Remember the game Marble Madness? It was an arcade game by Atari back in 1984 that made use of the trackball controller to move marbles through an isometric labyrinth. One of my favorite games for the Nintendo Wii, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blizz, is making use of many of the elements that have been introduced by the godfather of the move ball through labyrinth game.

Trackballs is a free version of Marble Madness that sports the old and many more new levels for everyone’s entertainment. The game features currently over 70 tracks and additional tracks can be downloaded from the game’s website.

Executables are available for Linux and Windows. The player moves the marble with the arrow keys and has to reach the level exit before the time runs out. The difficulty of the game lies solely in the game layout with tiny passages, drops and ramps plus enemies that make the life of the player miserable.

The game is definitely fun to play and offers nice graphics. Does not have to be installed in Windows and can be played right from the location it was unpacked to.

I’m not sure why this game is called Chat Noir and not Cat Noir but maybe I don’t get it. It’s a very simple puzzle game where the player has to prevent that the cat is leaving the game board by placing dark rings on the board that the cat cannot pass.

And that’s it. It took a while before I was able to discover the right strategy to beat that damn cat that seemed to be always one step ahead of my tries to block its path and I still win only about 20% of the games no matter what I do.

There is probably a better strategy. Have not figured out yet if the direction the cat takes is random or not. If you find it out let me know.

Cookie Cruncher is a full remake of the game Yoshi’s Cookie for the SNES. It’s an addictive puzzle game that is controlled with the arrow keys, space and enter. The objective of the game is to remove all the cookies in the map by using the limited amount of moves available.

Cookies can be moved horizontally and vertically by pressing the space bar and an arrow key and each action moves the full row or column in the direction. Cookies are removed if the same type of cookies fills out a row or column completely.

Cookies wrap around which means that they will appear on the other side of the column or row if moved over the edge. Rows and Columns collapse whenever a row or column is removed in the middle of the structure.

The player starts with ten lifes and receives an additional five lifes after each ten stages.

Tripline is a wonderful innovative puzzle game running on PCs with the Windows operating system. The goal of the game is to connect every geometric object on the game map by drawing an impenetrable black line.

To add to the difficulty of the game three similar geometric objects have to be connected before a different geometric object counts towards the goal. In other words, always connect three geometric objects of the same type before moving the line to a different object.

The game consists of 30 maps that increase in size and difficulty which takes a huge jump after level 20. Very nice solid game.