Continued from the last Firefox review, these are some more Firefox plug-in games that I’ve found from the Mozilla website. You’ll find all of these games in the extensions section under category ‘Miscellaneous’. Once again, these are the simplest possible diversions - nothing like real games, but more like the simpler Flash and Java games you find online. And as always, upon installing these into Firefox, you will find them in the “tools” menu.

Froggr

Froggr is a very faithful clone of the classic arcade game “Frogger”. The motion is smooth, the play is slightly challenging, and by all evidence this game didn’t miss a feature from the arcade classic - right down to catching the bug in the home row! As clones of arcade games replicated as Firefox browser plug-ins go, this is the best one I’ve seen yet.

Pagman and Pacman

Let’s do these two Pac-Man clones together. This is Pagman (with a G):

And this is Pacman (with a C):

In spite of the spelling, there is a lot more difference between the two than one letter. The top one looks just like the arcade version, but the play is terrible. It is slow and jerky, and I noticed a couple of bugs where starting a new game causes the board to start with two of the lower power-pills missing. Great to look at, but the play quality needs to be improved.

The bottom one is a perfect implementation of Pacman as he appears on the 286 desktop PCs of old - including (drum roll please…) SOUND! Yes, it faithfully re-creates every beep and buzz from the original as well. The play here is very smooth, provided you adjust the speed setting to ‘insane’ it will feel just like the original. The sound is a little scratchy, but then so was the sound on the original 286. Very well done!

Cards

Now here’s “more bang for your buck”. This is a very complete solitaire implementation, with your choice of about 29 different solitaire card games. Also has a full feature set; undo, hints, scoring, automatic “smart” card moving, and more. Pictured here is Freecell. With the exception of a display glitch on loading the game for the first time (it stacked the cards wrong) which is cured by starting a new game, I saw no problems with it. Even better is the list of rules for each game, so you can get in-game help - they really seem to have thought of everything here.

Together with the last article, that’s the round-up of Firefox game add-ons. There are some more, but they’re about like these. If they’ve come this far, maybe they’ll be up to 3D shooters by Firefox version 4.0 or so, you think?

Related Posts:

• Firefox Add-ons - Free lightweight games
• Vintage Gaming - part one: The Least You Need to Know
• Vintage Gaming - part four: MAME and ZSNES
• The Quest for Quake
• Best Moments in Gaming

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