Heaneyland!

Always postpone meetings for time-wasting Web games

Little Fluffy is once again slacking off on their job of helping me slack off, but Jim has stepped in to point me to Babycal Throw, a game which didn't at first seem like it would be addicting, and then an hour or so later I had to admit just might be. The game rules aren't very clear, so I'll attempt to explain them here:

Little guys (babycals??? I have no idea) walk across the screen. Each is carrying a bag. Clicking on one makes it throw its bag in the air; you want that bag to hit another one of the little guys on the head, which makes it start running in the other direction. Then you want to hit that running guy with another bag, and so on. Each time you hit it, you get more points, so you want to keep it running back and forth on the screen as long as possible.

You get way more points if you can manage to hit more than one guy at the same time and get them running in unison. It also extends your game to hit more than one guy at once, because apparently there are only so many bags in existence; you start with 30, and you earn more any time a babycal (or are the babycals the bags? I just don't know) leaves the screen after having been hit with two or more bags. If you've hit the little guy four times before he runs off, you'll get three more bags. If you had two guys running in unison and hit them both four times before they run offscreen, you'll get six bags. But you're only allowed to add up to 100 more bags (which is what the other counter in the upper left corner is keeping track of), so you can't keep going indefinitely. I've broken 10,000 points exactly once; Jim says his highest is around 30,000.

I clicked on the "more games" link that appears at the beginning of the game to see what other mysterious Russian games might be on offer; mostly they're pretty bad, but I really liked Orbox, a puzzle game with I forget how many levels...25, I think. Lots of fun (and there's no penalty for dying), but there is one very irritating level (the next-to-last one, if I recall correctly) in which the blocks appear in random positions, and you just have to keep trying new ones until they arrange themselves into a solvable formation.