I’ve been… busy. Making contraptions, that is. Intermittently. After work, mostly.

Allow me to show you my bizarre creations, won’t you? Note that the only contraptions I’ve bothered to save are those which satisfy some “above and beyond” quirk of mine. For instance: Don’t Stop completes the goal in mere seconds, but the fun part is watching it climb the hill and throw itself off the side. Four Plus 1 is an exercise in very, very slowly removing all four of the accessible orange balls. As with all of my creations, the trick is to click the “back” button when prompted as the goal is reached.

For her part, Erica managed to get three of them in the same challenge with her Push and Roll. That’s right, I hooked my darling daughter on Fantastic Contraption. You know what? She’s not doing too badly. Her solution for “Mission To Mars,” Chain Reaction, elicited a forehead slap from me. “Why didn’t I think of that?” (My solution to that puzzle didn’t warrant posterity, I assure you.) Her Push-Over is a much more creative contraption to solve “U-Turn” than what I’ve done so far, too. (I have an idea, I just haven’t been able to make it work yet. Argh.) Erica showed promise right from the start with her straightforward yet amusing LastMinuteSave.

Other contraptions of note that I’ve cobbled together include Brick Bridge, Goal & Clear, Latch & Chain, Tilt & Go and the Humpmobile. I’m probably not done yet, either…

The Fantastic Contraption, a Flash-based device-building game, is a suitable facsimile of The Incredible Machine. It’s good enough for my purposes, anyway. I spent some time building machines that achieve the goal plus a bit of something extra for fun. Please, allow me to demonstrate (in some cases the full amusement value requires clicking the “Back” button once the challenge is technically completed):

• Kick The Can – A nudge and a bridge. I could’ve just flung the ball straight over, but what’s the fun in that?
• Carrion Luggage – Everything must go! Well, everything in my machine’s path…
• The Ball, Too – Who says you can’t take it with you? This one took more time than you might think, but c’mon. I had to do it!
• The Ball, Also – I couldn’t leave it alone. I mean, it was just perching there. Mockingly, I might add. If I was crazy.
• Roomba Falling – Once I got onto the “orange ball” kick, I couldn’t just take the easiest way out of this challenge.
• Backflipper – Not only did I clear all of the orange balls in the path, I even collected four of them within the build area, leaving none on the field elsewhere. Hah!

There may be more to come, or I may grow bored before getting a chance to stretch my brain further. Still, I hope you enjoy my silly contraptions. What can you come up with?