News from the Spambots - Flash Games Mart

If you share my quirky sense of humor and appreciation of enthusiastic incompetence, be prepared, as there are...

***** SPIT-TAKES AHEAD! *****

I moderate comments here because some of them are commercial spam, trying to post links and content completely unrelated to this blog's subject.  A new one has been posting nightly of late, which is annoying.  But I'm going to dignify its subject with a more prominent post, because this one is posting links with the text "game development company."

The sponsor of this minor annoyance actually IS a Flash game development company, called FGM for short, Flash Games Mart for long. 

FGM's business model is interesting -- they create small Flash games, post them on their own website, and then auction them off as exclusive content to other websites and portals.  The games remain playable at FGM's site, so they're not quite as exclusive as they're purported to be.  But it's an interesting approach -- potential purchasers can audition the company's work, then bid to lock down the rights, including the original .FLA source code files.

What makes the company's efforts Saturday-blogworthy is that the development team is based in India, and the English employed is always a little awkward.  I like this Instructions page for The Haunted Serve, which is not a tennis game, but this:

A person was cursed by a witch to run a restaurant for ghosts.  Unfortunately the person's faith cannot be changed without pleasing the ghosts.  Now he needs your help for serving the ghosts.  Serve ghosts with their favorite food on time.

FGM's offerings are generally simple games in standard casual Flash game genres -- dress-ups (Cute Halloween), casual "adventure" games (Uphill Struggle For The Princess Rescue), time management games (Idly Shop), kissing games (Kinder Garten Kissing), and cooking games (Caribbean jerk rub-corn salsa).  Some of them make wholesale, unlicensed use of established, trademarked properties including Disney's Cinderella and James Cameron's Avatar.  The background music selected is always repetitive often inappropriate, and vocalized sound bites like "Ow!" and "Mmmmwah!" tend to sound flat and unenthusiastic.


The games aren't very good, but the website is highly entertaining in its own right.  Another great description is this one for Glamorous dancing girl dress up:

Dress up the girl, who is confused with the costume for her performance and make her to look pretty and glamorous on stage before the audience. Have fun and stay glued with us.

College professor dress up, which manages to trivialize decades of feminist struggle for academic respect:

College professors are one of the most important people in our life. They teach and guide us to lead a perfect life. Thus make her happy by choosing a perfect outfit for a lecture.

Or this, for the politically incorrect Apaches Attack, a shoot-the-tomahawk-bearing-Native-Americans-with-your-rifle contest:

Hi friends, if you would like to play some action games then take up the game of Apaches Attack. You have to attack the enemies in the war field at win over them to finish the level. See that the life is been kept in the game, do not reduce the life.

And the kissing games get very bizarre very quickly -- the website description for Kinder Garten Kissing is... man, this is all messed up:

Hey!!! The Kindergarten warden has given Lisa the responsibility to look after the babies for a while,surprisingly Lisa finds her boyfriend near to the place and makes love with him,now we have to make them enjoy their romantic kisses at the same time should keep an eye on the naughty babies from escaping help Lisa...have fun.

But my favorite bit is this thumbnail image for Peddling boat kissing:

 

The red spots are miniature kissing lips, visible at normal scale, but the image makes it look like some kind of amour fou zombie/vampire role-playing encounter, or a cautionary tale about gum disease.

Despite the spam marketing approach, I can't begrudge these folks a proper link -- for more unintentional hilarity, visit FGM's very entertaining website here.