Alley Cat

Can your favorite furball make it as an alley cat? It's not easy to spend your days outdoors, always in search of your next meal and fending for yourself. That's why cats have nine lives - to make up for the constant danger of living as a free feline.

Alley Cat from CleverMedia is all about helping the kitty of your choice make it on the street. The goal of the game is to help your cat jump from one house to the next without meeting his demise. How do you keep your kitty safe? You have to guide him from one floating platform to the next so he can enter the nearest window in one piece. If your fancy fingerwork isn't quick enough, you'll find yourself with a fallen cat.

At the beginning of the game, you get to choose from five different cats - Lucy, Spooky, Tabby, Jimi, and Hairball. Each cat has got its own distinctive personality, from their signature ?yowl? to their personalized fall to the ground. Pick your cat and then get jumping through the alley, using your space bar and arrow keys. Since the platforms are constantly moving, you'll probably miss the jump eventually, but that's okay - if your cat falls, he'll just lose one of his nine lives. The game ends when those nine lives are up.

I thought this game was cute and fun. That said, there is room for improvement. The scenery from one level to the next was exactly the same - a few changes would have made the game a bit more entertaining.

Go ahead and give it a try. See how many points you can score before meeting your inevitable alley cat fate.

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Gone Fishing

If you have enough patience for real live fishing, then you probably have enough patience for Gone Fishing from Clever Media.

At first, I found this game soothing and relaxing. What could be better than sitting on the edge of a pier, watching the fish swim by below, and carelessly casting a line into the water? But when you're playing a video game, you expect the pace to pick up!

The game is very simple. You sit by the water with a fishing line that slowly swings back and forth (automatically, no sweat for you). Many fish swim back and forth in the water, along with several assorted pieces of junk, like tires, teddy bears, and old pots. When you're ready to cast your line, hit the spacebar and down it goes. If you've calculated carefully, you'll reel in a juicy fish. The deeper it is, the more points you get. Otherwise, you've wasted a few seconds on the clock and have to try again. And if you catch an old teddy bear or anything else that's not a fish, you'll lose points.


Score enough points, and you'll move on to the next level, where the junk is more abundant and an even higher score is needed to make it through.

As I mentioned before, while this game is relaxing and evokes the feeling of fishing on a warm summer morning, it gets a bit slow for a video game. Level after level of the same old thing can be kind of redundant if you're looking for action and challenge.

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Enviro Boarder

Skateboard through an urban obstacle course and avoid taking a spill. In Enviro Boarder, from Clever Media, you get to do this while collecting recyclable trash from the street and depositing it in the nearest recycling bin.

I had a great time playing this game. It reminded me of a Bart Simpson skateboard game I used to play when I was little. The graphics, music, and anecdotal sound effects were great, and the game was fun yet challenging.

What's the real deal with Enviro Boarder? You're a teenage kid aboard a speeding skateboard. You can use the arrow keys to speed up or slow down as you ride away through the city streets. Your goal? Pick up cans, papers, and bottles and put them in the bin before your sixty seconds are up. You can only pick up five of each kind before dropping them off. Each item you deposit earns you more time on the clock, and if you get fifteen in at once, you earn a cool 75 bonus points.

So what's preventing you from easily winning this game? There's stuff everywhere - big men reading the paper, little old ladies shuffling down the street, dogs, buses, cards, billboards, you name it! You can either skate around these obstacles or jump over them, but the crowd is pretty thick - you may jump over one thing to find yourself careening into another. Every time you take a spill (or get hit by a bus!) you lose a life. Lose all four lives, and the game ends.

Not only that, but it's a bit harder to focus on grabbing every piece of trash when you're swerving and hopping for your life. If you run out of time before reaching a bin, you lose the game altogether.

Definitely check out this game. It's absorbing, entertaining, and challenging all at once.

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