A rolling stone gathers no moss. So get off your duff and spend your precious free time rolling something. How about taking a roly-poly hedgehog named Roly for a spin? You might be able to get other animals to roll - like ducks, cats, and buffalo. But for some reason, hedgehogs seem the obvious choice when a rolling animal is required.

Today’s game is Roly Poly. Here, your objective is to navigate Roly through a series of twists, turns, and life-ending obstacles to the safety of the checkered international symbol for finish line. This game is unique in that you don’t actually steer your character, rather you rotate the game around the character and let gravity do the all the work. Simply click and drag the game screen to tilt the game and Roly will roll into a ball and begin rolling. The further you tilt the screen, the more hedgehog velocity you’ll get out of the spiny hair-ball. If you can get Roly to the finish without him falling prey to traps or deadly spikes, you will be able to move on to the next, more difficult level.

Roly Poly is a one-of-a-kind arcade game. The gameplay is not only novel, but successfully entertaining. Although at times the game’s frame rate seemed to drop dramatically, making for some choppily challenging levels. The background music is full of bubbly pith. That’s an enthusiastic compliment to the dwarf music mixers who pounded out the “buzz bweech-bweech” beat on their techno mushrooms.

GameSpotter is a site that specializes in finding the best Web-based games. Each day we feature a new game on our front page. Each month we add dozens of new games to our hand-edited directory.

[tags]web game,gamespotter,roly poly,hedgehog,rolling animal[/tags]