Canvas Defense

     My last post was about the new surge of HTML5 games that are now available. Since there are so many I thought I'd start posting reviews of different games I come across. The first of these is Canvas Defense.

     In this strategy defense game, your goal is to stop the red blobs from reaching the blue wall on your left. To accomplish this, you have four different unit types you can use to trap the blobs and to kill them. You have limited units in each level, and must survive for a given amount of time. Its a nice casual game to fill up a little spare time.

Playability: I couldn't get the game to work in ie9, but it worked in firefox 4, opera and in chrome. I experienced a little lag on the higher levels, but nothing too bad. 4/5
Appealing: This game has nice visuals and background music. 5/5
Fun: Its a short game, with only 10 levels, but requires speed and strategy to win. Some levels can be frustrating if you can't figure out how to win or use a given unit effectively, but overall a fun game. 4/5

HTML 5 Games

HTML5 has become something of a buzzword over the past months. Browser makers have been competing to have the best support, and even Microsoft, typically lagging behind in standards implementation, has gotten on board with IE9, which brings support for various features of HTML5. Though flash is nowhere close to being displaced as the dominant web technology for rich content, there are more and more situations in which HTML will do the same thing, better. An example of this is the video tag. It can play both video and audio perfectly well on any modern browser, without the need for resource-consuming flash that doesn't work on most mobile platforms.

Another thing that is now possible in HTML due the the canvas tag are games. There are now sites hosting exclusively games coded in HTML, such as this one. In the past, practically every casual gaming site hosted flash games. Now there is a new breed of sites hosting html5 games, many of which work on mobile devices. To me, this is the way of the future. No more plugins, just pure HTML powering beautiful things.