Frog Fractions

Frog Fraction's is one of the best games I have played this year. Admittedly we are only 6 days in and nothing has actually been released but if we can have The Walking Dead to be GOTY why not a flash game? Ok, that might be taking it a little too far but truly this game is amazing. Before we start here is the link.

WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS INBOUND - (Like really just go and play the game yourself, it is not that long ffs and much more entertaining than my ramblings)

The game is pretty simple. You are frog who has to protect your fruit from the bugs that are trying to eat them. It all seems pretty simple, each bug you eat shows a fraction for a few seconds. A couple of things should strike you as odd about now. The first thing is that frogs don't eat fruit. In fact they don't really need an excuse to eat bugs, it's kind of in their job description. It was about this time I started to justify to myself that the frog, hence forth known to me as Smaug, did not actually NEED the fruit he just did not want these bug bastards to get any of it. So he sits there in the centre of his domain ready to defend his horde of fruit.

Your first shop screen seems like pretty standard fare. Upgrade your gold fruit so it is harder to eat. Ride around on a turtle friend aww that is pretty cure. Give your frog a cybernetic brain. Wait, what?! Warp Drive? A Dragon you can ride about on. It is about this time you start to feel all superior thinking "gah struggling to be original so they just stupid". 

So you continue on, gaining these increasingly random upgrades for little Smaug here and things on screen start to get a little more hectic. (You should start getting hints the game might be more than it seems when quite randomly "Frog Fractions teaches typing" happens and you start shooting lasers out of your eyes tbh). There is a definite high point when you get your dragon and things start getting a little bit out of control. 

And that's it. It is impossible to get the warp drive, those pesky internet people! You have been tricked into playing a pretty random game for ten minutes I am just going to give up now... WAIT wtf underwater fruit horde! YOU ARE SMAUG FLYING A DRAGON TO YOUR SUPER HORDE OF FRUIT-Y GOODNESS!. And you can now afford the Warp Drive? (I am not sure if the warp drive fits into your dragon or you as a frog or is just some object that you press. All three deserve detailed fan fiction. Perhaps slash.)

This is when things get a little... interesting. 

So once you have gotten your vertical scroller on it is time to go to bug mars and take a citizenship test. 

This review ends now. Because no one is reading to this point and not already playing the game. I can promise you that it only gets weirder from this point forwards. From a leisurely swim to the backing of a weird story about gentleman's boxing to a Zork style text adventure that will make you wish for simpler times when games were just that awesome. Go play it.

2012, In Review

I could go on about my life that I am sure you would all be interested in (year right) but it is at this time of year I like to remember just how awesome the world we live in can be.

NASA started work on a WARP DRIVE THAT COULD ACTUALLY WORK

The first commercial cargo delivery was an incredible success

Robot arms that you can control with your mind became a thing.

Self-Driving cars became legal in multiple states in America.

The most advanced robot ever built powered by a NUCLEAR ENGINE landed like a bad ass on Mars using what was essentially a jetpack like something out of Mission Impossible.

Google announced work on brining AR to the masses.

XNA was found to replicate like DNA and RNA making the possibility of synthesizing new life possible.
The Higgs bosson was detected and observations are very consistent that it is the actual thing.

ENCODE published a whole bunch of papers detailing pretty much every thing we know about DNA.
Autism was reversed in Mice. Not a cure but a huge step in understand it.

Speaking of Mice for the first time a mammal was created entirely from stem cells.

A FUCKING TRACTOR BEAM WAS MADE AND IT WORKED.

100 Year Starship was announced to make interstellar travel a real possibility within 100 years.

A bit of data was stored on 12 atoms rather than the million atoms it takes now.

3D printers became commercially available for under $1000 for the first time.

Quantum Cryptography was sent through normal fibre making piratically unbreakable encryption a possibility.

The genome of a pig was sequences opening the possibility that when we eventually get replicators we can have some fresh bacon... I mean helps us to study human diseases easier.

TITAN was created capable of 17.59 petaFLOPS, your average computer is capable of 3-4 gigaFLOPS.

That's it for now. These are just the flashy stuff that caught my attention this year and I am sure there are some amazing developments that I missed. If this is what happened in 2012 I can't wait to see what happens in 2013.

To quote Monty Python:  "Makes you feel so, sort of, insignificant, doesn't it?"