The internet flash games that are ruining the world economy one extended lunch hour at a time seem to fit into a number of fairly standard categories:
- The horribly, horribly addictive yeti sports games, our office shut for about a week when someone sent round the first one.
- Pervy hentai stuff from Japan involving cartoon alien schoolgirls, in pants.
- Games where you eviscerate large numbers of little stickmen in increasingly gory ways.
- Scatological efforts involving pissing, shitting, farting or spunking with a certain amount of timing or accuracy.
Whilst flipping through Edge (which, rather like the NME I have no idea why I keep buying), I came across mention of the deeply fantastic Boomshine, a flash game involving little coloured balls, bouncing around at random that you need to explode by starting a chain reaction.
All you do is click the mouse once to kick things off and then sit and watch while chaos theory in microcosm kicks in and hopefully a large number of the balls explode, albeit in an aesthetically pleasing manner and with pleasant little pings. Think Missile Command re-written by The Orb.
Easy to start with, success at the later points of Boomshine seem to be down to extreme cleverness, some sort of zen mastery or extreme luck. I’ve no idea but you do seem to have more success when a little, ahem, worse for wear, one way or the other. You can play it by clicking on this link right here. Take my advice and turn the music off.
There is always something to appreciate in a skilfully written opening line, something that grabs your interest and indicates exactly what it is you are getting yourself into. For my money you can’t really go wrong with Raoul Duke’s, “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold”, or maybe even Shaun Ryder’s, “Son, I’m thirty, I only went with your mother ‘cause she’s dirty”.
I was almost ridiculously overjoyed when I discovered that (greatest band of their generation) 
