I’m not one to usually get addicted to flash games, but I have been playing this one for the last few hours. I suppose it could be my free schedule on the lazy days of summer or perhaps the sheer boredom of watching Lord of the Rings for the hundredth time, but it matters not, Multitask has captured my attention.
The game is rather simple in design. You are playing 4 mini games at once basically. All four of these games would have been simple otherwise. You use both hands, using the arrow keys, the WASD keys and the spacebar. I guess you could try to play it with one hand, but it is already challenging enough as it is. You could always ask your friends to help (though the creator seems to imply that it is cheating) but it defeats the purpose. The game makes you pay attention to four different games at once that are simple simple mini games. The end result is a fabulous flash game that makes you look all around your computer screen, scrambling to get your fingers in place while confusing you because of the similar controls. It is a great way to kill time.
So let’s begin by detailing what the mini games are:
1. You have to balance a ball on a bar. Using the left and right keys, you tilt the bar to make sure the ball doesn’t fall off. For the first 15 seconds, the bar barely moves. But as time passes, the bar is much more sensitive to the keys. The bar also moves on its own to stimulate the need for you to move it. So even if the ball is dead center and the bar is flat, it will eventually move. You probably get a second or two free though.
2. There is a vertical bar with 5 slots, and the blue slot is the one you are occupying. You can move your slot up and down with the up and down arrow buttons. So, these triangles, or spikes approach the slots from the left and right, and you have to move up or down to avoid them. They usually knock out 2 or the 5 slots although once the difficulty is increased, I believe there are more.
3. At the center you have a green box. You can move the green box around with the WASD keys much like arrow keys. So W moves it up, S down, A left and D right. These other boxes appear, grey boxes with numbers in them. The idea is that the number is a countdown from 10 seconds. You have to navigate and direct your green box so that it touches the grey boxes. If you can’t reach them by the time it reaches zero, you lose.
4. The last game is probably the simplest. You have a triangle that you can move up by holding the spacebar or let it drop down by letting it go. These black bars that span probably a quarter of the height come at you, and you have to dodge them by moving your triangle up and down.
All deceptively simple, but obviously it is insanely hard when you combine them together. Even worse is that the difficulty gets raked up as you survive for longer. I found myself stumbling to figure out which sets of controls were for which game, most often mistaking the left and right arrow keys with the A and D buttons, which result in me slanting the bar and purposely letting the ball fall.
To summarize, this flash game is pretty addictive. You’ll probably find me playing it from time to time to kill time. It is a simple concept, executed well. The music is decent, the controls are spot on, and it really is a challenging game. I definitely recommend playing it at least a few times for laughs.
I guess I should be rather happy, I got a high score of 263 without any help. I wonder if any of you guys can top that?
