Tag: TIMEWASTERS

Remember, remember, the fifth of November! If you celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, liked V for Vendetta, or even if you're just extremely bored, you might get a (modest) kick out of Guy Fawkes Adventures. It's a simple puzzler where you push barrels around to their designated positions. When all barrels are in place, there's a resounding BOOM and you're transported to the next level. Each level gets a ...

If you've been following the time-wasters that I've been writing about, you may know that I'm not a huge fan of the point-and-click puzzle genre. Give me physics games or something with explosions, and I'm good. Puzzles usually just make me frustrated. But when I started playing The Trader of Stories, it really drew me in. It's not a lengthy game, and it's not very difficult. What I found most ...

Word Bubbles is a Flash game that's somewhat similar to Amazon's Every Word for the Kindle. You get three initial letters ("tru" in the screenshot above), and you need to compose as many English words as possible with those three letters. When you create a six-letter word, the bubble that says "6" rises closer to the surface. When you find another six-letter word, it rises some more. When you've ...

Steel Grinder is a fairly simple game. You're driving a tank, and you see the level from an overhead view. There are waves of enemies coming at you, and you need to blow them up with your mighty shots. You move the tank using WASD (which is no good if you happen to use Colemak), but you can also move it using the arrow keys (lucky for me). While you're driving the tank away from oncoming enemies, ...

In Nanopath, you're a spaceship that has to find its way out of a maze. This isn't about the mystery, though; the exit is in plain sight. The question is how, exactly, you're going to get there. You see, this spaceship doesn't move in real time. Instead, you plot its course first, and then hit Play to watch it go through the motions. With any luck, you will have planned the course correctly, and ...

I know the screenshot doesn't look like much. Wow, a bunch of dots – how exciting is that? But in Gravity, it's not what the dots look like – it's how they move. You see, each of these little dots is a virtual particle with its own "mass." The larger dots have significantly more mass than the tiny ones – more than just the visual difference. They seem to be about three times as ...

Quiet, blocky, cryptic, and minimalistic. These are the first adjectives that come to mind when I think of Feign 2. It's a maze game, but it's built like an FPS (first-person shooter). So, it's like Quake with a creepy soundtrack, but there are no monsters. Your goal is to collect nine bodies by navigating the maze. The whole thing is done up in shades of gray, but the bodies are bright orange. ...

Intellectual property is one of the most hotly debated subjects online. Should there be patents or not? And what can be patented? And once you have a patent, when is it fair to protect it? But to argue about these things, everyone should have the terminology down. What exactly is a patent? And what's a registered trademark? And what, then, is a registered design (which I did not know)? Sprocket ...

Robot Wants Ice Cream does not actually have ice cream. At least not as far as I was able to tell. What it does have is a robot. Well, to be exact, it has a robot, a dog, a ton of bad guys, 8-bit music, and bosses that you have to beat. You can tell when you're facing a boss because it's huge, and the music gets all "Bowser" when one of them shows up. There are also bonuses that make you jump ...

Did you know that YouTube offers a spiffy online version of Trivial Pursuit? It's surprisingly addictive, too! Each round consists of three questions, and one "Bet on Me" card. The three questions are real trivia questions, which can be quite challenging: From Ghosts > Geography: Which U.S. landmark is said to be haunted by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln? Drums > Science and Nature: What ...

In Wake up the Box 2, the object of the game is to ... wake up the box! Yup, there's a box, and it's asleep. And as soon as something jars it hard enough, it wakes up, and you get to move on to the next level. Each level is a tiny physics playing field. You get a piece of wood (or sometimes two or three, but always in a set sequence), and you can then connect that piece of wood to other pieces of ...

Before you get your hopes up, this is not an exciting game by any means. Chilean Miner Rescue is a celebration more than anything else -- a heart-warming tribute to perseverance! The game -- if it can be called that -- is simple. You turn a wheel that sends a lift plunging down into the depths of the mine, you pick a miner up, and then you spin the wheel to return the mucky hero to the surface. ...

When I hear "smash the castle" and "physics game," the first thing that comes to mind is another one of those trebuchet-launching, Angry Birds-style games where you shoot a projectile from the side of the screen onto an unseen target, trying to hit it with the correct angle and velocity in order to wreak just the right sort of havoc. This is why I was in for a surprise with Sieger. It was also ...

At first glance, Deconstruction is just a play thing, an experimental fiddle with Flash physics. Heck, at second glance it's still nothing more than a way to take your angst out on a priceless painting -- or, as the case may be, the face of whoever you like. All you can do is drag blocks around and change the gravity -- but I'm not ashamed to say that I spent a good five minutes reducing the ...

Defend Yourself is a basic tower defense style game. You have a cannon at the bottom of the screen, and balls are dropping from the top of the screen -- blast away and deflect the oncoming balls in order to keep them from touching down at the base of the screen. You don't have infinite ammo. There's an ammunition bar that runs out as you fire, and you need to pause every now and then to let it ...