Some people say, that there’s nothing going on in gamer’s world on summer. Looks quite different for me this year. I’m not just playing games for which there was no time before. There are also many interesting demos.

And because I kinda like episodic gameplay and first episode of American McGee’s Grimm was sent free on the net, I had to try it. Actually I didn’t know much about this game and maybe it’s better, because my expectations weren’t so high.

What’s this game about? About being evil. Many gamers love to be bad.  And even I’m sometimes disgusted from all the pastel colored animals and shiny happy sun. So your character - Grimm - is here to make everything a little more ugly and less shiny.

Everywhere, where he moves, the beautiful fairytale world’s changing to a smelly horror dream full of ghosts, ghouls and zombies. And using his special ability he can spread ugliness all around him.

In core, this game is nothing more than an jumping arcade. An easy one, because you can’t lose. If you die, it’s no problem and you born somewhere near again. And even your objectives aren’t very difficult. You must spread enough ugliness around you. Some characters try to stop your spreading  and clear the world again, but you can make them sleep and continue.

Your only enemy is the time here. But you don’t have any time limit, you just can try to be faster next time. And to tell the truth, time is an enemy of game itself. Because I finished first episode in about 40 minutes, I hope that the next one, that won’t be for free, will be at least twice as long.

Download American McGee’s Grimm Episode 1

Dungeon Siege in space? Whoa, this must be fantastic! Because I’m a big fan of games that take place in space and I also loved Dungeon Siege 2, I was really looking forward to try Space Siege demo. So how it is?

Actually…bad. Why? The action is not intensive at all, there’s no atmosphere and I could continue. All you need is to stay with your character someplace and click with right mouse button on your enemies.I don’t know, but in Dungeon Siege this really wasn’t enough! Maybe it was because you also needed to think about your companions.But in Space Siege, there are no companions, it’s just about you.

But even with one character there can be fantastic action. And you don’t even need to buy a game like this. Just try Robokill - you can find an article about it in here, and at least I enjoyed this game much more, than Space Siege demo

If you want to download the demo after all and try it by yourself - you can download it for example here.

I don’t think there are many flash games that you can call art. But music catch is different. For me, it’s a big piece of art. Why?

As you know from the game’s name, for sure, this is another music game. And you sure know, that I love music games:o) So, what can be so great about a music game? What can make it special and even art? Of course, it’s music. Concept of this game is pretty simple, actually. You can define it only with two worlds - the game’s name - Music catch.

Your objective is to catch different shaped objects that are blue, yellow or purple and avoid red ones. If music is intensive, there are many objects, if it’s slow and peaceful, there is only a few. And that’s pretty much everything.

Even if this game is using only a few colors, it looks amazing. Especially for those, that love minimalistic graphics. But as I said before, the best thing, about this game is it’s piano music. Sounds amazing.

And the only problem about this game I found out? It’s a big one, actually. There’s only one song. That means, that the gameplay is quite short and if you want to play again, the game’ll be absolutelly the same. Fortunatelly the song is so good, that you don’t need to care about it:o)

Play this game in your browser 

A lot of people wants to be a surgeons, much more people like to watch to TV shows and films about doctors, but we do not have a lot of games around this theme. I was very happy to find this little game. It is not perfect, but it is still fun for most moments.

The story behind this game is quite simply: you are the guys who continuously finds people who needs surgery, because they swallow magnet which draw up the nails which stab them 20cm inside the body or they are hit by hedgehog (I am not kidding, this is serious). You have some great tools: pizza cutter, tongs, stapler, lighter and chainsaw (yeah, this tool is great for slicing throught bones). There are 23 missions: patients that need help and it is really great fun.

You burn the wounds to avoid bleeding, slicing bones by chainsaw (then fire the bones up to the correct place, lighter is very handy tool) and taking of hedgehogs spines. There are couple of tricks and procedures you need to know, but later it just start to be very repetitive, but this is quite usual for flash games.

There are one particular thing I really hate on this game: there is no tutorial in this game and some procedures are quite tricky: like you need to select corkscrew and then select pain relief tool then follow the red square which rotate around the circle to have injection which boost the patient. You need to learn this without any hint and if you don’t you cannot finish 5 level. Common, this is crap.

OK, you have some in-game help, but you need to go through them and if you have some tool selected, you injure the patient each time you clicks on the book. I have sound off, then I do not seems that and I killed the patient twice to figure out how to get the injections.

If you do not mind this issue with the help you will like this game and trust me: it is fun, but it is very addictive. You can play this game here.

There are tons of flash games available and each day pops hundreds of another new games. Question how these developers and whole developments teams makes living is usually undiscovered which leads me to wrote this list.

Pre-game advertising
This is most common way how developers makes money: you must see the ads before loading of the game many times before.

Portals Revenue Sharing
Portals like Kongregate forbid in-game advertising, but they provide revenue sharing based on their own advertising solution.

In-site advertising
This way was most common before rise of in-game advertising by companies like MochiAds. Developers created game with faith that this game will spread virally and brings a crowds of players to his sites and then monetize it by classical advertisement like Google AdSense or so.

Sponsorship
There are a couple of sponsorship methods: developer could sign a exclusive publishing deal with game portal and this portal will pay him for his game or some other business or individual could pay him for including link which leads to their site or whole game might be branded to payer theme.

Pay Per Play / Pay Per Item
This is well know in MMOG genre and the method is simply: you have access to the free version of game and if you want some advantage or more content you need to pay some small amount money to the developer.

This list do not contains all possibilities, I want just provide some basic info about how developers makes living by creating small flash games. If your favorite method is not listed do not hesitate to post comment.

I’m sure you know the feeling. You’ve just finished a great game and you want to feel that you are the winner. You’re so good, that you was able to finish such a game! And now you need just a second to enjoy this winner feeling.

BUM! You’ve just killed the main enemy in your favourite FPS or destroyed enemy’s army in your favourite RTS. It doesn’t matter what game it is, but if it has at least some kind of story, it’s good to have some time in the end to think about the game and to enjoy the feeling, that this is end. You’re happy, that you’ve finished the game, but you’re sad, because there’s nothing more, too.

And now what should make a good game? Good game gives you time! Good game shows you some nice ending animation and of course credits and some good music. Most times I don’t care who created the game, but if I finished the game, it means that it was good and I’m glad to know what people were behind it. For example take Gears of War. I had big problems with last boss. And when I finally got him, there were quite long credits and I sat and watched. Just to enjoy the wonderful feeling.

And what about bad game ending? Few days ago I wrote about Bioshock. The game was really good, I loved it. But the ending? C’mon! I killed the last enemy, got a half minute animation and the game kicked me to menu! No “Thanks for playing!”. No credits (but you can run them from menu). And of course no time to stop for a while and think about what you’ve just done. No time to think about all what happened in the game.

So. Game creators. If you read this - please, please! Give us more time to enjoy the feeling that we’re the winners!

It’s about a year ago when Bioshock came. I resisted for quite a long time. Of course because I thought that my computer really isn’t enough for such a game.  But a week ago I finally purchased this great game and it’s really good, that it’s holiday in here - Bioshock looks like a big time eater for me.

In a few older posts I said, that if I play an FPS, I mostly like the most brainless ones. But I also love atmospheric games with a good story. And even if Bioshock is almost everything, but not a brainless game, I fell in love with it in a short time.

First of all - it looks fantastic. Even on my laptop it works just fine with high details. See some screenshots. You can almost say, that levels are peace of art. Sometimes it’s good just to stay and look at all the beautiful things around you.

And as I said before, story and atmosphere is great too. Oh yeah, I just can’t stop, because I need to find out what’s going to happen next. All the characters are well written and there are lots of “whoa” moments.It looks just like if almost everyone went crazy in Rapture. And everyone in a little different way.

So my final verdict? I didn’t finish it yet (even if I think, that I’m almost there, I can’t be sure), so I can’t say for sure, but even now I can say, that I’ll remember Bioshock and it’ll be one of my top games.