Bad Ice Cream 3 — Play Free Online

Bad Ice Cream 3 is the third entry in Nitrome's maze series about a scoop of ice cream with an appetite for fruit. It first came out as a Flash game in December 2013. The copy here runs the original file through AwayFL, a Flash emulator for HTML5, so it plays in a modern browser without a plugin. One or two people can play, each controlling their own flavour on the same keyboard.

The goal

Each stage is a small grid filled with ice and walls. Fruit is scattered around the board, sometimes frozen inside blocks, and enemies patrol between them. You clear a stage by eating every piece of fruit before the clock runs out. Touching an enemy ends the attempt.

Controls

• Move: WASD or the arrow keys.
• Freeze / break ice: Spacebar.

Pressing the freeze button shoots a line of ice in the direction you face. If the space ahead is already ice, the same button smashes it instead. That one action is the whole toolkit: you build walls to block enemies and break walls to reach fruit.

What you will find inside

There are forty stages. Reading the game file shows how much variety is packed into them.

• Flavours: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry are the classic three, and the file also holds bubble gum, mint choc chip, licorice and smokey bacon scoops.
• Fruit: bananas, cherries, grapes, kiwi, lemons, oranges, pears, pineapples, strawberries, watermelons, peaches, apples, dragon fruit and cactus fruit. Some of it walks, jumps, teleports, splits or runs away from you.
• Enemies: cows, eggs, flies, worms, drills, sponges, buckets, boots, cactus creatures, a sheriff, a balloon kid, sneezing monsters, ice breakers that smash your walls, and aliens with a mothership.
• Floor tiles: arrow tiles that push you in one direction, speed-up tiles, hot tiles, frost tiles, goo, invisible blocks, infected tiles, telepads, tunnels, campfires and flame pads.

Tips

• Watch an enemy's path for a few seconds before moving. Most of them follow a pattern you can wall off with a single line of ice.
• Frozen fruit has to be freed first. Break the block from a safe side so you are not trapped in a corridor with an enemy.
• Breakers chew through ice, so against them a wall only buys time; use the gap to grab fruit and move on.
• Arrow tiles keep pushing you. Line yourself up before stepping on so you slide where you want to go.
• In two-player games, split the board: one player handles enemies with walls while the other eats.