Inside Social Games

Oh monkeys and your shenanigans…. Giving monkeys water balloons; that’s just a recipe for disaster, or maybe great entertainment… depending on how you look at it. Well, Iminlikewithyou.com has done just that with a nifty little multiplayer title called Balloono, and if you haven’t figured it out already, it is the epic tale of water balloons and cute little monkeys.

This wonderful Flash-based title is a social and competitive game that pits you against other players in a live, strategic, multiplayer engagement. So here’s the deal: Each player starts out in a corner of the map, and separating them is a bunch of breakable (brown) and unbreakable (grey) blocks. Each player is armed with water balloons that pack quite a punch and explode both vertically and horizontally after a period of time. This explosion both breaks the brown blocks and kills any enemy monkeys it hits. As you break blocks, you can find and pick up power ups that let you drop more balloons, move faster, or give your explosions more distance.

Now that you have the basics, the real game can begin, and the objective: Be the last one standing. The game is partially twitch towards the end because there are so many bombs going off and everyone is moving pretty fast, but mostly it is about strategy and planning. You have to carefully place your balloons while avoiding not only their blasts but your opponents’ as well. Ideally, you want to try and trap them with well timed explosions – consider it like checkmate in Chess… only with simians.

Honestly, the only downside about the game is that eventually, the power ups begin to stack too much and the characters tend to move a little too fast, but perhaps that’s just from a non-veteran perspective. Beyond that, the only real quip is a slight lack in variety. Since you play against other people, the strategies will change, but more levels and designs would be nice.

Regardless, the game still looks great, and is a ton of fun (heck, it had 100,000 plays in the first day), which is understandable when you can play together with others. Iminlikewithyou.com,  built as a social/casual gaming/dating site, fully supports social interaction (chat, profiles, walls, etc) and allows you to join a game with other people at anytime. Even if you don’t know anyone, you can simply start a “Quick Play” game and hop right in without even registering. Even if Balloono is not your kind of game, the site is a wonderful network of players with a number of different fun, and well designed games such as Blockles and Jigsawce, and it is certainly a site to add to the “Favorites” list for any social gamer.