement each other like casting the Ranger’s Nature Balm (which increases health regeneration of an ally) on a Warrior using Shield Wall (which increases the warrior’s damage resistance and redirects all damage to the party except for area attacks to the warrior).

© Biclops Games

As you progress through the nine levels, you’ll fully appreciate the streamlined and intuitive interface as it makes managing your characters’ skills and inventory a breeze. Moving over an item of equipment shows the attributes of both the currently equipped item for that slot and the selected item for easy comparison. Equipping a piece of armour or weapon is as easy as dragging an item and dropping it on the character portrait. Your party shares a common inventory store of 45 items so there’s no need to manipulate items to attempt to cram different-sized items into a virtual backpack a la Diablo.

© Biclops Games

The addictiveness of this game in my opinion, lies in the abundant loot which results in almost continual weapon and equipment swapping and upgrading as you explore each room on a level.

I dare say it’s one of the best Flash RPGs I’ve ever encountered and I do play a lot of games

Play Biclops Games’ Monster’s Den.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
ProgressQuest : Non-interactive RPG
Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Wallpapers
Game Book Covers @ Mithrandir’s Gamebook Grotto
DoomRL - Doom Roguelike

What do you get when you combine turntables, accordions, pianos and an assortment of drums together ?

Instead of the expected cacophony from the distinctively different sound of each instrument, the end result actually comes off as an infectiously toe-tapping, head-bopping soundtrack - I simply love the cheery carnival sounding clockordian and the machinegun clatter of cymbals (Loop 2).

© Luke Whittaker

My kind of band

While the loops for each instrument in Luke Whiitaker’s One Man Band has been carefully constructed and synchronized for each other, it’s still hard not to listen in disbelief when the sounds of contrasting instruments such as the clockordian (accordian), loop-o-lin (violin), piano and turntables actually meld so well together.

There’s definitely a limit to the number of tunes you can create with 12 ingeniously automated instruments and 24 audio loops but it’s still a lot of fun for a short break.

Build your own One Man Band or check out Luke Whittaker’s other works, his current project being Stigmatisation to raise awareness of HIV in Sierra Leone.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Saiko - Cool Electronic Music Generator
Make your Own Tracks with Orange Mixer
Best Practice 1.01 - Speed up or Slow down Audio

Promotional trailer for Success Corporation’s Raiden : Fighter Aces compilation for the Xbox360 featuring three shoot-em-ups from the Raiden Fighters spinoff series, 1996’s Raiden Fighters, 1997’s Raiden Fighters 2 and 1998’s Raiden Fighters Jet.

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighters - Classic Raiden fare.

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighters 2 : Operation Helldive - Seems like it’s only a graphically upgraded version of Raiden Fighters from the look f it

© Success Corporation

Raiden Fighter Jet - Love the little details like the spinning propellers on the massive aircraft idling on the runway in this one but I doubt anyone seriously playing the game notices these kind of stuff while playing.

While the gameplay in the three games is pretty standard shooter fare with the prerequisite fuild animation, eye-watering weapon and explosion effects, what kept me glued to the entire 3 minutes of this trailer was the incredible reflexes of the player being recorded in the video - or was it just a pre-programmed demo?

By the way, if you’re itching for some Raiden action on your PC, there’s a pretty faithful fan-made Flash version of Raiden which you can play online - RaidenX - enjoy!

Download the trailer from Gametrailers (Quicktime or WMV) or the Raiden Fighter Aces (WMV only) site.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Space Aggressor - Be the Bad Guys of A Shoot Em’ Up
Jets N Guns Review

Saw this over a while back at Geeknews, a great source for interesting stuff and despite the title, it’s not necessarily for geeks only . MyMinicity.com is a Flash site by French developers Motion-Twin (creators of one of my newfound online addictions - Dinoparc.com) where you can build your own virtual city @ mycity.myminicity.com.

Geeknews City

The city automatically grows when visitors enter your city by going to mycity.myminicity.com directly. After a set number of inhabitants, the city can only further evolve when visitors enter via the infrastructure links provided on your city page e.g mycity.myminicity.com/ind to expand your industrial sectors thereby reducing the unemployment rate and prevent jobless inhabitants from leaving your city. Different infrastructure links are ‘unlocked’ as the city grows in size and population.

Since visitors have to enter the infrastructure links directly, you have to advertise these links on your blog, forum signatures (and possibly spam email ) for a chance to really expand the city.

While the entire process of city evolution is completely non-interactive, it still feels like a city-building sim where you derive some weird sense of satisfication from seeing a couple of humble huts expanding to a town and (hopefully) to a bustling city like the one below.

Kuala Lumpur - the biggest city in MyMinicity.com for the Malaysian zone. There isn’t a Singapore zone, though

Create your own virtual city at MyMinicity.com or help expand Geeknews City by increasing its population or improving its industry, transport (currently unavailable), security (currently unavailable), environment (currently unavailable)and business (currently unavailable).