Flash Games: Overkill Apache, The Last Stand, Luminara, The Way of the Exploding Stick, Sea of Fire, Elasticity

Welcome to Friday. Welcome to Friday Flash Games.

Every Friday I present three or more games for you to play, each of which depends on the Adobe Flash Player and your web browser. I let you know about sound and music for each game, in case you are playing when you should be vewy quietly hunting wabbits. The beauty of depending on Flash is that all games work on Mac OS X, on Windows, and probably on Linux or any other environment that supports Flash. Will the iPhone — due next month — support Flash? I don't know, but if it does, there's a decent chance these games will work there, too. Which may be as good a reason as any to not support Flash on the iPhone, I suppose.

In Overkill Apache, your objective is pretty simple: destroy everything that moves, and everything that doesn't. You're flying an Apache gunship, collecting ammunition that floats down via parachute (handy, that), along with mid-air repairs (really handy, that). All around you are enemy jets and helicopters, trucks, tanks, running soldiers, water towers, and more. Everything but the ground itself can be destroyed, and some of it shoots back.

Those tanks can be vicious when you don't have bombs, but when you have bombs, life is good. The bombs are powerful, destroying helicopters and jets as well as everything else. Some of the missiles are harder to aim, and the guns are feeble against some things. In theory, you need to keep track of how much ammo you have left. In practice, you fire everything you've got every time you hit the spacebar, so it really doesn't matter. You know what you're firing, so don't bother trying to hit low ground targets when you don't have bombs, for example.

The music starts before the game's main screen, but you can turn off all sound at any time. It's a nicely-polished, if simple, game, and the music is good.

I promise, I'll include one game today that doesn't feature "destroy everything" as the main purpose of existence, but this is not that game. The Last Stand takes place in a world in which you're being overrun by zombies, and the only question is how many of them you can kill before they inevitably take you.

Article Author: Phillip Winn

Phillip Winn was the Chief Geek for Blogcritics, and a blogger since 1995. He may currently be found and followed as @pwinn on Twitter.

Visit Phillip Winn's author page — Phillip Winn's Blog