Best free arcade games

In Silly Sausage: Doggy Dessert, the world’s stretchiest canine finds himself trying to worm his way through a land of cake, chocolate, ice cream, and a worrying number of spikes, saw-blades, and massive bombs.

Rather than walk like a normal pooch, the furry hero of this game stretches as you swipe, until his front paws can cling on to something. His bottom then snaps back into place. It’s quite the trick – but also a hazard if one end of his body ends up in danger when the other end is worryingly distant.

There are 50 scenes in all, along with tricky bonus rooms to try and beat. And although some of the later bits of the game are perhaps a bit too testing, this one as a whole is a very tasty, satisfying arcade treat.

Only the highest quality games with a mix of HTML5 and Adobe® Flash® games are available. Website visitors can login with Facebook and skip remembering an username or password. The member system on The Dark Sun Free Arcade Games Online allows users to earn points, make friends and send and receive private messages to users. All of these features are what makes The Dark Sun Free Arcade Games Online a social online game website. More details: Play Free Arcade Games Online

Exploring this site is easy because the content is separated by grade level (from PreK through 8th grade) and by content area. You can easily find a specific topic for your child to practice. In addition, this website allows you to keep track of your child’s time on each question, his or her score, and overall progress.

Other games news: In an addition that I’m surprised anyone would have asked for, the free version of Solitaire that comes with Windows 10 is getting a leveling system. The new feature was announced in a weirdly good trailer earlier this month.

That trailer, which you can check out further down this article (via PCGamer), riffs off the amusing “in a world” trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s 2002 film, Comedian. The feature in itself is pretty simple – as the video points out “Solitaire’s going to add a player leveling system with experience points and rewards.”

Quite what that system will actually look like when it manifests isn’t clear, but the trailer’s Microsoft Studios employee in the trailer says that it’s “catered to people who just want to track their progress and be rewarded for playing any game in Solitaire.” For the record, that includes Classic Solitaire, its spidery variant, Freecell, and then two games called Pyramid and TriPeaks, which I assume are related, but which I have never heard of in my life.

One of the most buzzed-about topics in games in recent years has been and continues to be cross-play. Now, one prominent developer has spoken up to talk about the benefits of allowing players on competing systems to play together. Stew Chisam, the CEO of Smite and Paladins developer Hi-Rez, outlined some of the benefits of cross-play in a post on Twitter.

For Paladins, which supports cross-play between Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, Chisam said overall match quality is improved thanks to cross-play. Wait-times for matches is down 30 percent, while the quality of matches is better because the level spread is down 40 percent. In all, Hi-Rez is reportedly seeing an 80 percent reduction in what it calls “bad” matches.

Anyone who has played a ranked multiplayer game knows how frustrating it can be when you’re matched with players who have a much higher skill level, so it’s good to see the statistics seemingly indicate that cross-play helps improve things. Whether or not other games see these results remains to be seen.

I had very mixed feelings when Apex Legends was announced. On one hand, Titanfall and its sequel are two of my favorite shooters, offering an incredibly fast, almost balletic sense of movement that made otherwise standard skirmishes feel fresh and alive. The idea of developer Respawn taking that to the battle royale genre and throwing in charming Overwatch-style characters was incredibly exciting. But there was one very particular aspect of the game that made me wary: you can only play it in teams. As someone who spends hours in Fortnite solo and hates the idea of voice chat with strangers, this was an instant turn-off.

But thanks to a handful of incredibly clever design decisions, Apex Legends is the rare team-based shooter where voice chat isn’t a necessity. You can be antisocial and still have a lot of fun.

Apex Legends is set in the Titanfall universe, and it has teams of three battling it out across a war-torn sci-fi landscape to be the last group standing. It’s a class-based game where you pick from a group of heroes, each of which fits snugly into an archetype like “support” or “tank.” They also all have special abilities that charge up over the course of a match. And just like in Fortnite and its contemporaries, the battlefield shrinks as the match goes on, forcing you into close contact with your opponents.