There’s a very good chance that you have already heard of the game World of Goo. If not, check out this video to get a taste.

This game has a number of great things going for it:

1. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to play.
2. The world if very unique and has a fun feel to it.
3. The music really sets the mood for the different areas.
4. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.
5. It’s DRM free.

These days, I find great favor in things that 1) have Linux support and 2) are DRM free. Since World of Goo looked like a ton of fun and had both of those, the $20 price tag was nothing. Frankly, the price is very small when you consider the many hours of fun that you can have with all the goo balls.

I ran World of Goo both on one of my Windows Vista machines and on my Ubuntu machine at home. It worked very well on both platforms. Even the Linux version was very smooth even though I’m running Compiz.

FYI: If you want to run this on Linux, you can get the software as a DEB or RPM package or as a tar.gz archive with all the application files. I recommend usingone of the package files. Since the packages are built for 32-bit, you will need to use these instructions if you have a 64-bit distro.

I highly recommend World of Goo, but you don’t have to have blind trust in my opinion. You can download the demo and try it out for yourself.

You might be interested in their post about the release of the Linux version. The day of the Linux release, sales were 40% higher than their previous highest-selling day. “There is a market for Linux games after all ,” said one of the developers after updating the post.

I have another great Flash game to share with you today. It’s simply called The Space Game, or TSG by its creator, CasualCollective.

TSG puts you in the middle of asteriod fields. Your goal is to either mine enough minerals or survive enemy attack long enough to pass each mission. This sounds simple, but it is actually quite complex while still being managable.

On the resource side, you have energy and minerals. Energy is provided by solar power stations and is used to power all created buildings. Minerals are mined from the asteroids and are used to build new buildings (as well as creating ammo for missile launchers).

The main building for most missions is going to be the mineral miner. This structure is where you gain minerals which are used to build up everything else (including other mineral miners). Watch out though as the asteroids do have a limited amount of minerals. Don’t let too many asteroids run dry or your supply of minerals will quickly disappear.

To defend your base, you can build lasers that have two different upgrade paths and missile launchers. There are a large variety of enemy units that each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. You must use your knowledge of the specific types of ships to build the appropriate buildings for defense.

There are also support structures such as energy stores which increase the amount of stored energy (great for weathering large attacks which can cause massive power drains) and the repair station which builds drones that automatically repair damaged structures. These structures aren’t strictly needed, but they can mean the difference between success or defeat.

There is one final building: the energy relay. You can’t build your buildings just anywhere and have them work, they need to be in range of power. Since you won’t want to build power stations everywhere, power relays allow you to bridge the gap between power stations and other buildings. These can be a weak link however as each relay can only connect to a total of five buildings and if a relay is destroyed, the power flow is cut off.

Other than the energy relay, all the buildings can be upgraded. It seems that upgrading a building always produces a better cost/benefit ratio than simply building another matching building.

Not only is this game very well designed, but the visuals are quite appealing. Sure, the enemies may appear retro and the buildings are simple, but the backgrounds are great and the user interface is fantastic. In the reviews, someone mentioned that it should be put on XBox Live. I’m sure that a game like this would do extremely well if ported over.

Great work CasualCollective. I look forward to seeing what else you come out with.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start mining those asteroids.

I’m very sorry for the late posts the past couple of days. Things have been quite busy, and I just haven’t had enough time to finish things up on time.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Auditorium.

Auditorium is a audio/visual logic puzzle Flash game. In the game, you have to use the different tools given to you to redirect the particle stream. As you begin to redirect the stream into specific collectors, specific sounds start to increase in volume. As you fill up all the collectors, you are rewarded with a beautiful symphonic sound.

Not only is Auditorium an intriguing challenge, it is both beautiful and a pleasure to listen to. There are times where I don’t want to successfully pass the level so that I can keep hearing the symphonic sound unique to that level.

You can play the first few levels for free. For a mere $10.99, you can get access to all the levels.

I highly recommend that all you puzzle and music fans try Auditorium out. I can’t be held responsible for addiction.

Today I recommend that you try out Shopping Cart Hero.

The last Flash game that I posted about was all about logic. This one is all about silly, pointless fun.

Try your best to maximize the distance, height, and style points as you ramp your cart into the air. Upgrade your cart to improve it’s ability to roll, attach rocket boosters, add groupies, and unlock tricks to build up the greatest amount of points possible.

Can you get a cart full of groupies in space?

I often enjoy simple games more than complex games. Grid is the latest time killer that I’ve found and became quickly addicted to.

Grid is a spin off of the old style circuit games where you have to get all the pieces connected in just the right order to form a circuit. The exception is that Grid requires you to connect every connector to some other connector. Each “grid” only has one solution, so you have to get it just right in order to move on to the next level.

This doesn’t sound too difficult, but there’s a great twist. There’s a central power point that feeds the circuit. Only pieces that actively have power can be rotated. This means that if you make a mistake, you can disable a piece and leave yourself with no way of sending power to it again.

There is a way to restart the puzzle if you have messed up too much, but fortunately, there is an undo so that you can reverse previous mistakes.

In order to add an extra layer of challenge on top of all of this, you start off with a base level bonus each time you start a new puzzle. Each time you rotate a piece, this bonus goes down by one point. If you use the undo, you lose two points. So, not only do you want to complete the puzzle, but you want to do it in as few moves and mistakes as possible in order to maximize your score.

My final score was 68671. See if you can beat me.

I stumbled on a great game the other day called Eversion. At first this game seems to be a simple, cutesy platformer, but it holds a great twist that starts simple and gets weirder and weirder.

I really don’t want to give anything away, so I just recommend that you give it a try. A bit of advice should be helpful though, the spacebar does something, but only in certain locations.

I wish you the best of luck as Eversion is not an easy platformer.