KOCHI: There was a time, a long-forgotten age, when internet speeds were slow. When we could send an SMS and buy the full version of games on our phones. Sometimes, we even played the pre-installed TV games using the remote control. If you were to check history on your 2010 Internet Explorer, it would consist of a tumble of searches including ‘MiniClip’, ‘Zapak’, and if you had absurd tastes, ‘games2win’. With the recent success of the multiplayer Agar.io (where you are a cell in a petri dish who eats other cells thats are players), MiniClip has resurfaced in casual PC gaming. Here are a few interesting ones:
Fire Boy and Water Girl
A 2-player puzzle game that offers hours of spare-time entertainment. The characters engage in pulling levers, pressing buttons and other conundrums, while avoiding water and lava to complete the level. The Light Temple version is especially interesting. It involves quite a bit of thought with manipulating mirrors and lights to open doors in each level. Sort of like a preparatory challenge — the higher graphics versions of these seemingly easy puzzles exist in bigger games, like Uncharted.
Fancy Pants adventures
On a first glance, the protagonist appears to be a badly drawn cartoon, merely consisting of a stick figure wearing bright colour pants. But the animation is fluid, and the speed with which the character moves gives it a very effortless vibe. The landscape of each level is different, appearing endless; it’s calming.
Wrassling
A 6-bit version of WWE, the wrestlers resemble vividly coloured matchsticks that are thrown on to the ring. You can control only the hands, which circle around like a two-pronged pinwheel. But there is a certain amount of satisfaction when you manage to throw a wrestler out of the ring in all this confusion.
Diep.io
For those who have played the famous Agar.io — Diep.io is one of the resultant spin-offs. Similar in most ways to the Agar.io, the multiplayer game has tiny canons that shoot at the blocks and the other players. The popularity of these games has resulted in hours of play through and strategy related footage on YouTube. Some of the more popular ones are available on smartphones, but I prefer the PC gaming. After all, Miniclip games are the Solitaire and Minesweeper.
(The economics graduate spends her time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)