The Sea of Glomp is a crazy-difficult game that requires you to hunt down the bat that stole your egg, and get it back.

There are warp portals, items you pick up (by "glomping" them) and put down (some of which are necessary, while others seem to just distract), bad guys, and more. It's too difficult — or time-consuming — for me to work through, though I managed to get reasonably far in a day. If you want to "cheat" just a little, one player has posted maps of each level by connecting screenshots.

The first time I played, I was stuck — until I realized that the worm on the hook wasn't quite as dangerous as my mommy-glomp once told me!

There is a brief snatch of music at the game menu, and there are splashing and glomping sound effects throughout the game.

I've depicted the arena from Bot Arena 2, but that's not where you'll spend most of your time. In fact, you can't do anything at all in the arena but watch to see how your bots fare!

Instead, the real action is in selecting the bots for your team. You start with a budget and a shopping list. Buy bots (get two, you'll face two opponents), equip them with armor and weapons, and then start the battle. A win will earn you more more money with which you can buy upgrades, and your opponents get progressively more difficult to beat, so choose wisely!

On the first level, your choices are limited by your budget. The only real question is which bot gets the heavy weapon! After that, things get slightly more tricky, as you sell back cheaper weapons to buy more expensive ones. You can fight in earlier rounds as many times as you need to in order to build up cash, but the prizes for winning the later rounds are larger.

There is (annoying, repetitive) music at every stage of the game, and the first chance you have to turn it down (or off) is after you've equipped your bots! You can save the game before each battle, and load saved games (using the same computer from which you saved the game previously) from the main menu. That's a nice touch, especially when you decide to risk a hefty entrance fee fighting against opponents likely to beat you!

Escape games have become a popular genre, and this week I'll present two of them. The first is Escape from Island, presented in English or Japanese. The setup is simple: you've crashed on an island. Good luck!

The interface is very Subversion or Mysteries of Time and Space. Directional controls are (usually explicit), and inventory is key. The game makes liberal use of drag-and-drop, both to inspect ("check") items in your inventory and to use them on the island.