Game Time

There's a lot to love about LightForce Games in Athens, Greece. Nick Kouvaris, and his wife Helen, develop Flash games as a hobby and make them available to play on their LightForce Games website. The site makes it very easy to find and navigate to any of their games. Best of all, in the true spirit of sharing their Flash game programming knowledge with others, each game features a link to the .fla source file used to create it. [Edit: this is no longer true, unfortunately]

Most of the games are clones of classic puzzle games, and yet all of them are presented with a simple and consistent style. From puzzle to platformer, many games feature their own graphics that are rather plain and ordinary, however the programming consists of solid implementations. It is evident a lot of love was poured into these little gems, and there is certainly enough to keep anyone busy for a rainy afternoon.

Highlighted here are a couple of noteworthy games that I particulary liked:

Blix is a block-matching puzzle strategy game in which the player shifts rows in either direction to create columns of the same color. Simply click one of the six (6) orange buttons to shift a row horizontally in that direction. Each column matched is eliminated from play and adds 100 points to your score.

You begin with only four (4) moves. Additional moves can be earned by clearing more than one column in a turn. Each turn costs two (2) moves, but you break even if you also clear a column. Each additional column cleared in a single turn increases your moves left by one (1).

Blix is a very simple and enjoyable game with a very pleasing appearance and soundtrack. Click.

A puzzle strategy game against the clock, Znax is about eliminating entire groups of squares by finding four (4) same-colored corners of any rectangular shape.

Simply click on each corner to highlight it. Once the fourth corner is selected the entire group of squares disappears and your score is increased relative to the number of squares removed. You have only five (5) minutes with which to find all the rectangles you can. Znax is another delightfully simple Flash puzzle game. Click.

Here is one for the classic game section. Frogger is a solid remake of the classic Frogger arcade game designed by Konami in 1981 and released in the US by Sega.

This Flash version of the game features the same classic gameplay along with appealing pixel graphics and arcade sound effects. Another solid Flash implementation by Nick and Helen of LightForce Games. Click.

There are many more games available on their website, including puzzle games, platformers, driving games, and flying games, too. And if you enjoy creating games as much as you do playing them, then you will appreciate the source code offered to each of their creations as well. The LightForce Games site is an especially valuable resource for anyone just getting started with game programming in Flash. Click.

Update: Some of the above games disappeared from the Lightforce website, so we are mirroring them temporarily until we can find out why they vanished.