We're having a slow weekend here at Kotaku: Owen is off, and I'm holed up in bed trying to stave off the flu; Aether made a nice respite from my headache and general feelings of 'blah.' It's a weird little game — a little abstract and fuzzy around the edges, you control a little guy and his pet who can fly through the air with the greatest of ease, using said pet's tongue as a grappling hook/trapeze .... I actually quite enjoyed zipping through space from planet to planet, trying to solve puzzles and bring the colour back to unhappy people (the core of an unhappy planet seen above). It's not the most intuitive game ever — it did take me some time to figure out how to successfully get off the ground and into the atmosphere - and I broke out the mouse because the trackpad wasn't cutting it. Still, it's pretty and soothing (and short) — good for a bit of time on a Saturday afternoon.

Aether [Armour Games via IndieGames]

A simple and scaled-down strategy game (it was an entrant in the 'Java4K competition,' where entries could not exceed 4096 bytes), FkConflict is still a lot of fun and good to while away a chunk of time that you probably should be doing something else with. The mechanics are pretty simple: pick your territories; territories get turns each round in random order; first player to get all territories on the board wins.

FkConflict [Blaine Hodge via IndieGames]

Calling all flash game devs! E4.com is sponsoring the Golden Joysticks web games thingy and is looking for flash game entries from around the globe. Maybe your entry. Who knows? The game doesn't have to be developed specifically for the competition, but it has to be developed by you. Yes, you. The winner gets £5,000 and the first Flash Game Developer Golden Joystick. We're pretty sure that the Golden Joystick isn't real gold, but we haven't bitten it so we don't know. Though, £5,000? That's pretty good — especially with the crummy US exchange rate. Full details in the link below. Click on it.

Grand Master Flash Competition [E4.com]

Ian Bogost sent along this link to his latest little title, this one called Honorarium: "An autobiographical art game. Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak". I've spent a bit of time with it — I guess I can sympathise with aspects of the game, since I'm the poster child for 'inability to balance life and work — wait, work IS my life.' Just as interesting, however, is his discussion of the way he created the game through Sims Carnival. EA invited Ian to create a game using the tools available through the site. And, as he points out:

Much of the rhetoric surrounding these game creation and distribution sites relies on accessibility: they are supposed to make game development easy. But the truth is, simplified creation tools don't necessarily make creativity easier or harder, they just impose different constraints.

Honourarium [Sims Carnival via Ian Bogost]

From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game "reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment". Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he's "happy to see a game that critiques today's attention culture, but I'm not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description". Still, while I'll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it's adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend.

Attention Hog [Chris Basmajian via Water Cooler Games]

Alright class, time for a flash game. This is "Orbitrunner" and it's reasonably addictive for such a simple concept -- place your star on the grid so that the planets (and their satellites) fall into orbit without smashing into you, each other, or going out of the boundary. I'm not sure how realistic the gravity physics are, but it's very challenging, and I like the background music. The collision/explosion sound/animation is lame, however. I was hoping for a Praxis Effect. If they put this in a 3D, rotatable-camera environment, I'd play it for hours.

You can skip up to five levels if you find you're just not getting the hang of one. It stores your IP address and lets you continue.

Orbitrunner [Gamezhero.com]

New game mechanic detected! At least, I think it's a game. You get a score at the end, so I guess it counts as a game even if it feels more like a sort of zen exercise you might do to calm the mind after post-traumatic stress.

Coign of Vantage (sounds like Engrish, but actually means 'an advantageous position') is a flash game from casual games people Bobblebrook.

You have to use your mouse to rotate an image that has been exploded into voxels (3D pixels) until it matches the un-exploded image in the corner of the screen. When you do that, you get points and more time to play the next image. Thats it.

Its weirdly addictive in that lunchtime minesweeper-grinding kind of way. Some of the high scores imply people glued to their mice for weeks, so tread carefully if you tend to get sucked into things like this.

Coign of Vantage [via Wonderland]

As if poor Amy Winehouse hasn't got enough problems. What with the incessant hounding by tabloid journalists, wobbly live performances, a jailbird husband and — of course — the ever-rising price of crack.

Amy's life just got a tiny bit worse with the release of Escape From Rehab — a frankly rather shoddy flash game that sees the beehived nightingale swearing her way across a side scrolling beat 'em up.

The game is a promo for the upcoming flick Disaster Movie from the (ahem) visionary comedy geniuses behind Scary Movie, Date Movie and Meet The Spartans. Humour-wise, it is definitely up to their usual high standards.

Our Amy has to negotiate wave after wave of characters from other blockbusters (Hulk, Batman, etc) dispatching them with syringe and crack pipe power-ups or smart bombing them with a swipe of her impressive hairdo.

It's just this side of unplayable, but at least Amy can say she finally broke America. Kind of.

Escape From Rehab [via Casualgaming.biz]

Stumbled across this on Reddit when I was looking for evergreen features earlier in the week. If you like monochrome graphics, inscrutable physics, confusing environmental interaction, floating hairy turds/eyeballs and half-assed production values, you'll love Shit Game, an ode to game programming's less-creative endeavors.

Indie programmer Mark Johns says he developed this in about a week back in February. The (world exclusive!!!) trailer is above, and the game (for Windows PC) is available for download from his site. The soundtrack is trailer only, Johns says the in-game soundtrack is entirely pop music done in MIDI. Sounds even shittier.

A Game By Any Other Name Would Still Be Shit [Doomlaser, by Mark Johns]

Exidy's Death Race, of 1976, might have been the first game adaptation and yeah, it was kind of lame, setting a standard for adaptations for decades to come. (It was inspired by 1975's Death Race 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). But man did it cause a stink. Players ran down stickmen with a car, eliciting screams and turning the screen into a graveyard of pedestrians. The game had no colour, no digitized sound, no blood splatter, no ragdoll physics, its violence was abstract in both audio and video, and it made 60 Minutes as a national outrage.

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