Given the positive reception of my last entry I've decided to bring yet more freedom to the masses with this week's edition of Addicting Games. Today's game is, well, an entire sub-genre. "What," you say, "An entire genre!? He's gone mad! This can't be allowed! Some one stop him, please!" Calm down, calm down. It's entirely alright. The reason I've decided to focus on an entire sub-genre of games this time is because they're a relatively obscure and small group dominated almost exclusively by a single indie-developer. They're the Grow games.

Grow games are a type of puzzle game in which the player is presented with a unique game world and number of tiles each representing some object to be placed into that game world. The gameplay is divided up into turns in which the player chooses one of the available objects to be placed into the game world. After each turn all of the objects already in the world interact with one another in unexpected and imaginative ways as they literally grow. For example, a bowl may grow into a fountain, then a tall piece of architecture and finally into a 'Tomorrow Land-esq' plastic house on stilts. Most objects influence the way in which other objects grow such that the goal of every game is to place the objects into the game world in the right order so as to allow every object to grow to its maximum potential. I know this probably all sounds a little complicate, but trust me, it's actually quite simple and intuitive. There's no real punishment for failure and experimentation as you can restart with a click of the mouse. In fact, some of the failures can almost seem as entertaining as the final success. The difficulty for any of the puzzles range from a short and simple three object game that'll take no more than five minutes to solve to a fairly long and challenging twelve object game that could easily take over an hour.

Eyezmaze is pretty much the exclusive developer of this type of game. The puzzles they produce are constantly of high quality, and they all have a fun and colorful drug-induced anime look to them that always leaves you wondering what's going to happen next. Their entire presentation looks very sharp are highly polished making the entire experience fell user-friendly. Their most famous game, and probably the best representative of what a solid strait forward Grow game is, is Grow Cube. It's to their credit though that they not only virtually invented this type of puzzle game but that they often attempt to re-imagine it instead of simply churning out countless clones of Grow Cube. For example, in Grow RPG you're given the goal of creating a fantasy world around a small Link type hero as he quests through the land in an attempt to slay an evil daemon. In another game instead of giving you a list of objects that you slowly dwindle down until you reach the end you're offered two objects at the beginning of each turn which change with each round.

Eyezmaze is the undisputed king of the genre but there is at least one other game not made by Eyezmaze worthy of mention; Sand Box of God(SBG) by Vertigo Games. SBG takes the basic concepts of the Grow games and uses them to place you in the role of The Big Guy as he creates the Earth, Humanity and a race of Anamorphic Rabbits. Yes, Rabbits that can build cities and wage war with the humans. SBG does a few unique things that makes it a deeper game than the Grow games produced by Eyezmaze. First of all, you're not only placing objects like trees, water and animals into the world but also controlling natural disasters and performing miracles. Secondly, the game is divided up into Ages, each with its own set of objects and miracles to be performed that change according to what you did in the previous Age. Lastly, you have no single end goal (You are God after all so its your prerogative to decided which out come is best). Instead you're given a list of objectives to perform (such as create World Peace or Kill all Rabbits after 2nd Age) that can't all be achieved with a single run through. The game keeps track of your accomplishments after each run-through and make note of it on the objectives list so that you can easily see that you still have yet to do. For this reason alone SBG has a lot more replay value than the Grow games, which in turn may make it more addicting for many people. The only big down side to SBG is that it doesn't have the same quality of polished presentation that the Grow games have. The UI is a little muddy and most of the objects in the game look like they where drawn in MS paint, but some people may find that endearing too.

Thats it for the Addicting Games this week, but before I end this blog I wanted to finally answer Xboxrulze' challenge now that my camera has temporarily resurfaced. Well, here I am, your humble bloger...

Please feel free to PM me any fan mail. Hate mail and lawsuits due to blindness can be emailed to nosuchname@nosuchplace@no.plc

Oh, and here's an unnecessary picture of my co-host. Yes, he's a Big Daddy guarding my Imperial Septim. So what?

Lastly, For those of you who missed it last week I did a short update to my blog entry Addicting Games: Freedom! about Aquaria. If you haven't heard of it before or looked into it lately you should check it out. Thanks for reading everyone!

-Fade2Gray