Utterly Lame Video Games You Must Play, No Excuses: Cosgrove’s Air Escape

As a general rule, I tend to regard flash games with the same thinly-veiled contempt I have for mobile gaming. I like to compare them with consoles by imagining two siblings, one a world-famous rocket scientist and the other a poor simpleton who drools on his shirt. And likely pisses himself. When your greatest accomplishment is spelling out boobies on an upside-down calculator, you can't really live up to a superior example. ("Well done! You haven't shat yourself for two days! isn't the most effective ego boost.) Even so, the bastards are completely ubiquitous, and will remain so. Long after Nintendo goes bankrupt, and Japanese businessmen have stopped crying into their sushi and rather excellent noodles about it all, these behemoths will be all that remains. It's perhaps time, then, to pay homage to the hardy cockroach after a nuclear strike of the industry.

Cosgrove's Air Escape, the barmy brainchild of Ben Roth, is one flash game that's worth repeated visits. You're a little green chap, with no visible limbs and eyes as big as his entire body. This is our good friend Cosgrove, who has found himself thousands of feet up in the freaking air for no reason at all. (It happens to the best of us, I'm sure.) Your aim is to descend the vertically scrolling screen on a series of platforms. The trick is doing so fast enough to not be mangled by the ceiling, but not so fast that you fall off the bottom of the screen either. Neither up nor down give you any love here. (How exactly the sky itself manages to crush you is an inexplicable mystery. Still, the ancient Celts believed the sky could fall if the Gods were angered, so I guess it's somewhat plausible. Those mad bastards did collect human heads though, so we'll not set too much stock in their opinion.)

It's a crazily fast-paced and addictive business, getting this midget to haul ass. Oftentimes, balloons will float by in a seemingly innocuous manner, which can trap you and end the game. Maybe Satan is sitting far below, sending these buggers up to murderise you. ("My most fearsome minion yet... witness the terror ofa small helium balloon,lowly mortal! Brightly-coloured deathto the face!Just ignore the ‘happy 80th birthday grandma' emblazoned on the side, that was a typo.MWAHAHAHA is more the message I was aiming to convey.") Your hop-happy hijinks are also accompanied by the most unholy music any game has ever produced. The same twelve notes repeated ad nauseam is nobody's idea of a good time. It's like being trapped in Dante's seventh circle of Hell.

With a hasty muting of justice, there's a good deal of fun to be had here. The simple ideas are often the best, as Cosgrove's Air Escape shows. For me, it reached the same level on the addiction-ometer as a whole range of harmful narcotics. It's sure to do you less harm in the long run as well. Score hunters/huge nerds are sure to appreciate this weirdness, and the included online leaderboard.

For more about the game, visit Softpedia here.

Article by Chris Littlechild
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