Funny Creatures, or, as I prefer to unofficially dub it, Hairless Hamsters.

Funny Creatures is a puzzle solving game with two levels of difficulty to it, easy and hard.   The goal of the game is to move the little critters (a circular creature with large eyes and small hamster-like feet poking out from it in four directions) around until you get it to stop in the round ‘base’ plate of the same color.

Some levels have arrows that will redirect the Creatures into the direction the arrow indicates, making it a bit harder to move them where you want them.  In all levels the same basic rules of movement apply.  Creatures move in a straight line until they meet an obstacle – either a wall or another creature.  You can not move say one square at a time, when they move they move as far as the open floor allows.

A nice “I’m asleep and wanna distract myself from going to bed” game, but not something to rush out and buy in my opinion.

Good points:

• Solve any puzzle you feel like working on, you do not have to solve puzzles in sequence.
• No timer, just a count of how many moves were needed to complete the puzzle
• East enough for small kids to play, but not so easy it would put adults to sleep
• Music is pleasant to listen to and not distracting – set volume in options
• Floor grid can be turned off/on in the options
• Full screen toggle in the options

Strikes against the game:

• Complaints have been made by other users at the giveaway site that it is not Windows 7 or Vista compatible.
• Simplistic no frills game with a too easy to reach ‘booooring’ margin

All in all it is worth a try if you like to veg and do not have something to do such as write a novel, get an article started, post to blogs, watch Netflix online or play Sims3 …. I have all of those other things, so I’ll head off and attack one or more of them and let you check out the Funny Creatures game some more yourself if you feel inclined.

I have about half the programs reloaded, but am hitting the annoying block of the new version of AIM won’t work with the comptuer.  I got an older version to work on it, so I will try agian to get the new one to work and if that fails I am just going to load the older version up and forget their new one.  They usually mess up their new versions anyway.  Last time they updated it I lost the ability to directly connect with my writing buddies, removing the ability to pass our novel-length writing back and fort, which made AIM all but useless to us.

Other than AIM I have my writing program back on the computer, still need to move the novel from the laptop back to the desktop though, and I have to get my image program (GIMP) back up and working on here.  I know there are more programs I need to get up and going, but I’ll be happy with them between now and the weekend – oh, and iTunes and Audacity, I need to catch up on the writing podcasts I have missed.

BusinessCards MX is a card design program for small business owners, I have already discovered that they have a wide selection of card designs at their website for apparently free download. I’m going to see if I can create a good business card for my Family Caregiver Information site (www.familycaregiver.info) as a test for the program, then I will let everyone know what I think of it.

The standard price for the BusinessCard MX program is $29.95, so if this is something that you might be interested in I encourage you to check out the Giveaway of the Day website and pick up a copy while it is still free. (It has about 10 more hours to go as of when I am writing this.)