Kotaku: timewasters

Sunday Timewaster: HDOS Databank request 01

Maggie Greene — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 13:30:00 MDT

This is a fun little remake (more or less) of the puzzle mode of Tetris Attack; you have a limited number of moves to swap blocks and clear the whole board. While the early levels are pretty easy, some of the later stages get pretty complicated — all in all, not a bad little browser-based timewaster to kill some time on a Sunday.

HDOS Databank request 01 [Game Reclaim via IndieGames] [Update: mirror at Kongregate]

Statetris: Tetris With Territories

Owen Good — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:00:00 MDT

Here's another one of those games that actually is boring as shit, but because it's geography, it preys on your need to show that you're not some bumpkin and you've either visited countries other than your own or at least know where they belong. It's Statetris, which challenges you to fit together, Tetris-style, the countries on two continents, or states in nine nations, or — here's the big WTF — all the counties in South Carolina. For those wondering, yes you will be asked to drop into place tiny ass San Marino, Andorra, Malta, etc., if you play Europe. And if you play on hard setting, where the territories are not identified, I don't know how you can get it right. Anyway, if you won your school's geography bee, you'll love Statetris. Or not.

Statetris [Mapmsg.com]

Sunday Timewaster: And We Really Mean It

Owen Good — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:00:00 MDT

Insidious Tuna sent this along. I swear I've seen it somewhere before, but apparently not on Kotaku. This game has a very simple premise and a very difficult opponent — your own patience. My only advice to you is that, after you click to start the level, any movement of your mouse, click, or key strike fires the gun. This game should be used at business leadership conferences, because it would definitely show who was the hypercompetitive, win-everything-at-all-costs guy in the crowd. I got to level 7 before I just had to fool with it and kill the puppy. But I'm thinking I could beat this game if I had a good book to read in the meantime.

Sorry about the lame screengrab. I couldn't get actual gameplay, for reasons that will become obvious.

Don't Shoot the Puppy [rrrrthats5rs.com]

Saturday Timewaster: Fantastic Contraption

Owen Good — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:00:00 MDT

Reader Alex B. sent in this — Fantastic Contraption — a physics flash game where you string together wheels and joints in order to carry an object toward a goal on the screen. It's nice nonviolent trial-and-error fun, indulging both the competitive urge to be as efficient as possible, and the creative impulse to be as outlandish as you can get away with.

The opening tutorial is pretty helpful, and many of the opening levels are easy to beat in minutes or seconds. As for the general appeal of flash games, I think XKCD summed it up best.

Fantastic Contraption [Site, thanks Alex B]

Sunday Timewaster: Marshmallow

Maggie Greene — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:30:00 MDT

This wonderfully adorable (and kind of weird) game is pretty straight forward — guide the marshmallow around a variety of objects just waiting to take a bite out of your head and send you hurtling towards the ground so you can land with a 'splat.' It's cute. It's not terribly taxing. The soundtrack is ... well, something (soothing? Weird? Vaguely Katamari-esque? All of the above?), but the game is really cute and a nice way to waste a couple of minutes or more ....

Marshmallow [forrent via IndieGames]

Saturday Timewaster: Hoshi Saga 3

Maggie Greene — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:30:00 MDT

Hoshi Saga 3 is a fun little puzzle game — the object is to discover the star(s) in each level through experimentation. The mechanics of each level are different, and while some are familiar, some will require a little more fiddling to get the right answer. Some levels are quite easy, though others may have you scratching your head — overall, a nice, relaxing little collection to spend some time with.

星探３ [hoshi saga 3] [nekogames via IndieGames]

Sunday Timewaster: Bounce Shot

Maggie Greene — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:30:00 MDT

IndieGames succinctly describes this as 'a cross between Breakout and Space Invaders,' which is pretty accurate — but it's a fun game with a retro feel. I was in the mood for some candy-colored, easy to pick up fun this weekend, and this definitely hit the spot. Boss battles every 10 levels, power ups, and trying not to get hit with your own bullets (so watch out for that trigger finger) — add in some cute alien enemies, and you've got the recipe for how I wasted a good chunk of my Sunday morning.

Bounce Shot [Nigoro via IndieGames]

Saturday Timewaster: Aether

Maggie Greene — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 14:00:00 MDT

We're having a slow weekend here at Kotaku: Owen is off, and I'm holed up in bed trying to stave off the flu; Aether made a nice respite from my headache and general feelings of 'blah.' It's a weird little game — a little abstract and fuzzy around the edges, you control a little guy and his pet who can fly through the air with the greatest of ease, using said pet's tongue as a grappling hook/trapeze .... I actually quite enjoyed zipping through space from planet to planet, trying to solve puzzles and bring the color back to unhappy people (the core of an unhappy planet seen above). It's not the most intuitive game ever — it did take me some time to figure out how to successfully get off the ground and into the atmosphere - and I broke out the mouse because the trackpad wasn't cutting it. Still, it's pretty and soothing (and short) — good for a bit of time on a Saturday afternoon.

Aether [Armor Games via IndieGames]

Saturday Timewaster: Attention Hog

Maggie Greene — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:30:00 MDT

From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game "reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment." Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he's "happy to see a game that critiques today's attention culture, but I'm not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description." Still, while I'll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it's adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend.

Attention Hog [Chris Basmajian via Water Cooler Games]

Worlds in Motion with Orbitrunner

Owen Good — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:00:00 MDT

Alright class, time for a flash game. This is "Orbitrunner" and it's reasonably addictive for such a simple concept — place your star on the grid so that the planets (and their satellites) fall into orbit without smashing into you, each other, or going out of the boundary. I'm not sure how realistic the gravity physics are, but it's very challenging, and I like the background music. The collision/explosion sound/animation is lame, however. I was hoping for a Praxis Effect. If they put this in a 3D, rotatable-camera environment, I'd play it for hours.

You can skip up to five levels if you find you're just not getting the hang of one. It stores your IP address and lets you continue.

Orbitrunner [Gamezhero.com]

Saturday Timewaster: Now Boarding

Maggie Greene — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:30:00 MDT

While the weekend timewasters at Kotaku are generally free, and Now Boarding — an indie time management/sorting game that has a nice, slightly retro aesthetic — isn't, the demo is lengthy and engaging enough to waste an hour or two on a lazy Saturday. The point of the game is to manage your airport empire and keep the poor slouches stuck at the terminal or on the plane reasonably happy, or at least not hopping mad. The $20 ($15 right now) price tag for the full version seems a little steep, but the demo portion has already gobbled up time this morning that I should've been dedicating to plowing through another couple of thousand pages on Japanese colonialism. Frankly, sorting flights is a hell of a lot more fun — and this is a nice, reasonably polished little game that is fun to play.

Now Boarding [via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Saturday Timewaster: Pandemic 2

Maggie Greene — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:30:00 MDT

Ever wanted to decimate the world's population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is 'uh, no,' it's an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customized disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your 'evolution points' to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, 'realistic' and 'relaxed,' so if you're not sure you're ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode.

Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]

Weird Artistic Timewaster of the Day: Immortality

Maggie Greene — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:30:00 MDT

We've mentioned Jason Rohrer's weird little works before, in the form of Passage and Gravitation; now with his 'Game Design Sketchbook' column at the Escapist, he puts up new little games monthly. This month features the theme of life, death, and immortality (appropriately called Immortality):

We generally assume that immortality is good, just as we assume that death is bad. Of course, universal immortality (all six billion of us) would be physically impractical. But what about individual immortality? What about for you? If you could become immortal, would you?

Immortality is a game about that question, and it's also about the converse of that question: Does death have some fundamental value that we usually ignore?

Immortality [The Escapist]

Holiday Timewaster: WTF?!

Maggie Greene — Sat, 24 May 2008 13:00:00 MDT

While I have enough work to kill an ox this weekend, I took some time last night to play with this delightfully silly side-scrolling WoW sendup. Here's one introduction to a quest: "Now that you've begun to get the hang of that most fundamental of skills - killing shit - and started to properly become a bit more class conscious, we can tackle a slightly more disturbing problem." Karl Marx even makes an appearance (never mind the Mario appearance pictured above). It's worth checking out if you've got some extra time to waste this holiday (in the US) weekend.

WTF?! [via Grand Text Auto]

Saturday Timewaster: Putty Puzzle

Maggie Greene — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:30:00 MDT

I don't have time to waste this weekend, sadly, but if you do, there's a challenging little puzzler called Putty Puzzler, found over on the interestingly named 'Coke and Code.' It's putty. It's a puzzle. It's kinda hard. I spent a little bit of time with it and was pleasantly challenged — I'll come back for more after I've got a little time to waste.

Putty Puzzler [Coke and Code via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The Ultimate Sandboxer

Owen Good — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:00:00 MDT

Quite literally. "The Hell of Sand" is a brilliant time-waster of a flash game. "There are many dynamics to this game but no goal. Play around for a while and you'll get the hang of it." Great premise.

You play with four streams of colored sand using 18 different effects, some of them working in awesome combinations with each other.

C-4 and Torch, for example, wasn't too hard to figure out. I've also been making little cups of gunpowder and blasting them to hell with torch. But can someone tell me what "plant" does? Does it grow in the water? I can't figure it out.

The Hell of Sand [AndysLife.org]

Pleasant Saturday Timewaster: Meet In

Maggie Greene — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:30:00 MDT

I really love the too cute for words Grow games — nothing complicated, but cute and fun to play. There's a new game from the same creator — while not a grow game, it's a cute and quick little puzzle. And if you haven't experienced such classics as Grow Island, there's even more to go and click.

Meet In ver.0 [Eyezmaze]

Weird Artistic Timewaster of the Day: Gravitation

Maggie Greene — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:30:19 MST

Back in December, I mentioned a little game called Passage. Well, Jonathan Blow clued me in to the fact that Jason Rohrer is back with yet another weird, artistic little game, this one called Gravitation:

I'm not going to provide an in-depth explanation for Gravitation. I'm hoping that most people will understand it as it stands. However, it involves more complex game mechanics than Passage, and it is trying to express something much more subtle .... The mechanics themselves are relatively simple, but the emergent behavior harbors a lot of texture. Know that there are no "accidents" in this game design. Everything you notice about the game, and every subtle interaction that you experience, is intentionally packed with meaning. Gravitation explores how a particular corner of my life feels, as only a game can.

It's definitely worth a quick play through; Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux versions are available.

Gravitation: a video game by Jason Rohrer

'Phun': A 2D Physics Playground

Maggie Greene — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:30:34 MST

Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that's fun to spend a while playing with. It's still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here's what the creator has to say about it:

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

You can snag the download (Windows only for now, but an OSX version is apparently on its way) at the Phun website, where there's more information. There's also a thread going over at the GameDev.com forums.

Holiday Weekend Timewaster: Guest House

Maggie Greene — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 12:00:00 MST

While browsing my feeds during the inevitable mid-holiday news slump, I was pointed to some fascinating little Japanese point-and-click (or 'point-and-kick ass,' as Leigh Alexander described them over at Sexy Videogameland) puzzlers, lumped under the heading of 'room escape games.' Guest House is the latest in the series, and I spent quite a while clicking my way through all the frustrating (but not too sadistic) puzzles. It's a good way to spend a few hours on a lazy weekend. Terminal House [via Sexy Videogameland]

Weird Timewaster of the Day: '... Not Lovesick Zombies'

Maggie Greene — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:30:48 MDT

The title would actually be alarmingly these are not lovesick zombies but it's certainly weird. Bizarre. Absurd. And I spent precious, precious free time puzzling over this little game/art/thing instead of um. Doing something else that probably would've been more productive. It's a pretty basic point & click shooting-type game, but with weird backgrounds, creepy zombie things, oogy flashes of text like 'your clothes want to DIE!' while you're playing, and even snippets of video rambling about game design (supposedly) after you win a level. I think it's always nice to get a look at the people who have the time to dedicate to this stuff. The game is actually quite a bit less strange (in some sensense) than Jason Nelson's other game/art/thing ... thing, game, game, game and again game, though I found bouncing a weird fuzzy little blob around the screen and to doors a more satisfying bizarre gaming experience overall, such as they are. alarmingly these are not lovesick zombies

Bizarre Timewaster of the Day: I'll Get It!

Maggie Greene — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 15:30:29 MDT

Ever wondered what it's like to be a librarian at an institution where your patrons are incapable of finding the most basic of materials on their own? No? Me neither. But just in case you're dying to find out, the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries have put together the 'Library Arcade' (no, really), where you can test your shelving skills following the Library of Congress call number system or try your hand at a Diner Dash-esque fetch it game, where you have to keep hapless patrons happy and find appropriate materials for their "research." What sort of researcher can't use an online library catalog, I don't know. I can tell you I'd be horsewhipped by my advisors for wasting the valuable time of our librarians by asking them to find me the answer to 'Does daylight savings time really save time?'. [via Water Cooler Games]

Timewaster(s) of the Day: Grow Games

Maggie Greene — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:00:35 MDT

Not that I don't have enough to do setting up in a new city, but I've been cheerfully clicking away at the various Grow Games over at Eyemaze all morning - the games are ridiculously cute, but not in an irritating way, and wonderfully simple and frustratingly complex at the same time. You are given a handful of panels, and you have to select which order to click them in - they will grow or change in relation to/with each other, and the point is to grow each panel to its max. The games are reminiscent of a lot of the game design theory of Danc over at Lost Garden, though they lack the feedback he so frequently discusses. Still, a great waste of half an hour ... or an hour ... or a few hours .... [via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]