The game "Cats" on Orisinal.com has 2 opening screens before the actual game screen. Once you click on the game from the selection, it brings you to a title page with copyright information and the game logo. It then fades in a transition to the "How to Play" screen. This gives the directions for game play and has a "start" button to begin.
Clicking on the "start" button brings you to the main play screen. The screen is divided into six rows with a Siamese-looking cat on each level. All the cats look exactly the same, there is no variation in size or color. The top 3 cats walk only to the left, and the bottom three go to the right. They never turn around in mid screen or switch direction, they simply reset to the beginning once they walk off the screen. The background of the entire board is black and the row with the cat that is to be mimicked is highlighted in grey. The highlight changes rows about every 20 seconds and the row to which it switches to seems random. There is a slight gap in time between when the highlighted bar disappears and then reappears.
The object of the game is to make all the other cats do what the cat in the highlighted row is doing, sitting or walking. To do this, you simply have to pass your pointer over the cat so it does the opposite of what it is doing (i.e., if it's sitting and you go over it, it will walk and vice versa). Once you are able to get all the cats doing what the main cat is doing, a timed point system starts and the longer all the cats are doing the same thing, the more points accrue. The scoring is only seen when you are accruing points, and disappears once a cat breaks your time by moving. It is again shows at the end of the game.
There are two tricky aspects to this game, one of which I didn't figure out until around the sixth time I played. The cats are on a random timer for sitting and walking, so if you sit them, for example, they may stay for a few seconds (in which your points rack up!) or get up immediately (now I know where the term "it was like herding cats" came from). The other thing I found while frantically moving my cat-taming pointer around that if you passed over it accidentally, it switched back, and effectively undoing what you did before. There must be some kind of proximity command on the mouse to enable you to not have to click, another thing I didn't realize until much later. But because you don't have to click, you have to maneuver around the other cats that are doing what the leader is doing because you will undo that by passing over them. When you reach a certain score, the game will become more difficult by adding another bar and hence, another cat to the screen on the next play. I'm not sure how long this will go on, I only got to the second round without growing agitated and giving up.
The entire game is timed, and there really is no way to "die." The timer is a simple bar in the left corner that loses color as time passes. Nothing affects the time; it counts down regardless of how you are doing on the game. When the time runs out, there is a "game over" screen that shows your current score, your highest score (if you played more than once, which you will) and the "play again" button that brings you back to the main play screen. The game also compares your old score versus the new and will comment if it is better.
The only sound effect is the lounge-like music that makes you feel like you are in a swingers club. There is no noise when the cats sit or walk, and they don't meow (which could have been amusing). The score will tick as it goes up.The game is very addictive, mainly because it's really hard to figure out a strategy to keep them all down. Add to that the swanky music, and you have hours of wasted work time fun!