I spend a lot of time checking out games I can play in a web browser. I'm in terrible financial shape, love checking out indie games, and use a PPC Mac, and quite frankly, most browser games feature ad banners for newly released browser games, so it's a bit of a self-perpetuating interest. Every so often, I come across something that really is new and different and interesting, and sometimes even fun too. The vast majority of the time though, I come across awful, fundamentally flawed games. More importantly though, I come across the EXACT SAME awful games again and again under different names. This needs to stop. I realize a lot of people are most likely making these as exercises in learning to code, but there's plenty of other simple concepts that have been done to death to practice which that aren't just plain broken. These game types I'm about to list aren't just over-exposed, they are flawed at the conceptual level.

Our first offender is what I like to call the slow-paced RTS. You have a town. You set up an order to build or upgrade a building (more often than not, a resource harvester). Depending on how high up the upgrade path you are, a timer of somewhere between a minute and 12 hours pops up. When it's finished, you can start something else. Eventually, after maybe a week or so, you build up to a point where you can start cranking out units and raiding nearby towns for resources, and later still you hit a point where you can outright attack other towns, sending war machines to destroy their buildings and cripple their production. Now, I should stress here that I love a good RTS. The key difference is that while the gameplay is similar either way, with a traditional RTS, I sit down with a friend or 3, or some random strangers, we all start at once, and one intense hour or so later, the game is over, allowing us to start fresh or go do something else. Here though, we have the following fundamental problems.

• Late Starters Are Screwed. If you are jumping into the game any time after it first starts up, someone is going to be dominating the world already. The second you grow big enough to threaten them, they will crush you, and you will have no means of defending yourself. The best you can manage is to hope one of the major alliances is still recruiting and can jump you up to a point you can survive. Living or dying by the whim of established players is not fun.
• Absurd Commitment Level. If you do manage to avoid that first dealbreaker of an issue, and find yourself in a position where you are on even footing with your fellow players, in order to maintain that, you must constantly start up the next build order the instant the last one finishes. Early on, this means sitting at your computer constantly monitoring things, possible doing something else in the background. A bit later, it still bookends your other activities, with regular check ins every hour or so. Eventually optimization might start to conflict with your sleep schedule, and once you're far enough up the upgrade path not to need to worry much, you'll be involved in the combat end of the game, which demands truly constant attention.
• Tribalism. Ultimately, none of what you do individually really matters. Huge alliances will exist in the game, whether or not it officially has mechanics which support them. Have 200 friends willing to sit at their computers constantly, willing to work together with you to dominate this game? If not, you're going to be crushed into dust sooner or later, with weeks or months of effort obliterated. If so, well that's just sad. At this point, you are putting more effort and organizational skill into this than you likely are putting into your career. Except this doesn't generate you any income or produce anything besides, possibly, the smug satisfaction of knowing that your tribe can beat up the tribe of a bunch of other people with no life.
• And While It's Not Inherent... I have yet to see one of these games which failed to include a means by which one can donate money for an edge over other players. Typically, this includes a subscription to let you queue up a few build orders, which is acceptable, but in most if not all cases, you can also just plain pay for extra resources, letting you literally throw money at the game for an unfair edge over other players. This, to me, is a breach of basic game design ethics.

Next on the chopping block, Management Sims. You run a business, let's say it's a restaurant, since it usually is. People line up at the counter with speech bubbles saying what they want. You click on them, you click on what you want. You repeat this process until they leave. If you don't keep them waiting too long, they are happy and give you money. If you meet the target amount of money before the time limit expires, you successfully complete the level, get to spend that money on upgrades, and move on to the next.

And While It's Not Inherent... For some reason, these games are all shareware, if not full on retail. I have never encountered one of these games which is available, in its entirety, as the simple flash game it is. They are always, always demos for a stand alone application I can download for $20 or so. Are any of these actually successful? They're incredibly shallow, and all upgrading from a demo could do for me is MAYBE let me keep going until a level finally manages to overwhelm me with enough activity that I can't keep up. I'm not even willing to give up the 25 cents it would cost me to hit this point in the first game of this genre, the old arcade game Tapper, which at least has the decency to ramp up difficulty quick enough to hold my attention.

And finally, we have Tower Defense games. These I believe are recognized well enough that I don't need to describe them. The original TD was a custom map for WarCraft 3. It was honestly a rather interesting an novel usage of the map editor to build an odd little puzzle out of an RTS. Several variations were then created, and eventually they made the leap to simple little flash games, the flood gates were opened, and I would estimate hundreds of them are now floating around. Now, unlike the other games on the list here, people honestly get very creative with Tower Defense games. It can be argued that they are not, in fact, irredeemably bad. However, the best TD games are the ones which move the furthest away from the tried and true TD formula, and the single-best games I've seen labelled as Tower Defense had, in reality, reverted back to being just straight up RTS games that were mislabeled. In any case, there is really just the one inherent problem here.

• They're Just Puzzles. No matter what weird gimmicks are used, ultimately, any given TD game is just a single puzzle. You have strictly limited resources, the same monster waves each time you play, and most strategies flat out will not work. The trick is to figure out which tower type (or types) is the key to victory, and place them for maximum damage dealing efficiency. Since the actual mechanics are rarely all on the table (especially when it comes to upgrades), and there is inherently no room for error, it comes down to pure trial and error working out the correct solution. It might be interesting once, but much like there is precious little joy to be found in solving a sudoku puzzle once you understand the basics, I think we're done here. This of course only gets worse when you factor in the following.
• And While It's Not Inherent... The trend in TD games of late is to try and add in value with a level based structure. Fend off 25-50 waves on this map. OK! Now move on to THIS map and do it again! And again, and again, through all 50 maps. Presumably, you figured out the winning strategy by the time the difficulty curve made you start taking things at all seriously, so the vast majority of this full day or week of "gameplay" is just plain repetition. Some games attempt to spice things up with a global upgrade system across levels, but this yields to just another layer of puzzle-solving, where mistakes can ruin your game but not be obvious for several hours, or, if one can back-farm for unlimited upgrade points, makes the monotony all that much worse by forcing you to play through the exact same levels over and over.

There are a few other types of browser games which are more common than is warranted, but with the others that come to mind, the potential for something worthwhile exists. I'm rather sick of "Escape the Room" Myst-clones, but they only suck because so many are just going through the motions. A serious effort by a talented designer would presumably be perfectly fine. Legend of Red Dragon clones have a ton of potential too, especially the weirder ones.

On that note, here's a few browser games I can actually get behind with a fair bit of enthusiasm. First and foremost, Kingdom of Loathing. It's funny, it's surprisingly deep, and it's constantly being improved upon. Next there's Billy Vs. Snakeman which I very nearly turned my nose up at seeing as, well, it's a primarily Naruto-themed, bare-bones, unpleasant looking mutant LoRD-like sitting on the side of an anime news page. Upon actually giving it a chance though, it's surprisingly engaging, with later challenges requiring increasingly more thought and strategy to find combinations of bonuses that make success possible. Finally, Adult Swim's website of all places is home to some surprisingly sophisticated and well polished games which aren't buried under a lot of garbage like you usually find in collections of flash games.

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