I can’t believe that it is a year when I start this blog, but it is true: Zip-Zap Games have first birthday.

Story behind this blog is quite short: it was nice summer night and I just wander around the house and thinking about my Internet activities and what I can do next. Then great idea pop in my mind and I want to create new gaming blog focused to games, back than I want to cover all of these games console games, some news, pc games and handheld at all. It takes a couple of weeks to find that this is not possible and I settle in calm waters of flash games, because I enjoy these games a lot.

I also do not want to start this blog alone than I talk about this idea with my friend: Gee and take him on board. Set up of the blog takes a couple of minutes: I have this domain from my previous attempt to create game portal and and I can install Wordpress in a minute. It takes about three hours from first idea to publishing first post.

First year was something like trying the waters, we try different style of writing, change a design and also our writing is much better than the old days of first posts. For a first year we write 153 blog posts and I hope that this, second, year will be much better, but we do not want to change a lot of things, just still improve our writings.

Thank you guys, for reading this blog and happy birthday ZZ.

When I was a small boy, one of my big hobbies were dinosaurs. I really loved these big lizards and almost everything about them. Not just Jurassic Park:o) And now, if I got a chance to save one in a flash game, of course I tried! The game’s called Dino Run.

Everything you need to do in here is to run from left to right and save yourself. You can meet many other dinosaurs acting absolutelly the same and if they’re smaller, you can eat them to get some extra points. If it’s some kind of Triceratops or Stegosaurus (big dinosaurs for everybody who’s not fan and doesn’t know;oP) you just need to try not to slow down and jump over them as fast as you can.

And what are you running from? Of course from all the destruction caused by fallen meteor. If you are fast enough, everything looks good, but if you got stuck somewhere, you’ll see everything changing very fast. Everything’s going red and soon you”ll see an all-destructing wave.

Game looks pretty good if you like pixelart graphics. You can’t have no problem with controls, because you’ll need just cursor keys. And that’s pretty much everything. Just try it and save your small dino:o)

Play this game in your browser

I worked on some casual puzzle-crossword game last year and due to some complications with graphic designer I did not finish this game. The source code lays in the dark corner of my hard disk for many months until I spoke with Gee about it. From that time I have dilemma what I can do with this game.

Last year I wanted to have epic (casual) game full of elves and pots of gold, nice Irish music and beautiful hand drawing graphics. First months everything was going well, then started problems with my graphics designer that went to fail of the project. I lost attraction, but most of code is written, also some levels and others stuff.

These days I spend a lot of time thinking of what I can do with this unfinished project. I can continue at the point I left this game and finish it into A grade casual game and sell it at the portals. This sounds good, but it requires a lot of time and effort that I probably do not want to spend at this project with such a uncertain outcome (my game developer myself cry, but it is not so fun to find another graphic designer, than another, because first left than start again).

I can also finish this game as a B grade casual games and go indie way. Just finish the code, throw all the elves and nice story away; add some generic graphic created by myself (graphics is not crucial in this kind of games) and try to sell it via download sites. This looks nice for me, because it is everything just about me and I do not need to spend a lot of effort at the business site (like dealing with publishers and so). Game could be also much cheaper: if it will costs $5.99 I will get more money than if I release $19.99 game with some publisher (yeah, they take more then 70% of game sale).

Or I can just leave it at the dark place of my hard drive. What do you think, what is the right way? Try to make it big, spent a lot of time and money to get the chance and have about 5 percent to make nice income or try to publish it and just see what happen later. If you are a developer what are you doing with your abandoned projects?

And now for something completely different. Small logic games is actually Dejv’s domain, but I found something, that even I enjoy. It’s fast, you need to think and of course, it’s fun.

This game’s principle is pretty simple, it’s quite similar to Phit. You’ve got a few objects and you need to tag them together into a grid. And of course there’s a deadly time limit. If you’re good - that means fast - you get more time. And trust me, you’ll need it in later levels, because you’ll need your whole brain capacity.

There’s nothing more to say about this game. Graphics is pretty simple, but you can’t anticipate from such a game. Same with sounds and music - there aren’t any:o) But who cares.  What’s most important, it’s fun and it makes you think.

Play this game in your browser

I love simplicity in games. Simply games shows who is great designer and who not. Bad designers tend to bloat everything they’ve got to their hands. Great designer must have clear mind and have vision for each game they want to create.

Seek is this kind of the game. You have very simple objective: just click to the button with character or number that correspond to letter which slide upper to your choices. If you miss the time limit, you lost one live.

Simple concept, but Eyemaze, the designer of this game, plays with this theme a lot. In first level you have just couple of choices, later you’ve got much more buttons-choices. Later there where case sensitive letter and also rotated characters (this is very hard in little time to find the corresponding one). But Eyemaze do not stopped here and add multicolored buttons and much more features that makes this game great.

It is nice to see that anyone can create great game from such a simple concept.

To play this game, click here

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.