Directional Pad

EyezMaze updates GROW and Tontie

EyezMaze, Japanese developer of quite a few great little flash games, recently updated two of their most well-known games: GROW and Tontie.

The new version of GROW, called GROW RPG, is much like it's predecessor GROW v3. Drag things from the sides to the middle, watch them grow and do . . stuff. The original was arguably more of a flash-based busybox than an actual game, but it was still fun even if the only real interaction was "what order should I drop these in?" GROW RPG works much the same way, but instead of being a diverse and random collection of widgets to apply to the ball, you drop down landmarks and terrain objects into a generic fantasy RPG, and their order either helps or impedes the progress of your little generic fantasy RPG hero guy. Yes, it's easy to win, and yes, it's easy to lose, but there's a ton of different ways the world can evolve and change depending on which order you drop things.

The update I'm more excited about, and which delayed the writing of this article by many hours is the long-awaited Tontie v1.0. Tontie is an innovative little variation of whack-a-mole that uses your keyboard's tenkey numpad. Sorry laptop users, you'll want to get to a desktop for this. It goes beyond just standard whack-a-mole, by adding health, weird permutations of Tonties with special rules for how to dismiss them, a cash system and upgrades to buy with the cash.

There are several differences between Tontie v1.0 and the original Tontie Beta. The most obvious is the progress bar that now lets you know just how much longer you're going to have to go before you finish the level. 1.0 also adds all the stuff that was half-finished in the original. This means you can finally get the raygun, which has limited ammo but nukes anything in one hit. The raygun was also moved from the shop to new treasure chests which occasionally crop up along with normal Tonties. Treasure chests may contain anything from the shop [including hefty-big hammers and the like] or things you can't get from the shop like the raygun or crystal hearts [which give you bonus armor on top of your normal four or five hearts].

Protip: just because it came from a treasure chest doesn't necessarily mean it's better than what you have. You could have just dropped a load of cash on the gold hammer, and come across a chest that drops the brown hammer. So be careful what you pick up.

Also added to the game are bosses [!!!], new types of Tonties [or, perhaps, Tonties I've just never seen, because it was nearly impossible to get to them in the original] and a continue system. You're given ten continues, and they're not lame continues that would strip you of your upgrades or anything, you get to keep all your gear. This means that now even if you suck at Tontie you have a chance to get far.

So, now you're armed with two new games to help you waste time at work. Just be sure to keep your fingers ready at Alt+Tab.

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