Games

Now calm down, Rainbow Web isn’t a disgusting euphemism for jizz like you probably think it is - it’s a fun little puzzle game that absolutely doesn’t have anything to do with jizz. We really can’t stress that enough.

Rainbow Web 2 is so fast and furious and fun that we’ve been hooked on it for some time now. It’s your usual ‘match the coloured tiles’ puzzler, but the ingenious inclusion of letters into Rainbow Web 2 gives it a life expectancy far beyond many of the other generic puzzley games we’ve had here. Plus Rainbow Web 2 is indirectly about spiders. And who doesn’t like spiders, eh?

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Look, we know that everything you own - your computer, your phone, your iPod, your kettle, your first-born child - all comes with a version of Solitaire on it. We know that. But this isn’t Solitaire. It’s Fashion Solitaire.

How does Fashion Solitaire compare to regular Solitaire? Well, it’s got dresses and stuff in it, obviously. And also it’s not really solitaire. In Fashion Solitaire you spend a lot of the time matching garments to models to make outfits, and then you make collections and - if you really want to - you can design your very own clothes. A warning, though - if you’re crap at solitaire, you’ll be just as crap at Fashion Solitaire.

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Like The Sims, but disappointed that it doesn’t feature as many hardened embittered murders who face execution as you like? Good, Death Row is the game for you, then.

Death Row puts you in the role of counsellor, and you have just 14 days to reform a violent criminal before he gets sent to the electric chair so, you know, lots of laughs to be had there. You do this by playing games with him, improving his work ethic, controlling his diet, earning his trust and looking for clues that prove his innocence. But be warned, do badly at Death Row and your prisoner will hang himself. So, again, quite a happy game.

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Face it, this is a game called Spandex Force. You’re going to play it regardless of what it involves just because it’s called Spandex Force. Even if it’s a hokey puzzle game with a few ill-fitting RPG minigames thrown in, you’re still going to play Spandex Force.

And that’s a good thing, because that’s exactly what Spandex Force is - you choose a superhero and a superpower, then battle through all kinds of puzzle-style minigames as you go. Fighting villains, rescuing citizens, matching up three identical tiles in a big board full of tiles - these are just some of the quests that Spandex Force will take you on. Hardly Iron Man, but diverting enough.

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Download Spandex Force

Grow games rule. Even Grow games that we don’t completely understand and aren’t convinced how good they are rule because they’re Grow games. Life Ark, then, also rules.

While it’s not nearly as intuitive as the Eyezmaze games that obviously inspired it, The Life Ark is still a pretty diverting way to waste your lunchtime. In Life Ark there’s a huge barren wasteland that you have to bring life to by clicking various objects in a certain order until a big rainbow comes down and makes flowers and dinosaurs and giraffes, pretty much in the same way God did all those years ago. It might seem infuriating at first, but once you’ve got the measure of it, you’ll find The Life Ark most satisfying.

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Hey, it’s another one of those business management sims that we’re so fond of letting you play. And this one’s about a hotel, so you’ll have to make sure you’re really great at only supplying really rubbish TV channels in your stupid dirty rooms.

Just kidding, Jane’s Hotel Family Hero is fun! Here’s what you have to do, straight from the horse’s mouth:

Want to be a fabulous entrepreneur? In Jane’s Hotel Family Hero you will expand a boutique hotel chain and provide 4-star service to eager guests. Help Jane purchase four International hotels, make upgrades, and pay off that looming bank loan. In addition to the normal guest services, Jane can now help customers buy souvenirs and take pictures. Jane’s Hotel Family Hero is the hospitable sequel adding a brand new twist to time management and cafe games.

Jane’s Hotel Family Hero is just like Hotel Babylon! Except it’s not completely shit!

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Download Jane’s Hotel Family Hero

Meet In is another Eyezmaze game, so it’s officially one of the top ten best things on the planet. But don’t expect the usual ‘click on stuff in different orders to make things happen’ schtick here, because Meet In is quite different.

Without wanting to give too much away, the aim of Meet In is to try and reunite all the members of a family in the centre of a maze by moving them with your arrow keys. But the brain-crapping Eyezmaze twist is that each family member is in its own individual window, and everyone needs to help each other out quite a lot. That’s it - we want you to experience the rest of Meet In for yourselves.

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We should probably warn you now that Kullors will possibly break your mind forever. Don’t come running to us when it’s mashed your frontal lobe irreparably, OK?

Kullors looks so sodding easy at first, too - you just have to click matching-coloured blobs until none are left. But then, a few levels in, you realise that you have an odd number of blobs to click, and that’s where things start to get messy - Kullors asks you to start mixing the blobs up and changing their colours. By the end of it, you’re planning how to mix colours about five or six moves in advance and that, friends, is where madness lies. OK, not actual madness, but a jolly nasty headache.

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Not a clue. Seriously, not a clue. We’ve played Cowabanga for a while now, and we haven’t even come close to working out what the hell we’re supposed to do. Have a go and let us know if you figure it out, won’t you.

In Cowabanga there’s a cow, and a little TV-watching man on the cow, and a tent peg, and some flying fish with exploding eyes, and little pingy balls that fly about the place, and everything explodes if you touch the cow’s nose… but that’s as far as we’ve got. Cowabanga might not even have a point, in fact. And wouldn’t that be a pain in the arse.

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As the popularity of the game Theme Park proved, everyone thinks they can build world-beating rollercoasters or, failing that, rollercoasters that make people spew up all over their shoes. And Rollercoaster Creator is a game that maximises on that desire.

Rollercoaster Creator is quite simple - you draw a rollercoaster outline and then watch the little carts go round your design. But you can’t go too crazy - you have to make sure that your rollercoaster hits a set amount of checkpoints, and you have to make sure that it obeys the basic laws of physics, otherwise there’s a giant horrific crash and you get sued and everyone hates you and you end up taking your own life because you’re such a monster. That last bit doesn’t happen, by the way. Well, it doesn’t happen anywhere outside of our heads, at least.

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We’re just going to come out and be honest here - we love Doeo so much it’s disgusting. Everything about Doeo, from the idea to the execution, is so perfect that we’re toying with the idea of actually marrying it. No joke.

Doeo is blindingly simple - faces pop up on the screen and you have to wave your mouse over as many of them as you can in a set amount of time. But the inventiveness of how these faces appear, coupled with Doeo’s blinding Katamari-esque off-kilter setting and glorious soundtrack, means that we can’t stop going back and playing on it again and again. And now it’s your turn. If you don’t love Doeo, there might just be something wrong with you.

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It went on sale at 12.01 AM in most supermarkets, some games retailers and no doubt a few geezers doing the mark-up thing on street corners. Did you get your copy of Grand Theft Auto IV today?

If you didn’t and you didn’t pre-order then, well, tough. Finding a copy now will be like finding a pair of jeans that actually fit properly: not impossible, just flipping difficult.

41 UK shops were understood to have opened their doors at midnight to welcome the obsessed and the wired as they queued up in the cold, gingerly working their way towards the counter only to be told that the guy in front has just bought the last copy. Still if he/she was small enough you could always have mugged them and run off into the night. Someone will have done, you mark our words.

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