Aurora
Requires the Unity Web Player to play.
An Aurora is, put simply, a natural light display in the sky that has not been caused by that meth you had that one time (I know). The most famous of which is, of course, the Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights. And today, I bring you Aurora, a game with almost nothing to do with lights in the sky.
A fairly basic game, Aurora has one button that does on function ? Left click to create a gravity well. Use this to cause little rocks to crash into each other, merging them into bigger rocks, eventually capable of maintaining life. As life increases, you get access to wider areas around your sun, with new challenges to overcome.
First, the positives: The game is very attractive, the soundtrack is just what you need for this, a Higher-esque Zen theme, and watching small worlds grow and their population caps increase is about as fulfilling as it is in SimCity. The ability to name your world makes the game far more personal, and there is a good balance of letting the game advance itself and player interaction, as some games require you to leave the world for ages to do its thing, clicking a button every half an hour, or the opposite, where it basically works out as an action game.
Unfortunately, for every Children of Men there must be a Pirates of the Caribbean, for every Blackadder there must be a Friends, and for every Shakespeare there must be a James Cameron, so the game has its faults. It is beautiful, but eventually that becomes clouds of dust when the world moves far enough out. While the game is very much Pick Up and Play, it couldn?t hurt for the game to tell you something. For example, while sending two massive Earth sized rocks into each other melds them together, rather than, say, shattering them into tiny fragments of their former selves, sending them into the giant red rocks in some of the outer regions, which I assumed were massive planet size boosts, instead sent my primary planet, Angelus II crumbling into pieces. I got revenge by throwing it into the sun though, but I had earned a leaderboard ranking for most people killed, which hurt a bit. And because gravity wells affect everything, albeit to a lesser degree the further away, so manoeuvring one planet away from danger can very easily have another one plough straight it.
Overall, this is a game you should have a look at at least once, just to see what it is about. I managed to create my own planet with a population of 5 Billion and rising. It was maintaining a decent distance from the sun, with two other planets orbiting closer in, and several others further away. I called it Sol III - Earth, and realised it was only a short time before it created Lolcats, so I threw it into the sun.
Just in time.
