Also, bears don’t normally have such flexible and long arms, else they could easily reach up to trees and grab the honey without having to climb clumsily – parking their cars on the hiker’s parking and going home to the city for hibernation.

Through your transdimensional socket connection, you now begin to interact with the desert world. The cute crayon graphics, the beautiful music by Helen Trevillion and the excellent writing build a very atmospheric world you don’t want to leave easily. I had to force myself to quit and write down some lines to communicate this to you, fellow reader! Oh, yes, and TSASSTOTHADB (as insiders call it) is also an adventure game which features one of my all time favourites: A well-filled bookcase. Seriously, you should play the game for the bookcase alone.

And you better do it quick! Those demanding parents are yawning harder and harder with every missed cue! Get Puck into the green light, get the girl back on stage, and, most importanly: Avoid crashes! It’s hard enough for the little sweeties to walk in their costumes, so if their paths cross…Are you family man enough to bring this mid summer tale to a sweet dream’s end?

At least he learned more about limousines that way. But to explore limousines is profane! What now? Should he tell them he shrinks from trumpets? Or he avoids chanting? Too much information for poor robot…and off he went to robot jail. Yes, try to avoid robot jail. That’s about the only thing you can easily state in that game.

Cartonman is the all-in-one superhero of this day and age. Biodegradable, recyclable, invincible, hyper sexy. And, since he is a french robot: He can dance the funky carton dance. Yes, that’s about it. What’s sad about it: He requires Shockwave to save cities and be recycled, which is a file format that itself is not really recyclable and most likely not biodegradable and will give you sad headaches on almost every modern personal computer. The rise and fall of Cartonman…

Soon the strangers make their way to the planet ruler, an unsightly creature. With an evil grin (at least as far as our two interstellar friends remember), he asks them: “Have you met my children yet? Hahahaha!”

Jan Willem Nijman and Jonathan Barbosa Dijkstra have built a nice little tale here that is bound to teach you some things about yourself, about humanity, and, above all, about the butt-ugly word shmup.

Eventually, its developers decided to rely on human genius: They released the software as a puzzle solving game, and now thousands of people can invent new proteins, enzymes or antibodies that could – one day – cure diseases, help decompose toxic waste or dissolve carbon dioxide. And you really want to go on playing Tetris?

To successfully mine the candy, you have to rotate the candy orb, so your candy mining projectiles will hit only the best and tastiest candy – but beware, don’t try to mine it all at once by hitting the core of the candy orb – horrible things will ensue!

Now, to keep you happily mining along, Gregory Weir has crafted a level mode in which you meet a good natured miner, a candy-hating duchess and, finally, a general who instructs you in the war for your nation’s most important natural resources: Candy.

Well, basically it is a standard shooting game with a static player character that can buy upgrades and with enemies that are getting stronger each level to raise the challenge. But that static player character is a heart, and it is your task to keep it going, to blow the blues away. And also the mean reds, as in “Hold Off Red“.

Now, what makes the game special isn’t so very special at all anymore, but still special enough to mention: You have to interact with your past self. You are so alone that nobody but yourself can help you. The Company Of Myself. Braid showed us how possible that is, yes. It is nicely implemented, though, the dialog keeps you playing, and soon you will be stacking your current selves on top of your past selves that have faded away for the good cause.