I.T. Kid

An island, a coast, and a round of attack to see off. Island Defense is FreeOnlineGames' 2008 defence game, and its title card says only what it is -- the ISLAND DEFENSE wordmark over a Start button, with the wrapper's Game Instructions, View High Scores and Add Free Games to Your Website links beside it.\n\nThe round is short and score-driven. It ends on a panel rather than a screen of stats: Submit Score, Play Again and Play More Games sit together with the run's own tally, and the board is the publisher's nickname-and-score table. The movie's code names the parts of a round that the screen never spells out -- bomb, time and wind bonuses, the wind that shifts from a strong gust to a superwind, and the round counter that drives them -- so the game is a fight with a clock and the weather as much as with what is coming ashore. A spent round offers the board again immediately, which is the shape of the whole thing: a small, repeatable browser defence game of its year.