Happy Happy Joy Joy Alert

What's good about casual games is that they tend to look for intellectual property in the most unlikely places. And that they take well known characters and familiar situations and turn them into interactive games.

Happy Tree Friends is one of the wonders sparked by the Internet. It debuted in 2000 and the website where the cartoons are shown has since surpassed 15 million hits. The short animated show, made using Flash technology, features extremely cute and apparently playful characters that always wind up dead and/or maimed. The violence is very graphic even if it is animated and blood features prominently through the show. Although characters die again and again, deaths are not permanent and each episode is a continuity in its own right. Against the protests of concerned parents, the show is especially popular with kids and has sparked a frenzy of merchandise based on the multitude of characters that appear on the show.

Stainless, a casual games developer, has taken up the challenge of bringing the over-the-top violence of the cartoons to the PC and the Xbox with Happy Tree Friends False Alarm. The game will be 3D in its action phase, with cutscenes done in 2D by people involved with the series. It will feature 10 different disaster scenarios with 3 levels each, through which the player must navigate in order to save members of the Happy Tree Friends cast. The unlikely hero of the game will apparently be Lumpy, the low-intelligence, bad-teeth, girly-screaming blue moose that has a parental relation with most of the other characters. He'll have a sizeable arsenal, including napalm and freeze rays, at his disposal. Although his rather low intelligence makes him a very unlikely candidate for the position of hero, it will sure make for fun gameplay, of which much is based around solving the puzzles needed to get the characters out of impossible situations they have gotten themselves in.

The game is published by SEGA and it expected on both PC and the Xbox 360 somewhere in spring this year. Until then, you can check out the series' website.