This is one of those cases where one gender has an Occam's Razor to cut through the velvet rope, and the other has to resort to Complex Machinations with Important-Sounding Names that border on being Rube Goldberg-esque in their intricacy.

That's really all situations, when it comes right down to it. I really can't think of a problem that a girl's boobs couldn't resolve. Well, I can, but that's because it's generally accepted that breasts can't do math. But that's really just getting nitpicky, isn't it?

Today I'll be addressing a couple of Flash games that I have discovered during my perusals of the Interwebs. First up is "This Is the Only Level", a game predicated wholly upon the idea that the landscape of its gamespace is sacred, but not its rules. While the appearance of the "single" level remains uniform throughout, the controls and the ways in which your elephant (no idea why it's an elephant, just roll with it) interacts with its environment are mercurial, to say the least. It's an interesting exercise in reversal, and is still damn fun.

Our second contender comes from the maker of "This Is the Only Level", and is called "Achievement Unlocked". This is another exercise in "let's fuck with the way games traditionally work and also make the player's avatar an elephant, all for the hell of it". It takes the achievements mechanism so common in video games nowadays (collect all the secret doohickeys, murder so many whatsits in a certain amount of time, find the hidden area*, beat the uber-powerful boss that brutally browbeats you over and over again with unstoppable techniques, complete the intricate and game-spanning sidequest, etc.) and makes it the central focus of the game. This one is even more brainbending than the previous game, so you may want to have limbered up first. You have to get ninety-nine achievements--once more, in a single gamespace--in order to beat the game. It sounds difficult, but when the game first kicks off you can't go ten pixels without getting, like, three achievements. Only late in the game does it begin to get...intriguing. Good luck.

I do so enjoy games that bend the rules. Then again, I enjoy things that bend reality, so I suppose I would.

-James